Lady Frankenstein (1971), No. 1-9
About the author:
Chris Gavaler is an associate professor of English at W&L University, where he serves as comics editor of Shenandoah. He has published two novels: School for Tricksters (SMU 2011) and Pretend I’m Not Here (HarperCollins 2002); three books on comics: On the Origin of Superheroes (Iowa 2015), Superhero Comics (Bloomsbury 2017), and Superhero Thought Experiments (with Nathaniel Goldberg, Iowa 2019); and has two forthcoming books: Creating Comics (with Leigh Ann Beavers, Bloomsbury 2020) and The Comics Form: The Art of Juxtaposed Images (Routledge 2021). His visual work appears in Ilanot Review, North American Review, Aquifer, and other journals.
Art: Chris Gavaler
In the artist's words:
Lady Frankenstein (1971), No. 1-9 are digitally adapted stills extracted from the Italian B-movie of the same name. They feature actress Rosalba Neri in the title role. While the film is R-rated horror sexploitation that relishes, fears, and punishes female desire, the portraits attempt to transform that genre material and its gender attitudes into something less formulaic. Like the pop-cultural versions of Frankenstein’s creation, the images follow a collage aesthetic with an emphasis on discordant combinations. Like Dr. Frankenstein, I’m looting dead materials and assembling them with the digital equivalent of suture needles. Reflecting the film’s B-quality and public domain status, I use the antiquated software MS Paint, which Microsoft “deprecated” in 2017. Playing a YouTube version of the film on my laptop, I paused the video, framed images using Snipping Tool, and pasted them into Paint documents, where I variously arranged and duplicated, adding no content and using no software features but a touchpad pencil on its thinnest line setting and the transparent selection tool. It seemed the more I limited the technological options the more the creative options grew. I’m not a fan of Photoshop in part because it privileges photorealism. I’m instead beginning with photographic content and moving backwards across the uncanny valley into greater and greater distortion, searching for tensions between recognizable representation and complete abstraction. At what point does a portrait of Lady Frankenstein stop being an image of Rosalba Neri? At what point does it stop being an image of anyone? Because the title unifies the series as versions of the same character, I developed a different style for each image and a collective emphasis on contrast. I’m also aware of myself as a heterosexual male artist looking at a female and—in the context of the original film—sexualized subject. I hope I have undermined that gaze, in part by creating a Lady Frankenstein who is more complex and contradictory than her source material but still composed of the same pixels.