Buy This Comic on Wednesday, August 5, 2009: Frankenstein's Womb

Buy This Comic is an ongoing feature here at I Love Rob Liefeld in which I recommend one comic book -- and one book only -- arriving on shelves on Wednesday.

This week's pick is:

Frankenstein's Womb, written by Warren Ellis, art by Marek Oleksicki, Avatar Press, 48 pages, $6.99

Here's the description from the solicitation:

The newest addition to Warren Ellis' Apparat line of original graphic novels has arrived! 1816 was called 'The Year Without A Summer.' In the weird darkness of that July's volcanic winter, Mary Wollestonecraft Godwin began writing Frankenstein on the shore of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. But that is not where Frankenstein began. It began months earlier when, en route through Germany to Switzerland, Mary, her future husband Percy Shelley, and her stepsister Clair Clairmont approached a strange castle. Castle Frankenstein, some one hundred years earlier, had been home to Johann Conrad Dippel, whose experiments included the independent invention of nitroglycerin, a distillation of the elixir of life - and the transfer of a live soul into an awful accretion of human body parts. Mary never spoke of having entered the real Castle Frankenstein, stark on its hilltop south of Darmstadt. But she did. And she was never the same again - because something was haunting that tower, and Mary met it there! Fear, death and alchemy - the modern age is created here, in lost moments in a ruined castle on a day never recorded. Following up the huge successes of Crecy and Aetheric Mechanics, Ellis turns his spark of mad genius to bring us a fantastical tale in this all new original graphic novel illustrated in atmospheric perfection by newcomer Marek Oleksicki.

Although I am by no means a Warren Ellis nut, I enjoyed both Crecy and Aetheric Mechanics, Ellis's two previous "graphic novellas" published by Avatar, so I'm looking forward to this one.

Here is a seven-page preview.