I was a little worried when it was announced we’d be getting a two-part story arc that had nothing to do with the main story so soon into the series’ run but boy did Tate Brombal prove me wrong. This first half of a two-part deep dive into Adam Frankenstein’s past was one of the most beautiful pieces of comic book storytelling that I’ve ever read.

This issue was a love-story told on multiple levels under the guise of Adam writing an autobiographical account of his life. The first layer of the love story we see is the relationship between Adam and his creator, Victor Frankenstein. As Victor helps Adam with his first breath, guest artist Soo Lee captures in a way that makes the reader wonder if they’re really witnessing a tender kiss between two lovers. Brombal continues the double entendre with Adam writing about learning how to live from his creator in prose that would make the most lovestruck Shakespearean character jealous. That touching story is only surpassed by the next we see, the history of Victor and his best-friend turned lover, Henry. We see this relationship play out over the course of several years, culminating in a gruesome act of love committed by Victor which ties the two stories together.

Main series artist Isaac Goodhart’s visual identity for Christopher Chaos is one of the defining aspects of the series, yet Lee’s designs may have been the perfect artistic choice for this backstory. Her heavy lines kept a semblence of Goodhart’s style intact, while her use of shadows and more angular, sketch-like quality to characters and background environments evoked a sense of an older timeline being told through someone’s memory. Patricio Delpeche’s palette complimented this well with a more muted tone compared to the usual bubblegum bright colors from Miquel Muerto. Delpeche also let colors bleed outside of their lines, adding to Lee’s approach of using visual cues to let readers know that we’re not currently in the present.

Overall this was issue blew me away. It was so well crafted and dealt with different relationships in beautiful ways, while paying homage to the monster we all know from Mary Shelley’s literary classic and giving us more background on the version of the monster we’ve come to love in this series. I’m excited for the next main arc to start in issue #9, but I can’t wait to see how this mini-arc wraps up in the next issue!

Rating: 10/10