My cat, Demure, was injured this week, and that resulted in a visit to the animal emergency room.  It never fails - my pets always get injured on Sundays.  But we got the little girl sewed up so that she looks like a feline version of Frankenweenie – tubes and sutures sticking out at every angle.  Her brother used to make regular trips to the doctor for all his battles.  He used up every one of his nine lives, and maybe a few extra.  But this is Demure's first, and we’re happy to see her on the mend with at least eight lives left to go.

Being creative is a bit like having multiple lives.

You move from one project to the next, almost like going from one life to the next. And everything changes, including your perceptions, as you go from one personal world to the next. I've worked on a lot of comics over the years.  I've created most of them from scratch, creating my own characters and worlds.  In some ways that makes me nearly unique in the company of mainstream comic book creators.  And while I have never thought of myself as someone who predominately produces horror comics, all you have to do is look at Mars, Blood of the Innocent, Breathtaker, Blood of Dracula, Prince Nightmare, Radical Dreamer, Hammer of the Gods, EZ Street and Lone Justice to see that most of these titles are to some degree about classic horror characters and situations.  What I got out of looking at that list was that my own personal brand of horror skews to Horror/Adventure.  I think that King Kong is the perfect example of that kind of story.  So when I finally owned that aspect of my creative spirit I knew that a series like Frankenstein Mobster offered me the most options to tell a wide variety of stories over a very long period of time, because it offered the most potential for conflict.

I've always subscribed to the idea that the only conflict worth writing about is the battle that goes on inside a character. In the case of the Frankenstein Mobster, I had created a character who came with not one conflicted personality, but four!  Before I started drawing Frankie, I sculpted his head, just to get a 3D idea of how he looked.  And this clay head watched me for years, accusing me of ignoring him with not one, but four different voices!

By 1997, the Insight Studios website was pulling in record numbers of visitors to our newly-launched SunnyFundays.com where we featured online daily comic strips. It seemed appropriate that I began to develop Frankenstein Mobster for this new, cutting-edge medium. I drew 13 weeks of dailies before my responsibilities of running the publishing at Insight eclipsed my available time for drawing. Before I realized my time for drawing had evaporated, I put what I had written for Frankie, and much of what I had drawn, into a presentation folder that I showed to friends in the comics and film industries. The reaction was swift and overwhelming. I was suddenly fielding offers for film options – and I only had a hand full of art pages and a few pages of story. In spite of the pressure on me to create more, I had no time to do anything about it. Our publishing schedule was booming thanks to Frank Cho's Liberty Meadows. It was a very difficult decision for me to select between keeping a successful publishing machine running or to take a shot at making a major motion picture. Both publishing and motion picture-making are unstable and often doomed enterprises. But I knew more about publishing than movie making, so Frankie went back into his grave, with my best intentions that I would resurrect him again at my first opportunity. For the next few years, while I designed books, planned marketing, and managed a growing staff, Frankie lived in my dreams and imagination. His world grew richer. His character became more real. His shallow origins, as a pun, were long past. Now I could list his favorite drinks and food. I knew his life. His family. His accomplishments. I knew what the world thinks of him. And I knew just as much about the other people who lived in Monstros City and who felt lost when Terry Todd died.

With repeated requests from film companies for an option on Frankenstein Mobster coming in, I decided to write a spec film script for the character. I know now that this was just an excuse.  I really wanted to tell this story.  So, between all my other responsibilities, it took about nine months to squeeze out the time to finish the project. When it was done, I was so enamored with what I had created, so excited by the visual potential of the setting and the characters, I knew I had to make the time somehow to write and draw the comic book series of Frankenstein Mobster.

Along with my other responsibilities at Insight Studios, I spent the year of 2002 drawing and lettering the first two issues of Frankenstein Mobster. A trip to Europe early in the year gave me a great deal of inspiration for the architecture of Monstros City, and these influences made their way into the series from page one. 2003 and 2004 were spent on the continuing issues, with quite a bit of the story arc done before the series was even solicited. Creating the Frankenstein Mobster series doesn't seem so much like invention as discovery. The people and the place are all too real to me now. I think of new material for the series and the characters every day. I find myself hoping that, with this series, it will be a long time before I'm done. Fortunately, for a character who began life as a simple pun, who was killed by market changes and brought to life again and again by fate, the Frankenstein Mobster now has a long life head of him. Frankie has shared quite a few stories with me that I want to share with all of you. There is the one about the "Three Ghouls And a Baby," someone's "Past Sins", whatever it is that comes "From the Shadows" and even a "Son of Frankenstein Mobster" and a boxing epic called "Money on the Zombie".  All these stories and more will be coming in 2009 at ComicMix.com  So many small but catastrophic conflicts of characters and the constant tales of spooks and beasties, crime and punishment-- so many stories now fill my imagination and my sketch books that I have little doubt the Frankenstein Mobster will find more than a few more lives.  Maybe he has a cat or two sewn up in him along with the three Mobsters and that Cop. That would give him at least a total of nine lives. Be sure to click over to ComicMix.com to read some free Frankenstein Mobster comics, including this Munden’s Bar story that features the first script I've done in collaboration with MJ Butler…

MJ Butler has been writing, directing and producing internet shows for almost a decade. His show The Lonely Astronaut beat out Tim Burton and Kelsey Grammer for "Best Comedic Web Series" and "Strangest Grouping of Nominees" at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen.  Conversely, Garry Trudeau beat him out at the 2008 Harvey Awards for "Best Syndicated Strip or Panel" and was heard to cackle maniacally.  Entertainment Weekly wrote that Butler's show "The Real Whatever... may be closer to reality than The Real World – and it's loads funnier.  And the fact that he is very, very funny is why I've drafted him to work with me on Frankenstein Mobster.

Mark Wheatley holds the Eisner, Inkpot, Mucker, Gem and Speakeasy awards and nominations for the Harvey Award and the Ignatz Award.  His work has been repeatedly included in the annual Spectrum selection of fantastic art and has appeared in private gallery shows, The Norman Rockwell Museum and the Library of Congress--where several of his originals are in the LoC permanent collection.  His comic book creations include Ez Street, Lone Justice, Mars, Breathtaker, Black Hood, Prince Nightmare, Hammer of the Gods, Blood of the Innocent, Frankenstein Mobster, Miles the Monster and Titanic Tales.  His interpretations of established characters such as Tarzan the Warrior, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Jonny Quest, Dr. Strange, The Flash, Argus and The Spider have brought them to life for a new generation of readers.  He has written for TV, illustrated books, designed cutting-edge role-playing games and was an early innovator of the on-line daily comic strip form.