Frankensnake is Depressed

A Triumphant Return after a 27-year Hiatus, the Latest Chapter in Frankensnake!

Author's Note

When I was seven, my best friend and I co-authored a series of picture books about a giant, genetically engineered reptile with human forearms named Frankensnake who eats people and rampages around smashing things.

A page from “Frankinsnake in Town”, probably the third volume in the series.

Recently, I started thinking about old Frankensnake and wondering what he was up to these days. I wrote a paragraph and sent it to my friend. He said he'd do a picture. I kept writing, he drew, and what took shape is the first new Frankensnake story in nearly thirty years.

We hope you Enjoy,

Jason Barbo and Graham McCullough

Frankensnake wakes in the nest he's made of what was once a whole mall with a pounding headache and a sense that life’s closing in around him.

Slowly, he pieces together the events of the night before. He remembers hitting two, no, three breweries, tearing the roofs off the buildings, shoving his head in the vats of mash and drinking them dry. Crazy thing is, he doesn't even really like beer. He just wanted to feel alive, you know?

Throat dry as his fossilized ancestors, Frankensnake goes looking for a drink. He passes a backed-up convoy fleeing the city. People scream and point, abandoning their cars and fleeing on foot. He ignores them. He doesn’t really have much of an appetite these days.

Man, ten years ago he would have chased them down no matter how full he was. He would have thrown cars around, let some people almost escape before gobbling them up at the last second. He used to love that stuff, now he just can't be bothered. It's all so boring.

Tearing up a fire hydrant and drinking from the sudden fountain, Frankensnake wonders if there’s more to life than devouring people and destroying cities. He wonders if he’s only wondering about this because he’s not very good at it. Look at Godzilla. Don’t catch him moping around, all worried about the meaning of life, do you? When Godzilla shows up, Tokyo is getting destroyed, period. Always on task, always in the zone, always bringing his best to work; seventy years at the top and he’s never let fame get to his head. That's what makes him the best. That’s the kind of mindset you need to really make it in this business. Honestly, with monsters like Godzilla out there, does the world even need a Frankensnake?

With a sigh he heads down the street and begins smashing houses. He tries his best. He does. Does he want to wreck this subdivision? No, he wants to lie in the sun and sleep off the rest of his hangover, but here he is, doing his job, turning people’s homes into piles of debris spread across their perfectly manicured lawns.

As he leans on another groaning roof, someone runs screaming out the front door. Frankensnake flicks his tail and sends the guy flying. He used to be really good at this; he'd hit them just right so they'd get this spin and go for miles, sometimes, before finally coming back down. This guy makes it about ten feet before he bangs into a telephone pole and slumps to the ground. Frankensnake groans and lies down, knocking over a whole row of trees.

See, this is his problem. Things go badly, which gets under his skin, which puts him off his game, which makes him mess up, which makes him even gloomier. He's trapped in this spiral, and every time he thinks he's hit rock bottom, he finds a new basement level. The harder he tries to get out, the deeper he falls.

Maybe he's getting old. He's not even thirty yet, but maybe that's old, for freakish mutated snakes? He doesn't know. He doesn't know who would. Not a lot of other frankensnakes out there. Dang. Thirty. The big three zero. It's coming up. He just doesn't feel like he has his life together enough to be thirty, you know? He thought he'd have things a lot more figured out at this point.

He thought he'd have a city of his own by now too. Godzilla has Tokyo and King Kong has New York. Frankensnake’s not in their league, obviously, but there are still lots of good cities out there. Portland. Columbus. Grand Rapids is nice; he'd live there. He really thought he'd get Denver at one point. He was actually offered Montreal, but his agent thought he'd be sidelining himself if he became known as a Canadian monster, so he turned it down. Biggest mistake of his career.

If you have your own city, you can go into semi-retirement, hibernating most of the time and only waking up every ten years or so when the place’s been rebuilt enough to be worth destroying. Not him. He has to move around, taking gigs where he can find them. It's a hard market for the little Kaiju, that's just the way it is.

No. He can't keep lying to himself. It's not the market's fault, it's not his agent’s fault, it's not the fault of all these darn microbreweries that are popping up everywhere; it's his fault. Witnesses at the scene of the murder of Frankensnake’s career report a green perpetrator five hundred feet long with yellow spines down his back.

He had every advantage. He came out when there was a lot of interest in monsters, he had media coverage, he had a kind and supportive mad scientist creator who only ever wanted him to succeed, he had rival monsters and world tours and even that space trip to fight aliens. No one gets that lucky, except him, and he messed it up. He does everything wrong, and no matter how hard he tries, nothing ever changes. It's all his fault.

Covering his eyes with his claws, Frankensnake begins to cry.