Universal Monsters: The Bride of Frankenstein Lives #1 Review

WEPAAAAA! The easiest way to screw up The Bride of Frankenstein Lives #1 would have been to make the Bride somebody else’s supporting character again. Kelly Thompson knows better. This issue starts from the obvious question the old mythology barely had time to ask: what does the Bride herself think about being dragged into existence, stitched together from stolen flesh, handed a purpose she never chose and then expected to play along? That is the book. Not “look, classic monster.” Not nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. This is her story.

The opening pages are brutal because Thompson frames birth as trauma. The Bride wakes into pain, confusion, fire and instinct before she has language for any of it. Her first understanding of the world is basically that living hurts and surviving seems to mean more hurt is coming. That gives the issue a strong emotional spine immediately, and it makes her eventual curiosity feel earned rather than cute. She is not discovering the world like a wide-eyed innocent. She is trying to figure out why the hell she exists.

Mattia De Iulis is ridiculous on this book. The painted work gives every page weight and texture, but more importantly, the visuals never let beauty erase the horror. Skin looks cold. Rain feels heavy. Fire feels dangerous. The Bride can look terrifying in one panel and heartbreakingly human in the next, and De Iulis understands that both things need to be true at the same time. The creature design honors the iconography without trapping the book inside a museum display.

Thompson also makes a smart choice by centering freedom as an idea before the Bride even fully understands the word. Animals fight cages. Bodies resist pain. Living things try to survive. That instinct becomes the first philosophy she can actually trust. Nobody has to give her a lecture about personhood because the story shows us what she already knows in her bones: she belongs to herself, even if the people who made her never planned for that.

The issue is deliberately paced, and I think that works because this is essentially an origin story told from inside the origin. There is action, but the real movement is psychological. Every new experience becomes evidence she uses to build an identity. The danger is that a book this internal can get precious with itself, but Thompson keeps enough physical threat and mystery moving around her that the story never turns into a monologue with pretty pictures.

My only hesitation is that this first issue is so focused on atmosphere and awakening that some of the larger plot machinery is still waiting offstage. That is not a flaw yet, but issue two will need to widen the world without losing the intimacy that makes this opener work. The promise is huge because the question Thompson is setting up is not just who created the Bride. It is whose lives were taken to create her, and what she owes those women, if anything.

Universal Monsters: The Bride of Frankenstein Lives #1 understands the assignment. It takes one of horror’s most recognizable images and gives her interiority, agency and anger without sanding away the monster. Thompson and De Iulis are not trying to “fix” the Bride. They are finally letting her speak for herself. Fam, if the rest of this four-issue run keeps this level of control, this could end up being one of the strongest Universal Monsters books Skybound has put out.

CRUSADERS SCORE:
4.5/5

Writer: Kelly Thompson
Artist: Mattia De Iulis
Publisher: Skybound / Image Comics
Series: Universal Monsters
On Sale: October 28, 2026