Because I don’t go for the cheap joke like that until the comments section.

I think Dracula was pretty much the only other one that didn’t feature a guy turning into a monster at night which beat up bad guys while simultaneously was hunted by authorities

Tales Of The Zombie also had a different hook.

I think the reason it failed is multiple. First, in the early days I think the book was just too outside what readers wanted. Everyone and their brother loves the quirky books after the fact but too few read them while they’re still being published. Think of it this way: I’m a ten year old buying a monster comic off the spinner rack since I’m not allowed to touch the cool B&W magainzes and I spot Frankenstein. Picking it up I find something completely different from the Frankenstein I expected; something that might appeal to the college crowd but that wasn’t Marvel’s bread and butter at that point. Bad word of mouth spreads around the playground and sales aren’t that great.

So then editorial retools and the result is a weaker book on the whole. Besides going the Karloff route the stories are now exactly in line with Marvel’s other “misunderstood heroes”. The problem there is that Frankenstein doesn’t have as strong of hook for those stories as the other characters. While Marvel’s other horror books had a hook (in fact I’d say that most of them had the exact same hook; I think Dracula was pretty much the only other one that didn’t feature a guy turning into a monster at night which beat up bad guys while simultaneously was hunted by authorities), Frankenstein was just there. It wasn’t inspiring and it certainly wouldn’t be enough to bring back the crowd that was already turned off.

Incidentally, that’s one thing I’ve noticed in retrospect, how much of a “house style” ’70s Marvel had across multiple genres. Everything *reads* exactly like a Marvel Comic. Including the non-superhero stuff, and even things like romance comics. Likely a very good thing on the whole for Marvel, but for some books, they might have been served better by trying a more starkly different stylistic approach.

Howard The Duck read like a Marvel comic?
Possibly the biggest exception that could prove the rule, but I do think there were some books that didn’t.
McGregor and Russel on Killraven is another one that comes to mind.

But it strikes me that a fundamental problem with a Marvel Frankenstein series is that (especially in the Moench modern-day movie-flavored variation) Marvel already *has* a long-running series about this character, and it’s called “The Incredible Hulk.”

I could see the Friedrich version not doing well because of unfamiliarity and/or preference against the novel version of the character, but without those aspects, it’s just another Marvel Comic, this one starring an underpowered Hulk character.

Incidentally, that’s one thing I’ve noticed in retrospect, how much of a “house style” ’70s Marvel had across multiple genres. Everything *reads* exactly like a Marvel Comic. Including the non-superhero stuff, and even things like romance comics. Likely a very good thing on the whole for Marvel, but for some books, they might have been served better by trying a more starkly different stylistic approach.

Had to be done.