Beginning with bones

Sighted on Facebook. This is an illustration by Carl Lagerquist and it comes from a 1922 edition of Frankenstein by Cornhill Publishing… and it struck me because the book is famously silent on exactly how Frankenstein creates his monster, only that he did so and was aghast at what he’d done; all the pyrotechnics and shit you see in film versions simply aren’t there in the original text. And for some reason the idea that Frankenstein might have really have started from scratch had never occurred to me until now. Cos look at it, that’s basically what he’s doing here, beginning by evidently making the skeleton himself, which would require adding the flesh, organs, etc separately. Something about that seems more appalling than just, you know, taking a pair of “readymade” fully finished legs and attaching them to a similarly fully finished torso…

And this, apparently, is the end result. From the same edition, Lagerquist’s rendering of the final product; I sighted this on Reddit and can do no better than quote the OP there:

I really like this take on the Creature (my only nitpick is the short hair). His eyes seem to be popping from their sockets (quite different from the Universal version’s droopy and sunken eyes). His inner workings are visible in uneven measure. His limbs have the correct structure, but not quite the right proportions. There’s even a big hernia below his abs!
He looks accurately messed up.

I’ll take OP’s word for that, cos I’m not an anatomical expert and wouldn’t know how “accurate” the mess is, but… yeah, damned if it’s not a mess. And what they say about having the structure but not the proportions is spot on; we’re not looking at dubious technique, Lagerquist evidently meant him to look misproportionate, it’s not really like the infamous Rob Liefeld…