How to Make a Monster: Ugly Memories of Chicago from a South Side Escapee

By Glenn Pearce and Casanova Frankenstein

Conveyed as a bleak first-person narrative with darkly humorous overtones, Casanova Frankenstein reveals how real life experience shaped his hard-bitten, survivalist view of life. His was a world of fear and isolation punctuated by bullying thugs, the stifling atmosphere of the Lutheran school on the South Side of Chicago, racial segregation, unapproachable girls, and a home life consisting of an emotionally distant and unsupportive mother and an violent, alcoholic cop father who was not above giving his son a good thrashing now and again while preaching Christian family values. It is a searing portrait of an unbearably painful upbringing.

How to Make a Monster is illustrated by Australian outsider artist Glenn Pearce in a rare creative symbiosis in which Pearce captures Frankenstein's inner turmoil using a variety of stunningly realized artistic approaches from naturalistic portraiture to outrageously inventive phantasmagoric imagery. A seamlessly contrapuntal balancing act between Frankenstein's raw, unadorned writing and Pearce's stunningly detailed drawing.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 168396571X
• ISBN13: 9781683965718
• Release Date: September 2022
• Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 1.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 8.1" x 11.2"
• Age Range: 16 years and up