The Bride of Frankenstein is getting a new voice, and the perfect team has stepped up. Eisner Award-winning Kelly Thompson and Eisner Award nominee Mattia De Iulis, the creative duo behind Absolute Wonder Woman and The Cull, are back together for a brand-new horror miniseries about one of Universal’s most beloved monsters.
Created amid a violent thunderstorm of stolen flesh, crackling electricity, and sheer monstrous desperation, The Bride is alive! With no answers and nowhere to turn, she sets out to uncover the truth about her origins—and figure out how to survive long enough to find them.
I spoke with Kelly Thompson ahead of the new miniseries premiere from Image Comics, Skybound Entertainment, and Universal Monsters, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone that she recognizes the Creature and the novel as sacred text. “That's the first science fiction. It's the best science fiction. It's incredible,” she says, adding, “And I think there's a particular weight to Bride because it wraps all many of those same themes and adds its own layer by nature of her being a woman — being created not in an effort to see if it can be done, but in an effort for a specific, really horrific purpose, which is to be sold into slavery of being a wife, of being a bride.”
Unfortunately, the plight of The Bride is as relevant now as ever. “We're seeing a huge erosion of rights in the United States for women, and certainly women's rights across the globe are pretty uneven from place to place you might go, which is appalling,” Thompson rightfully points out.
“I think Bride's story is even more universal than the Creature's story for regular human beings, and that's an incredible asset that you can play with when trying to excavate. And I think you have to play with it when excavating this kind of thing, because to ignore this part of her creation is… I mean, offensive,” she declares. “Do you know what I mean? You can't just look away. It's part of why this character was created.”
An irrefutable part of The Bride’s creation is the stunning, iconic beauty as originally portrayed by Elsa Lanchester and designed by legendary Universal Pictures makeup artist Jack Pierce. But the choice to depict her as beautiful is worth interrogating. “Why does she not look like the Creature?” Thompson posits. “Is it because they got better, or is it because it's a higher priority to make sure she's beautiful? I mean, there's a lot of really incredible stuff to unpack in all of those narratives.”
There’s been a bit of a reckoning in the last few years about The Bride’s place in pop culture, with films like Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! forcing horror fans to question our own complicity with the commodification of a woman who never had a say in not only her creation, but the role her creator assigned her and the horrific realization the Creature has when he realizes what her existence means for her. While she may be the titular character, The Bride of Frankenstein was always a continuation of the Creature's story.
“I think it's shockingly powerful; it's just not her story,” Thompson agrees. “And it's a beautiful exploration of the creature and what that all means and his desperation as he tries to literally make a place for himself in the world.” Thompson muses that this is precisely why we’ve become obsessed with telling her story. “People recognize the power of that character,” she explains. “I mean, she steals the whole movie in those last three minutes, doesn't say a word. It's incredible stuff.”
As an official release under the Universal Monsters brand, Thompson and De Iulis work still has to fit within the established lore of the character in the film as well as the other comic books within the line, but from the preview I was fortunate enough to see ahead of our interview, the story the duo has brought to the page feels like the definitive next chapter for the character we’ve admired since 1935.
Considering how embedded in pop culture The Bride is and has been for nearly a century, there are plenty of people who are aware of her as a character but have yet to see the film, so there’s a non-zero chance that this comic series will be some folks’ introduction to her story. Thompson doesn’t take that responsibility for granted.
“I hope we're bringing something new and interesting,” Thompson says. “I just feel like she's made less by Dr. Frankenstein to me than by the creature and by the women that are her creators — that the women that she came from, these lives that were destroyed in order to make her.” The erased voices of the women were a huge priority for this series, along with discovering how The Bride would feel about her existence in this new world.
Even with less than five minutes of screen time in the original film, everything about The Bride is deeply relatable. I’ve joked for years that if I woke up and somebody was like, “Hey, we're giving you to this man,” I would also hiss and scream in everyone’s face. The Bride, even without saying a word, speaks for so many of us.
Which is why Mattia De Iulis’ was the perfect illustrator for the job, beyond an existing collaborative relationship with Thompson. “Mattia is such an emotional creator, the way he can create emotion on a face,” she tells me. Apparently, on more than one occasion, De Iulis’ work was so striking that Thompson admitted that words weren’t needed on the page, as The Bride’s expression said it all.
The Universal Monsters collection of comics is among the best horror comics on the market, and The Bride of Frankenstein is no exception. “I'm really honored if we can stand among these other really powerful books that I've personally really enjoyed,” Thompson says. “So it's cool to get to be a part of that now.”
UNIVERSAL MONSTERS: BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN LIVES #1 arrives on October 28, 2026 and is available now for pre-order.
