[A series on the Madman Library Editions by guest reviewer Zach King. Zach writes about movies at The Cinema King and about comics on Instagram at Dr. King’s Comics.]

“You can’t blame Frank. He always does his best.” — Dr. Gillespie Flem

When I start a series of reviews, I usually begin by thinking how long I’ve loved the character or the run. But Madman exists in this state of quantum uncertainty for me; I’ve always been aware of him, and I’ve always thought he was just this side of cool. Could my first exposure have been an early ’90s house ad from Dark Horse, perhaps in a Star Wars comic?

I know for certain that I never owned a Madman comic until relatively recently. The first time I sat up and took notice of Michael Allred was his issue of Solo, a short-lived DC anthology that gave creators like Allred, Darwyn Cooke, and Tim Sale free reign to tell whatever stories they wanted to tell, with any collaborators they chose. Allred ran wild in his issue, with wife Laura as his ever-ready colorist, and it was breathtaking for me. His work was fresh and familiar, like lost issues from the Silver Age, and by the time he was doing covers for Batman '66, I was hooked.

Flash forward to a used bookstore shelf about twelve years ago. I’m in grad school at the time, and I spy a few Madman paperbacks for ten bucks a pop. There are no numbers on the spines, no clues in the book titles, but I grabbed the lot of them. And when Dark Horse began reprinting the entire “Madman-iverse Library” in six oversized hardcovers, I bought them all again. If you read anything by Allred now, you know the vibe, like pure pop with the fluidity of improvisational jazz. But finding those raw Madman books in the wild was like finding undoctored prints of the original Star Wars trilogy — you understand it even more so when it’s straight from the source.

Madman is, broadly, the story of Frank Einstein, a reanimated corpse with no memories but a penchant for making friends with just about every weird character he meets. Resurrected by Dr. Egon Boiffard and Dr. Gillespie Flem, Frank takes up superhero work because it’s the coolest thing he can imagine — and because his world is filled with strange and bizarre creatures. Through it all, Frank usually wants nothing more than a stick of gum or to go on a picnic with his stalwart girlfriend Josephine “Joe” Lombard.

Beyond that, I cannot tell you the plot of the Madman Library Edition Vol. 1, which collects comics from 1992 to 1996. And that’s not a cop-out, saying you need to experience it for yourself. Even at 16 issues of varying length, with a host of supplementary material to immerse you in Allred’s most iconic and most personal creation, so much happens in this first run of Madman that you wouldn’t believe me. We have no fewer than three dueling mad scientists, a reanimation experiment gone awry, time travel, dinosaurs, pizza-delivery robots, secret agents spouting zen koans, and cameos from Hellboy and the Big Guy. The narrative is so freewheeling, its titular protagonist so unfazed by the currents of the plot, that you might think the late, great David Lynch had gotten his surreal fingers on a superhero comic.

Put another way, Madman is a real trip. Despite having precognitive dreams, even its protagonist is never quite sure what’s coming next. “I can’t shake the feeling that my whole life is like one cosmic summer rerun,” Frank opines near the end of this first Library Edition. “Like, I’ll never get off the island or my five-year mission will never end.” These shout-outs to ’60s television tell us some of Allred’s inspirations, but we also have an alien named Mott from the planet Hoople and a few appearances from cosmic beings known as the Three Nephites.¹ It’s this wild careening gumbo, and like Frank we’re just along for the ride.

For readers who know Allred better from his more straightforward superhero fare, Madman has plenty to say about the trappings of the superhero genre. Frank is not born a superhero, but nor was he made to be one; though he has almost no memory of his life before the reanimation, Frank remembers his childhood comic book hero Mr. Excitement and so wears his signature lightning bolt. “It gives him confidence,” Dr. Flem explains, “[and] while his mask hides his scars, it has also become a second skin.” Even his name, Frank Einstein, is a palimpsest of influences (Frank Sinatra and Albert Einstein, forming a portmanteau that puts one rather in mind of Mary Shelley). But Frank is equally at home ruminating on deep philosophical questions; “Is there honest-to-goodness badness that somehow slipped by God to challenge God and all God created?” Frank asks while a circus strongman spins him like a top in the middle of a seagoing voyage. “If God and all God created is perfect, how could that happen?”

Frank never quite comes up with an answer to that heady question, though this book is as close to proof of the divine as a comics reader might get on this earth. As a collected volume, this Library Edition is fascinating for new Madman fans and for the most devoted. For one, this edition begins with a colorized version of The Oddity Odyssey, the first Madman series, which had been colored only in blue and gray. The colors by Han and Laura Allred do make The Oddity Odyssey feel more of a piece with the rest of the book, but I confess I do miss the odd flavor of German expressionism from the initial printing. For completionists, though, this reprint includes the Madman flipbook at the corner of each page.

In addition to a few pin-up pages by the likes of Frank Miller, Jim Lee, and Todd McFarlane,² this first Library Edition also includes three issues of They!, the first comic by the Allreds. As first comics go, it’s chatty and bizarrely paced, but even Michael Allred in his introduction admits that these stories are presented as curiosities, gently chiding brother Lee Allred for allowing the original copies to survive to this day. But once you get past the dense backstory, the visual designs for Allred’s first superheroes are recognizably gonzo, and Allred’s command of body language (as when one character carefully puts her boots on) is readily apparent.

Indeed, Madman Library Edition Vol. 1 is a very fluid book, capturing motion and energy in a way that only the comics medium can. I’ve used the word “free-wheeling,” and that does describe both the tone and the spirit of Madman. In a word, ginchy!

In the next volume, Frank meets Superman!