[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.]

"I always have more Madman in the pipeline from an outline that is longer than my lifespan may allow, as well as various other ideas that fill me with the light of inspiration." — Michael Allred

In the spirit of their title character, the Madman Library Editions have been a curious bunch, madcap and scattershot yet perennially heartfelt. And by the end of the Madman Library Edition Volume 6, a hardcover released in July 2024, I found myself worriedly checking my shelf to see if I hadn’t forgotten a seventh volume. I’ve spent so long binge-reading the Madmaniverse that I wanted to spend a little more time with Frank Einstein.

Perhaps it’s that we’ve spent the better part of two volumes away from Frank, who departed into outer space at the end of Volume 4 and has made only intermittent cameos since then. Here, at the end of the road, we might more fully appreciate that subtitle “The Madmaniverse Library,” which finally concludes with an author’s note from Michael Allred, in which he acknowledges that everything’s been connected in the same universe, even by the scantest of threads.

Tracing those threads ends up being one of the bittersweet joys of Volume 6, which goes back to Allred’s earliest days with Graphique Musique and Grafik Musik.¹ These anthology issues find Allred telling a few interrelated tales, bridging the gaps from his earliest work into the world of Madman. In one tale, Calvin Lennox (late of last volume’s Dead Air) begins his journey into the next life, only to find himself reliving his time on earth while Shadrack the Seraph tries to ferry the last disembodied souls through their final judgments. Meanwhile, the vampire Max tries to free his wife Merete from the evil Rovena, while being pursued by two vampire hunters.

Once we get into Grafik Musik, we find Allred cracking his knuckles on a prototype of the story that would become “G-Men from Hell,” which was collected in Volume 2. It’s fun to see an early iteration of the story Allred would polish and revisit years later, but it’s also striking how many of Allred’s creations arrive fully formed. Agents Crept and Mattress are here, of course, but so too are Joe Lombard, Dr. Boiffard, and Frank Einstein himself (here imagined as a psychic for hire who lives upstairs — his superheroing days are yet to be). Then lo and behold, who should seek out Frank’s help but Merete and her parents, in search of Max. Though the artwork is scratchier and the speech bubbles not especially well-copyedited, Allred is weaving his stories together like a jazz solo, surprising and delighting his readers when it all pulls back together.

I was reminded throughout of one of my favorite refrains from Grant Morrison: “And so we return and begin again.” Indeed, the recursive publication strategy means revisiting these earliest stories after we’ve seen them in their apex form (sort of like watching George Lucas’s student film THX-1138:4EB after watching the Special Edition of A New Hope).

One wonders what a strictly chronological publication order might have looked like — if we’d started Volume 1, for example, with Dead Air, Graphique Musique, and Creatures of the Id. We’d have gotten a completionist’s version of the Allred catalog, to be sure, but it would be hard to sell a Madman Library where the eponymous superhero didn’t arrive until the very end of the first book. I have to imagine that sales might have flagged, and so I do want to commend Dark Horse for finding a middle ground between the marketable and the readable. Casual fans can get the full Frank experience in four volumes, while the diehards and the collectors can stick around for the more experimental stuff at the fringes.

Volume 6, however, ends up feeling a bit like a catch-all grab-bag. The book — and the Library — ends with X-Ray Robot, Allred’s latest and last creator-owned work. It’s only tangentially related, but with Madman appearing in a two-page cameo, it would have felt like a cheat not to include at least those two pages of Allred drawing Frank one last time. Overall, this story is an almost incomprehensible whirl through a multiverse of branching timelines, but it looks plum gorgeous, and it feels like a roller coaster ride through Allred’s most demented science-fiction. And I was reminded also of Morrison when Allred articulates what might be the clearest version of his cosmology, which seems to be a digestible echo of a similar concept from The Invisibles: “All life came from a single entity. … Over the eons, in an effort to alleviate a kind of loneliness, the consciousness divided parts of itself. These lifeforms evolved into corporeal beings. Eventually, life as we know it.”

What is a real shame, though, is that Volume 6 does not include a pair of 3-D glasses. Some of the bonus features around X-Ray Robot detail how the 3-D and stereoscopic effects were generated, but to the unaided eye, it’s just pages of muddy blue and red. Tougher still, Volume 6 reprints the “Madman In Your Face 3D Special” from 2014, which does include a brand-new story but is largely a reprint of Madman Atomic Comics #3 and #9.² While these issues are probably among my favorite of the many Madman stories I’ve read, it’s hard to derive any joy from reading them without a pair of anaglyph specs to help out.

It wouldn’t be a Zach King review if I didn’t think about what wasn’t included, and so I might have rather seen “In Your Face” replaced with the handful of issues of Savage Dragon in which Madman appears. The issues weren’t written or drawn by Allred, and so by that logic their exclusion makes sense — ditto the Madman appearances in Donny Cates’s Cross Over — yet the crossovers collected in Volume 2 weren’t all Allred, either. Though if we’re going to be purists, one might have reprinted the four issues of Vault of Michael Allred, a self-published scrapbook circa 2006. I’ve often lamented how little editorial content has been included in these volumes to help readers navigate the material, and Vault could have done some of that work with an added bonus of being a retrospective at the end of the road. (Plus, the original collection of Vault has long since faded from print!)

But at the end of the day, I have six hardcovers (nearly 3,500 pages!) from one of my favorite creators, and it’s hard for me even to imagine a similar collection for any other creator.³ I’m grateful to see that Dark Horse has begun a line of paperback editions of the Madmaniverse Library; with compendium volumes becoming more popular on the market, I welcome anything that makes it easier for someone to find Madman without needing a stroke of luck at a secondhand shop.

Allred ends the Madman Library Edition Volume 6 with a reflective essay (dubbed “Outro”), in which he puts everything back into chronological order, explaining how each swirl and eddy of his personal life got him to this point. As he name-checks the folks he met along the way, he posits a world not unlike Frank Einstein’s — full of fascinating characters, close friends, and surprising coincidences. It almost reads like a lost, real-world issue of Madman & The Atomics. (Maybe, dear reader, the real Atomics were the friends we made along the way.) And in that oldest and noblest tradition of serialized superhero comics, Allred concludes with the words “Until the seventh volume…” and if there were a way to preorder that seventh volume now, I’d do it in a heartbeat.