Forty Days of Frankenstein, Day Thirty: This is a blink-and-you’ll-miss it Frankenstein, and also one that takes a little explaining for the uninitiated. On the TV show *The Simpsons*, main character Bart Simpson is a comic book fan, and his favorite comic book character is a superhero called Radioactive Man. That is to say that, Radioactive Man is, within the fictional Simpsons universe, himself a fictional character, a meta-fictional character, if you will. In Radioactive Man’s universe—a fictional universe within a fictional universe (a metafictional universe?)—Radioactive Man is a member of the superhero team The Superior Squad (a parody of teams like the Avengers and the Justice League). What you may or may not realize, though, is that in addition to *The Simpsons* TV show, there’s a Simpsons “extended universe” of sorts that includes Simpsons comic books. Occasionally, however, a Simpsons comic book story will go a level deeper fictional-universe-wise and tell a story set within the Radioactive Man / Superior Squad universe. In the comic book *Simpsons Super Spectacular* #2, cover-dated February, 2006, you can read the story “Bongos,” which is set in the Superior Squad universe. The story is pretty funny in itself, in painterly tones by artist Dan Brereton, but in a single panel we get this throwaway gag of Superior Squad member Captain Squid fighting the Frankenstein Monster, who the story is at pains to tell us lappily, is able to encounter Captain Squid in his element because, astonishingly, he’s “learned to swim.” I have to say, the Monster’s design is pretty rich in comedic detail (screws for electrodes, for instance) for a tossed-off reference that’s never seen again. And it makes me wonder about Frankenstein media in the Simpsons universe. It seems like there, as here, The Monster is a public domain character. If a classic Frankenstein movie ever came across the TV that Homer Simpson was dozing in front of, I wonder what we’d see?
