I was standing on the corner of Spring and Second Streets when the whole city of Los Angeles shook!

As the ground RRRRUMBLED I grabbed the mailbox next to me and wished everything would just stop moving!

And then it did.

That’s when I realized I’d just survived my first earthquake. It had only lasted a second or two. It must have been a really small one on the Rictor or Richter or whatever-you-call-it scale.

Nothing was damaged and no one was hurt.

In fact, no one else seemed to notice the earthquake at all. I guess here in Los Angeles, little earthquakes like that one were pretty normal. Everyone around me just kept driving or walking.

The only thing that seemed weird to them was me.

That wasn’t too surprising. Anyone who’s met me knows I can make a pretty odd first impression.

Maybe it’s because my feet are too big for my legs. Or because my left hand is way bigger than my right. Or because one eye is blue and the other is bright green.

Or maybe it’s because I’m the son of . . . FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER!

Not that any of the people passing me in downtown Los Angeles knew that. I had only just found that out myself.

I never knew my dad, but I had read about him. I’d only bothered to print out one of the newspaper articles I’d found and taped it here in my journal, because they were all pretty much the same.

Apparently, my dad tended to freak people out.

Some people are scared of genetically modified food. Imagine how they felt meeting a genetically modified MAN!

Actually, I imagined how they felt a lot. I wished I could’ve traded places with them and met my dad. But he disappeared after leaving me at Mr. Shelley’s Orphanage for Lost and Neglected Children® when I was just a baby.

Let’s recap, shall we?

No one knew who had left me. So Mr. Shelley, the orphanage director, named me John Doe.

J.D. for short.

Growing up in the orphanage, the one thing I wanted was a big family. Then one day I found the journal of Dr. Victor Von Frankenstein. I discovered that my dad was Frankenstein’s Monster, which meant I had a HUGE family!

Well, kind of.

I inherited my mismatched arms and legs and hands from my dad. The way I figured it, the people he got body parts from were my relatives. I have their hands, feet, and eyes, the same way other kids have their grandmother’s ears or their great-uncle’s nose.

Those people were probably all dead. (At least, I hoped they had died before Dr. Frankenstein took out parts of their bodies and put them in my dad!)

But those people probably had kids and grandkids. They would be related to me too — they’d be like my cousins!

All I had to do was find out who they were by tracking down where each part of my dad came from.

And I had to find out fast. Because I wasn’t the only one looking for my cousins!