This blog has threads running through it. One of these is the idea of the Northern tale with a fantastic element. I call them “The Strangest Northerns”. I love Northern fiction. The tale of Northern Canada, Alaska, or the Big Woods. But with something extra: a ghost, a werewolf, a spirit of the land, and so on. And strange Northerns show up in all kinds of places, and to different degrees. Novels, movies, Radio, Television and comics all offer their own version. Often the supernatural is explained away as a false monster story. I mean could Sergeant Preston really find a ghost in that haunted trapper’s cabin. I don’t think so. Fortunately, many of the comics of the 1950-70s offer up real spooks and terrors. And if you think this is an old, worn-out trope, well consider Dan Simmons’ bestselling The Terror (2007), recently made into a TV show (2018). A masterpiece of historical as much as horror fiction, it tells of the doomed Franklin Expedition of 1848. There plenty of life left in the old bird!
Check out my talk on Pulp & Comics connections to Alberta that has some Strange Northerns in it, here.
1800s
(1894) Mary Hartwell Catherwood
1900
(1900) The Illustrated Jack London
(1901) A Relic of the Pleistocene
1910
1920
(1921) The Valley of the Beasts
(1923) The Ghoul and the Corpse
(1926) The Menace of Mastodon Valley
1930
(1933) Doc Savage: The Northerns
(1935) King of the Royal Mounted Part 1
(1939) Reynolds of the Mounted
1940
(1940) Amazona the Mighty Woman
(1945) The God of the Mountain
(1945) Old Black Magic and Weird Tales
(1947) Treachery in the Arctic
(1948) The Mystery of the Ghost Gold
(1949) Airboy Fights the Ice-People
1950
(1950) Snow Beasts! Yeti, Bigfoot and Sasquatch in Comics – Part 1
(1951) The Doom of the Living Ice
(1951) World Below the North Pole
(1951) The Mystery of the Indian Totem Pole
(1951) The Doom of the Living Ice
(1951) “Skag With the Queer Head”
(1952) Eerie Footsteps in the Red Snow
(1952) Fanged Nemesis of the North
(1952) The Strange Indian Curse
(1953) Crimson Wraith from the North
(1953) Vengeance of the Vikings
(1957) King of the Glacier Men
1960
(1961) Theodore Sturgeon Style
1970
(1970) Snow Beasts! Yeti, Bigfoot and Sasquatch in Comics – Part 2
(1970) The Ice-Giant Saga Part 1
(1970) The Ice-Giant Saga Part 2
(1973) Mike Kaluta’s Frankenstein
(1975) Snow Beasts! Yeti, Bigfoot and Sasquatch in Comics – Part 3
