“Frozen Alive!” from Marvel Tales #147 (June 1956) was written by an unknown author and drawn by Bob Brown. The immediate reaction for me is this is Marvel’s version of the 1953 film The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. That movie was based on Ray Bradbury’s “The Foghorn” (The Saturday Evening Post, June 23, 1951), which doesn’t involve Arctic ice. The filmmakers added that. Since Bradbury appeared in a slick rather than a Pulp, the story was read widely. Here again is the idea that if mammoths could be frozen, then why not dinosaurs. Charlton used it in “Deep Freeze”, Story Comics in “The Horrible Fangs of Professor Prome”, and Gold Key with Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Marvel compressed this strange Northern into only four pages.
Three geologists go to the Arctic to find frozen specimens. Their wildest dream comes true when they find a T. rex.
The men decide to stay and cut the dinosaur free. Too late they realize they are freeing a living relic of the past.
One man goes to shoot the beast but another stops him. They take a moment to consider what would happen if the dinosaur reached civilization.
Together they shoot it with high-powered rifles until it falls back into the icy water. The specimen is lost forever. The men are sad at losing the dinosaur but they know that Science will always have to make sacrifices.
The idea that dinosaurs could live in the frigid temperatures of the Arctic seems a little unlikely. We may not know for sure if dinos were warm or cold-blooded (or a combination of both) but their metabolisms don’t seem right for the ice. Also, a large food source would be needed to maintain a body of that size and at such a temperature. T. rex would curl and die pretty fast in icy waters or in the howling wind. There is a reason why whales live in the water and polar bears have fur.
Of course the entire point of these films and comics is that the dinosaur will get to civilized parts and go on a rampage. “Frozen Alive” dedicates only one panel to that, a frame where the scientists realize if they don’t do something that terrible fate is going to happen. They destroy the beast before any such The Lost World: Jurassic Park style suburban chompfest can happen. “Frozen Alive” skips that part for some reason, merely suggesting the carnage.
