“Deep Freeze” appeared in The Thing #11 (November-December 1953). It was written by Carl Memling and drawn by Bob Forgione and Vince Alascia. It is the tale of a military expedition to Glacier Island. The crew is an advanced party there to prepare for the colonel’s arrival. The local Inuit man, Karniak, warns the men that they are not alone on the island. Like the men in The Thing they find something in the ice. Karniak tries to run but the soldiers hold him.
Dynamite is placed around the dark spot in the ice. The explosion releases a dinosaur and the men run. One man who is at camp in a tent comes outside to see the dinosaur. He shoots it with a pistol but the bullets bounce off. The dinosaur quickly munches him.
Later the colonel’s plane lands. The men have a garbled message about Karniak and the dark spot. The soldiers investigate, finding all their comrades below in the ice. The colonel decides that this must be an attack by “the enemy”. Behind them, the dinosaur rises up again to take its prey…
This little Cold War Northern from Charlton is a wonderful glimpse of that time period. We still have the cliche of the Inuit guide who nobody listens to, but what is different, and not really explained it why the monster is a dinosaur or giant lizard? Cold blooded creatures aren’t going to survive in the Arctic.
I suspect this is Ray Bradbury and Ray Harryhausen’s fault. The film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was in theaters in 1953. The original story was Ray Bradbury’s “The Foghorn” in which a resurrected dinosaur mistakes a foghorn for another of its kind calling to it. Bradbury’s mood is sad and elegiac. The producers who bought the idea hired Ray Harryhausen to make it into an adventure story, with a nuclear blast releasing the monster, capturing it, letting it get loose and attacking Coney Island. Steven Spielberg would get to homage this is The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997).
NB: As it turns out there was another source: The Alaskan dinosaur came out of a mistaken discovery known as the Glacier Island Trunko carcase in 1930. (Thanks Markus!) A whale skeleton was mistakenly thought to be the remains of a prehistoric Alaskan monster, thus the Arctic reptiles of the comics and films….
