Fawcett Comics was the big rival for DC back in the 1940s. Science Fiction writers like Manly Wade Wellman and Alfred Bester penned the craziest adventures they could think of for Captain Marvel and his family of superheroes. Some of these were even Northerns.
“Monsters of the North Pole” was a Captain Marvel Jr. tale written by Otto Binder (half of the SF team known as Eando Binder) and drawn by Al Carreno. It appeared in Captain Marvel Jr. #5 (March 19, 1943). That date is important because this is a wartime comic and the villains are going to be Nazis. The line that really struck me was the first one here:
The Cold War was years away and Russians were not portrayed as evil. That would come later.
When Freddy Freeman sees there is trouble up North he zips up there. Unfortunately, so does Freddy’s nemesis, Captain Nazi. The baddy attacks a Russian plane and Captain Marvel Jr. fights him off. Captain Nazi heads for the North Pole to destroy the Russian’s base.
The Nazis attack the Russians who have run out of bullets. Captain Marvel Jr. drives off the attackers but Captain Nazi escapes. As a reward, Jr. gets to see what the Russians are working on. They have found a whole mammoth frozen in the ice.
Later Captain Nazi uses a flame-thrower to free and revive the animal. jumping on its back, he rides it into the camp to kill the Russians. Captain Marvel Jr. approaches the beast and gets thumped. He tries again, grabbing the animal’s tail. He throws the mammoth off a cliff. Captain Nazi escapes because he can fly. As a reward, Jr. asks the Russians to raise the US flag.
Not much real information about life in the North, but the setting was certainly different with igloos (but no Inuit?). The discovery of a frozen mammoth carcass near Fairbanks, Alaska obviously caught the eye of comic writers.
