Today Strangest Northerns gives you thrills Franken-style. The fact that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) ends in the Arctic with Victor chasing his terrible creation over the ice, makes it in many ways the first of the strange Northerns. Mary Shelley’s Arctic was created three decades before the lost Franklin Expedition (1845), so her interest was unusual. Mary’s Arctic strikes me as being very much like Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a sublime and terrible but not very specific place.
Several comic writers found Mary Shelley as a good jumping off point for some non-specific Arctic horror comics. These include Al Feldstein and Bill Gaines’ “The Monster in the Ice”, drawn by Ghastly (Graham Ingels) for Vault of Horror #22 (December 1951-January 1952).
The story takes place in modern times (as both Mary Shelley’s book and the movie based on it are mentioned.) Gerald Dawson and his companion, Campbell, are in the Arctic doing a geological survey. They have the help of one local Inuit man named Lomo. Lomo refuses to take Campbell out to where he needs to take samples because of a monster in the ice. Legends tell how the monster killed many and drove others insane with the hideousness of his face.
The two white men go out to dig up the monster, mostly to prove that native superstition is foolish. They return with a body encased in ice. Lomo wisely wants nothing to do with it but Dawson forces him to chip away the ice so they can reveal the body for what it is.
While Lomo does his job, the two white men warm up. Dawson recalls the Shelley novel and how it was once thought to be true. Campbell has only seen the movie. Dawson corrects the film version, saying it ended in the Arctic with man and monster separated by breaking ice.
Lomo screams. The two men rush in to find the monster gone and Lomo driven insane. Dawson remembers the Frankenstein monster is impervious to bullets (Thanks Mary Shelley!) so they dig a hole in the ice to trap it. The trap works but the monster pulls both men in with it. Cut to the future and men finding the bodies and beginning to dig them up…
Pretty typical EC stuff with no one getting out alive. I do like the way the writers worked in Mary Shelley so that it wasn’t too obvious. The story couldn’t work outside the North, so that’s a plus.
The second one is The Monster of Frankenstein #4 (July 1973) from Marvel Comics. “Death of the Monster” was written by Gary Friedrich and drawn by the wonderful Mike Ploog. Inks were done by John Verpoorten. All was edited by Roy Thomas.
Since this is a Marvel Comic the story is not self-contained but continued from the previous issue. The monster has been shipwrecked on an Arctic shore. The only survivors are Robert Walton and the cabin boy, Sean. Both are injured. Frankie refuses to rescue his enemy, Canute (as the editors at Marvel always liked to do — *See Issue #3). When he does at Walton’s insistence, he finds Canute is already dead. Walton tells the monster to leave him and Sean as both will be dead by morning.
Frankenstein’s monster does leave, recalling for the reader’s benefit the last pages of Mary Shelley’s book and what happened afterward. Abandoning Victor to his fate, the monster arrives in a desolate wasteland. He comes across a campfire and eats the meat cooking there. The owners of the camp show up, a rag-tag band of outcasts little better than cavemen. The monster fights them but stops when the shaman shows up. Monster and magician have a bond and communicate. Frankenstein’s monster becomes one of them, helping in the hunt.
Once happy, the enemies of the outcasts show up, another tribe of Mongol-like men. The two tribes clash, with the monster fighting for his new friends. The warriors attack him with fire and club and beat him into unconsciousness. When the monster wakes he finds his tribe has been wiped off the face of the Earth. In the ruins he finds the shaman who asks him to take his body for proper burial on a native-style stretcher, which the monster burns.
The heat from the fire loosens the ice and the monster plunges into the frigid, Arctic waters. The monster is tired of his sad existence and breathes in the waters to die. But, of course, he didn’t die for real, because Robert Walton pulled him from the ice in issue #1. (According to Roy’s editorial message!)
Reminiscence over, the monster returns to the dying man, with a new raft built from the wreckage of the boat and an armload of firewood. Walton is not doing well, though he is surprised to see the creature. Sean, the cabin boy, has died and Walton will join him soon. Before he goes, he tells the monster to go to Ingolstadt where a descendant of Victor still lives. The monster launches his raft and sails onto Issue #5.
This tale strikes me as having more Robert E. Howard in it than Mary Shelley or even Northern elements. These two rivals bands gave us some great battle scenes (which Ploog excels at, making him such a great artist on Kull the Conqueror). Rather than tell a tale of Arctic explorers, Friedrich takes us on a kind of time travel journey for a little Sword & Sorcery. Ploog’s Franken-style can handle the job.
I am sure I will find other comics that has directly sprung from Shelley’s Frankenstein besides novel adaptations like Classics Illustrated #26 or Marvel Classics #20. If you know of any, send a mention my way. And if you enjoyed this one, make sure you see “Aurora, Queen of the Arctic”.
