If you missed the first part…
The Ice Giant Saga began with The Phantom Stranger and Dr. Terence Thirteen looking into mysterious activity in the Arctic. For the second part, only eighteen pages instead of twenty-five, the tale will be the Fedora wearer’s alone. (Dr. Thirteen got the back-up story.) The writing this time is not Denny O’Neil but another veteran writer, Len Wein. Once again, comic art by Jim Aparo with a cover by Neal Adams.
The Phantom Stranger #19 (May-June 1972) “Return to the Tomb of the Ice Giants!” starts with men laying down oil pipes in the Arctic. For some mysterious reason, the men keep disappearing. (Not so mysterious to those of us who recognize that giant hand!)
Franklin Stone, the lead man on the pipeline expansion has a disagreement with Anthony Blake, a geologist, about the future of pipelines and the world. (This is 1972 not 2021!)
Blake storms off and his car falls into a ravine because of an earthquake.
The Phantom Stranger pulls him out.
Back at home, we meet Blake’s other half, Carol. Blake continues his argument about saving the planet with her.
Stone is busy fixing his pipeline, that has been severed by a giant sword we all know. More arguing that stops when another earthquake comes.
The rumbling ice and earth reveals where all the missing men have gone. Frozen dead, a mysterious voice gives a final warning to the humans. Stone is not intimidated by the voice. He is prepared to use force to get the job done.
Blake brings up Stone’s promise to move the pipeline, a promise he had no intention of keeping…
Stone and Blake fight. Their struggle ends when another earthquake opens a chasm and swallows everyone.
Finally, the Ice Giants!
The leader of the Ice Giants explains how the pipeline is destroying their underground city…
Stone tries violence and is easily put down. The humans are taken to a prison cell. They wait for execution. The Phantom Stranger appears and melts the door with his voodoo. He then stops their guard with a spell that wraps up the giant. They escape.
Anthony Blake’s plan is revealed. The environmentalist is willing to sacrifice everyone, including Carol, to save the planet. He has been working with the Ice Giants and wants to erase humanity from the globe.
Blake dies when he shoots his gun and causes the roof to fall in on him. The Phantom Stranger tries to comfort Carol by explaining her man was lost long ago when he became obsessed. The story ends with Franklin Stone getting back to work like nothing has happened. Pipelines will be built. No man can stand in the way of Progress.
This story has a new bitterness to it today. Back in 1972, we could talk about saving the planet and know the consequences were decades away. Well, those decades have fled. The Climate Change issue of 2021 makes Blake look less like a fanatic and more like Greta Thunberg. (It is just coincidence that I am posting this at the same time as the COP Conference in Glasgow, Scotland. I didn’t really plan it.) Len Wen is gone but I am sure he would nod his head with a bit of a “See what I was talkin’ about” look in his eye.
Once again, we have another Northern theme in the oil pipeline. Resource extraction from the Arctic has always been central to tales of the North. Whether it was fish, fur, gold, diamonds or oil, Canada, the US and Russia have always seen the Arctic as a hidden fortune to be exploited. The fiction that followed that hunt for wealth is the classic Northern, stories about the men and women who suffered for that wealth.
Incredibly important and prescient story