“Death and the Icy Sea!” is a short shock to fill out an issue of a 1950s comic book. This strange Northern makes me think of the store of tales about Arctic exploration. A while back I wrote about “The Moonstone Mass” by Harriett Prescott Spofford and the race to find the Northwest Passage. The doomed Franklin Expedition inspired such stories, the most recent being Dan Simmons’ awesome The Terror (2007). In recent years new discoveries about the Franklin mummies, as they are called, have led to new questions and new mysteries. But even back in the 1950s, the legends of Arctic doom haunted the history of the North.
This one-pager from The House of Mystery #21 (December 1953) packs as much horror as five panels can hold. The House of Mystery and other DC horror comics would do much longer stories in the future. The author is not known but art was done by Morris Waldinger. Waldinger was also a writer so he may have penned it too.
Like “The Moonstone Mass” there is a suggestion in “Death and the Icy Sea!” that there is some secret path through the ice that allows ships to cross the impossible corridor. In “The Moonstone Mass” this was done in hours. Here the time frame is much longer. Fifteen years is certainly not quick, but the vessel did make the journey, despite the crew being corpsicles. This would have made a good opener for a William Hope Hodgson tale if he had ever written about the North. (He tended to stay in the tropics.) Not a gigantic tale of terror, just a dollop, perfect for a one page filler.
