Story Comics produced Mysterious Adventures #1 (March 1951), which featured “The Horrible Fangs of Professor Prome”. The artist and author are not known. This rather obscure horror comic uses the old chestnut of the monster locked in the ice. Like Charlton’s “Deep Freeze” two years later, the monster is a giant reptile, which never made much sense to me since reptiles are cold-blooded. They would find it impossible to live in the frigid Arctic. It made more sense when Fawcett did in back in 1943 with a frozen mammoth.
The main character’s name changes from Prome to Prone several times but we will call him Prome since it is in the title. They can’t spell Arctic right either, so there you are…
The story opens with Professor Prome already dead, his colleagues standing over his corpse. The two men find his diary, which contains the story of the photograph of the monster frozen in the ice. This is brought to the professor by Miss Janet Spense. She gives Prome a box of rocks samples to analyze.
The samples come back radioactive so Prome joins the young woman on a trip to Alaska. When they arrive at the Aglemit Eskimo village, Prome knocks out a local so that he can go into the forbidden hut of the Death-God. Inside he finds a carving of the same monster from the photo. Prome insists on leaving immediately.
The professor hurries to the site of the frozen monster. He plans to melt the ice with heat coils and retrieve the lizard. Janet warns him it might come to life. He is willing to chance it.
Unfortunately, the Eskimos he hires aren’t. They abandon Janet and Prome. They continue working without the Eskimos.
While taking a break, the monster revives and eats their sled dogs. Prome is quick and captures the creature using steel chains. Later, Prome goes to sleep. He is woken at three in the morning when he hears Janet, who is on watch, scream.
Prome drives the monster off with a flare. He rescues Janet but she dies of her wounds, a terrible bite to her throat. The scientist wonders how this could happen. He looks at the chains and sees the monster bite right through them.
Now alone, his monster run off, Prome returns to the Eskimo village. All the locales have left, leaving the village abandoned. Prome is haunted by ghosts and the totem figure of the monster. He flees into the Arctic night. His journal tells he made it back to civilization and the museum. But his fate can not avoided. He has been killed by a terrible bite to his throat.
Mysterious Adventures gives us a more complex story than “Deep Freeze” it combines other strange Northern motifs like the killer totem and uranium prospecting. The character of Prome is completely unlikable, as he bullies the natives, gets his girlfriend killed, and gets the justice he deserves. Usually the professor types are milquetoasts but Prome is a bit of an adventurer (“It belongs in a museum!”) The Alaskan dinosaur came out of a mistaken discovery known as the Glacier Island Trunko carcase in 1930. (Thanks Markus!)
This comic is available at DCM for free.
