Review: Dick Briefer's Frankenstein
Dick Briefer’s Frankenstein Edited and designed by Craig Yoe
Produced by Clizia Gussoni
Yoe Books / IDW Publishing
150 pages, color
$21.99
Review by Drake Caperton
Craig Yoe has put together another great book for fans of comics and popular culture. Dick Briefer’s Frankenstein is Yoe’s tribute to 1940s and 50s comic book creator Dick Briefer and his 15-year run on a series of comic book stories about Mary Shelley’s monster.
Briefer is pretty much unknown today, even to most comic
book fans, and his reputation among aficionados relies mostly on Frankenstein. Yoe does a splendid job of detailing the artist’s career and encapsulating the comic series, which began as a minor feature in Prize Comics #7 in 1940. (As much fun as I found these comics, I have to say that the introduction made me really want to read Briefer’s adventure comic strip The Adventures of Pinky Rankin, published in the Communist paper The Daily Worker during World War 2. Maybe someday Yoe or someone else will collect those comics.) Frankenstein began as a serious strip, very loosely based on the novel and distantly akin in spirit to the Universal Studios Frankenstein movies of the 30s and 40s. Yoe’s words perfectly set the strip in the cultural context of its day.During the war, the monster patriotically fought Nazis, but in 1945, the strip took its truly inspired turn. Briefer reimagined the monster as a gentle figure, comical and kind-hearted, taking a cue perhaps from Charles Addams’ cartoons. The comical Frankenstein stories are both weird and charming and are definitely my favorites of the stories included in Yoe’s book.
The funny Frankenstein comic ran through the end of the 40s, but in 1952, Briefer revived the strip as a bleak horror book, darker even than the stories from the early 40s. These issues stand out from the other horror comics of the era mostly because they have the recurring character of the monster who serves as a kind of amoral force of vengeance in a world of very bad people.
Yoe’s book is beautifully designed; the cover features die-cuts so that the fierce monster on the outer cover shares a pair of eyes with his cartoon cousin within. Besides Yoe’s excellent introduction, the collection includes 12 complete stories, lovingly restored, and many pieces of incidental art, covers, sketches, and photos. In the context of the other books about horror comics that were published this fall, the last stories in Dick Briefer’s Frankenstein provide some fascinating material for comparison, being a little better written and more stylistically distinctive than many of their peers. Over its lifetime, Briefer’s monster largely tracked the rising and falling trends of American comics. The earliest stories arose from the wide open era that preceded the war, when creators could write and draw stories about almost anything, then move into the postwar era, when super humans gave way to funny comics, romances, and crime comics, and finally into the horror period, before most comics died under the threat of the Comics Code. Watching the work of a single, enormously creative artist working on a single character through those eras provides a unique perspective on the times.
Yoe’s book left me wanting more Briefer stories or another volume devoted to an equally interesting artist. Since this is “Book #1 in the Chilling Archive of Horror Comics,” I bet I’m going to get my wish.
Posted by Angela Caperton at 12/9/2010 8:44 PM 
Categories: Drake Caperton, Comics, Review, art
Tags: comics Craig Yoe art review
Categories: Drake Caperton, Comics, Review, art
Tags: comics Craig Yoe art review
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