Prize Comics #7 (7)

History

Prize Publications (also known as Feature Publications and later Crestwood Publications) had launched Prize Comics in March 1940 as a superhero anthology built around the Black Owl. By issue #7, the publisher brought in the Joe Simon–Jack Kirby team to handle the Black Owl strip — one of Kirby's earliest credited superhero features — while separately licensing Kendell Foster Crossen's Green Lama from the Frank Munsey pulp world; Crossen worked out a deal with Feature to write the comic adaptation himself, with artwork produced through the Harry 'A' Chesler shop, and the first three Green Lama instalments were drawn by Mac Raboy. Dick Briefer, a veteran of the Eisner-Iger shop, contributed both script and art on the Frankenstein feature under the tongue-in-cheek pen name 'Frank N. Stein'; he later recalled having to convince the publisher that Mary Shelley's novel was in the public domain before the strip could proceed. The result was an issue assembled by multiple creative teams under the same anthology roof, each operating largely independently.

Trivia · 8 facts

• First comic-book appearance and origin of Dick Briefer's Frankenstein monster (and his creator, Victor Frankenstein), in the eight-page feature 'New Adventures of Frankenstein', set in New York City circa 1930 — credited on the splash page to the pseudonym 'Frank N. Stein'.
• Widely regarded by comics historians — including Don Markstein — as the debut of American comics' first ongoing horror-genre series.
• First comic-book appearance and origin of the Green Lama (Jethro Dumont), in the eight-page story 'The Gas Killers', scripted by Kendell Foster Crossen and drawn by Mac Raboy; the character had debuted in pulp prose in the April 1940 issue of Double Detective magazine.
• A noted misconception: the Green Lama had previously appeared in single-page promotional advertisements for Double Detective, causing some sources to mislabel those ads as his first comic-book appearance — this issue is the correct first full comic-book story debut.
• First appearance and origin of Dr. Frost (with villain Vulcan), another feature that would become a recurring presence in Prize Comics.
• The Black Owl story in this issue was scripted and pencilled by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby — described in Simon and Kirby scholarship as Kirby's first superhero feature — and has been reprinted in both The Complete Jack Kirby (Pure Imagination, 1997) and The Simon and Kirby Library: Superheroes (Titan, 2010).
• The Frankenstein story from this issue has been reprinted in Men of Mystery Comics #18 (AC Comics, 1999), Golden-Age Treasury #1 (AC Comics, 2003), and Dick Briefer's Frankenstein (IDW/Yoe Books, 2010), part of The Chilling Archives of Horror Comics series.
• The Green Lama's Prize Comics run lasted through issue #34 (1943) — 27 issues in total — before the character transferred to his own self-titled series from Spark Publications (8 issues, December 1944–March 1946), with Mac Raboy returning as the primary artist for that solo run.

Cast · 4 characters

Full credits

Full plot ⚠ may contain spoilers