Frankenstein #1
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeFrankenstein #1 (1945) marks a genuinely unusual creative pivot in Golden Age comics: the same writer-artist, Dick Briefer, who had been crafting what comics historians call America's first ongoing horror comic-book feature since 1940 voluntarily abandoned terror for absurdist comedy, giving the monster a solo title built entirely around domestic farce and pop-culture satire. The result was one of the first sustained horror-comedy hybrids in the medium's history — years before EC's horror anthologies or Mad magazine — demonstrating that a single character could anchor radically different tonal registers and sustain reader interest across both. Briefer's loose, gestural brushwork in the humor phase has been compared by later critics to the visual vocabulary that would define early Mad, making this issue an early template for the anarchic illustrated comedy that would reshape American comics in the 1950s. As the debut issue of the monster's first-ever solo title, it is the formal beginning of an entire subgenre: the sympathetic, comedic monster-neighbor story that prefigures everything from The Addams Family to modern horror-comedy.
The Frankenstein monster awakens in a laboratory where a mad scientist injects him with a serum, after which a creature called "Little Lambsie" escapes and causes chaos, eventually setting the laboratory ablaze and forcing vampires to flee the grotto. Frankenstein pursues the fiends into a cave, where he dispatches them, and is subsequently celebrated as a hero who has rid a town of its terror. The grateful townspeople reward him generously, and Frankenstein uses his newfound wealth to marry a woman and retire to a mansion, where he contentedly surrounds himself with the creatures and vermin that inhabit his new home.
When the peaceful town of Mippyville finds itself plagued by ghouls and vampires draining the life from its citizens, the desperate mayor calls upon Frankenstein to save them—though the monster himself faces an unexpected obstacle when his clothes shrink in the wash. What unfolds is a comedic clash of supernatural chaos and mistaken identity, as the townspeople's excitement over "Frankie's" arrival takes a turn neither they nor their unlikely savior quite anticipated.
Frankenstein stumbles upon a secret cavern inhabited by Professor Hugo von Hoogenblotzen and his grotesque creations—hybrid creatures stitched together from animal and human parts. The mad scientist sees an opportunity to complete his collection and captures Frankenstein to create the one mananimal that's eluded him: a man-elephant. But Frankenstein's quick thinking and a tiny companion from his pocket might just turn the tables on Hoogenblotzen's operation in this 1945 humor tale.
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Dick Briefer (1915–1980), a graduate of the Art Students League in New York, had been writing and drawing an eight-page Frankenstein feature in nearly every issue of Prize Comics since December 1940, published by Crestwood Publications (also operating as Feature Publications under its Prize Comics imprint). After the character shifted from rampaging horror to a more humanized, comedic persona across Prize Comics #33–52, the monster's popularity justified a solo spin-off; Frankenstein #1 was advertised inside Prize Comics v5n4 (the April 1945 issue) as already on newsstands, placing its actual on-sale date around February 1945. Briefer reportedly had to persuade Crestwood that Mary Shelley's novel was in the public domain before the original horror series could even launch in 1940, and the eventual comedic reinvention was entirely his own creative initiative, with Briefer serving as sole writer, penciler, inker, and letterer on the new title.
Trivia · 8 facts
- First solo title for Dick Briefer's Frankenstein character, spinning out of Prize Comics after the monster appeared in nearly every issue of that anthology from #7 (Dec. 1940) through #52 (Apr. 1945).
- Published by Crestwood Publications (Prize Comics imprint); no cover date appears on the issue itself, but Grand Comics Database places the on-sale date around February 1945 based on an in-house advertisement in Prize Comics v5n4.
- Dick Briefer served as sole writer, penciler, inker, and letterer — a complete solo creative effort, 52 pages in full color at a ten-cent cover price.
- The issue launched the 'Merry Monster' humor phase of the series: Frankenstein settles into small-town life, interacting with Dracula, the Wolfman, and other classic monsters as comedic neighbors rather than antagonists.
- Issue #1 story contents include 'Frankenstein's Creation,' 'Animal Crackers,' 'The Ghouls and Vampires,' 'A Bat in the Belfry,' 'Frankenstein's Wife' (in which the monster briefly marries and divorces), and 'The Manimals.'
- One story in the issue features the monster as a pop-culture celebrity parody: he becomes a singer modeled on Frank Sinatra, referred to as 'Frankie Singatra' — an early example of comics lampooning contemporary mass-media celebrity.
- The humor phase of the solo series ran from issue #1 through #17 (February 1949); the title was then revived in 1952 with Briefer returning to straight horror (issues #18–33, ending November 1954) before the Comics Code Authority shut it down.
- Key modern reprints include: IDW/Yoe Books' The Chilling Archives of Horror Comics #1 — Dick Briefer's Frankenstein (August 2010), and PS Artbooks' Roy Thomas Presents Frankenstein: The Classic Series Written and Drawn by Dick Briefer, Vol. 3 (September 2013), which collects issues #1–5. A copy of the original issue is held in the collections of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
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Reprints
Reprinted in Dr. Frankenstein's House of 3-D #[nn] (1992), The Chilling Archives of Horror Comics! #[1] (2010), Roy Thomas Presents Frankenstein: The Classic Series Written and Drawn by Dick Briefer #3 (2013), Crypt of Horror #36 (2018), Frankenstein #2 (2021), Frankenstein #3 (2021), Frankenstein #4 (2021), Frankenstein #5 (2022)
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