Guest Post | The Four Color Adventures of Frosty the Snowman

By GW Thomas

From just about the very beginning of comic books, publishers have realized that with the extra leisure and more generous spending habits of December, it’s a great time to sell more comics. Thus the Christmas Special. From Bugs Bunny to Superman, the Christmas comic became a seasonal surety on wire store racks.

1950 was the year Gene Autry tried for Christmas gold a second time. His first hit had been “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which had been Number 1 the year previous. His rendition of Jack Rollins and Steve Nelson’s song “Frosty the Snowman” proved almost as impressive (getting to Number 7), adding yet another entry to the pantheon of non-religious Christmas characters. The song would have to wait nineteen years to get a cartoon based on it, but in the meantime, the comic specials filled that void.

Dell had the popular anthology comic, Four Color, which alternated between familiar newspaper comic characters, Disney and Warner Brothers, to movie and TV adaptations. The year after Autry’s hit, readers saw the first Frosty the Snowman comic with Four Color #359 (November 1951). Written and drawn by Jon Stanley and Dan Gormley, it set the pattern for the next ten years. Gormley would draw seven of the eleven issues, each showing up in November or December.

Many of the stories are suggested by the original song. “Before I melt away” inspires several stories where Frosty needs to keep himself from melting, such as “The Heat Wave” (December 1961). “There must have been some magic in that old silk hat they found” gives us several stories about the hat, whether stolen by evil snowmen or lost in a mix-up after being cleaned. Later, when the cartoons were done in the 1960s, they too latched onto these ideas.

The first full-length story, “The Evil Snowman,” features a villainous snowman with a black Russian beard. The story would get a second version (called “The Snowman Contest”) in the final issue where the evil snowman wears a checked vest instead. (After eleven years of stories, even Gormley had run dry.) This first issue also introduces some of Frosty’s sidekicks: a rabbit named Skeeter, Santa Claus (with his elves and reindeer), Jack Frost, the Straw Man, and a gang of kids who come to the rescue whenever Frosty needs them.

Most of the Frosty plots follow similar themes. There are a good number of stories in which Frosty loses his hat like, “Frosty the Snowman and the Old Top Hat” (November 1952) and “Magic Hat” (December 1958). He doesn’t turn into an immobile snowman, but he can’t walk around (or skip and dance, as he often points out) either, and it is up to kids or animals or mere chance to bring his hat back.

Other stories focus on Frosty as helper or hero, usually for a small child or animals, like the ducks and other forest creatures in “Saving Frozen Ducks” (November 1952), “Frosty the Snowman Makes the Forest Safe”(November 1953), and “Frosty the Snowman and Peter Polar Bear” (November 1954). In these tales, Frosty may go on a long journey, giving the story a grander scope than the neighborhood tales. Sometimes he is helping Santa Claus, like when the elves all come down with the flu or the toys are missing. Frosty encounters a number of witches in these stories, as they require a villain, like the one who has taken all the hobby horses in “Frosty the Snowman and the Crystal Castle” (November 1953). Wolves and foxes also show up as bad guys.

Frosty also acts as teacher sometimes to boys who have lost their way. “Bad Bobbie” (November 1953) has Bobbie tricking Frosty into shoveling the walk for him, but when Bobbie tries to get Frosty onto skis, the tables are turned. Frosty is an expert skier and causes a pile of snow to recover Bobby’s walkway. These bad boys usually see the error of their ways and become good with Frosty’s help.

And lastly, my favorite of the Frosty stories are mysteries, where Frosty acts as detective. The November 1954 issue had “Down on the Farm” where a “ghost” is playing practical jokes on the farm animals. Frosty, of course, uses his little white cells and figures out who is the culprit. “The Missing Page” (December 1960-February 1961) has Frosty help a girl find part of a missing book.

In 1964, Rankin-Bass' animated Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer would premiere. A perennial favorite, it featured a snowman named Sam, not Frosty (and modeled on the actor who played him, Burl Ives). In 1969, Rankin-Bass acquired the Frosty property and put out an animated cartoon of him that has also become a seasonal fixture, with Jackie Vernon as the loveable snowman. R-B did a crossover cartoon in 1979 called Rudolph the Reindeer and the Island of Misfit Toys. All of these animated shows remind me of material in the Dell comics, especially the idea of Frosty's becoming associated with Santa and the North Pole, though it is hard to say if they had any influence as many of the ideas can be found in the original song.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

31 Werewolves | Dell's super spy

At the height of the monster nostalgia craze in the early '60s, Dell published a series of one-shots adapting Universal's most popular monster movies: Dracula in 1962, then Frankenstein and The Wolf Man in 1964. A couple of years later though, they decided to turn the characters into monster-themed superheroes. 

Dracula and Frankenstein were no problem as long as Dell didn't use the Universal likenesses. They even continued the numbering from the one-shots, starting the superhero versions with #2 issues. Since the Wolf Man name was trademarked by Universal though, Dell renamed that series Werewolf and started with a new #1.

Unlike Dell's Frankenstein and Dracula heroes, who had some story ties to their namesakes, Werewolf was an all-new character with no connection to the monster of folklore. In fact, with Bondmania in full swing all over the world, Dell broke further with the other two by making Werewolf more superspy than superhero. He was an Air Force pilot named Wiley Wolf who got amnesia and was adopted by a wolf pack after he crashed his plane. Traveling with his wolf pal, Thor, he used the skills he learned with the pack to join the CIA and become a secret agent in a black bodysuit with high tech enhancements.

Like the Frankenstein and Dracula series, Werewolf only lasted three issues.

Back in 2010, my pal Pax Holley at Cavalcade of Awesome wrote about Werewolf during his lycanthrope-themed Halloween countdown. He's got lots of additional details, plus scans of the issues, including a schematic of Werewolf's suit. Check that out, but then also check out the rest of his posts from that month. It's great companion reading to 31 Werewolves.

Tarzan 101 | Tarzan of the Comic Books

Celebrating Tarzan's 101st anniversary by walking through Scott Tracy Griffin's Tarzan: The Centennial Celebration.

Griffin covers the history of Tarzan in comic books from the character's first appearance in Tip Top Comics #1 (above) to his current status at Dark Horse. True to the roots of comic books in general, the earliest Tarzan comics were simply reprints of his newspaper strips. United Features started running the Sunday strips in 1936 in Tip Top, while the dailies began getting colored and reprinted two years later in Comics on Parade.

In 1939, Dell got into the game with new adaptations of Burroughs stories starting in Popular Comics #38. It would also be Dell who published the first original Tarzan comic book story in 1947's Four Color #134 with art by Jesse Marsh. Four Color was an ongoing anthology series in which each issue was devoted to a single character, but Tarzan got another issue that same year with #161 (the series wasn't a strict monthly and often had multiple issues each month). Those issues sold so well that Dell gave Tarzan his own series, with Marsh still drawing it, the following year.

Marsh worked with writer Gaylor Dubois to create a new continuity for Dell's Tarzan that combined elements of the Burroughs novels with those of the Johnny Weissmuller films. The series lasted 131 issues until the summer of 1962 when it switched over to Dell's publishing partner Western and its Gold Key imprint. Gold Key kept Dell's numbering and its Tarzan series ran another 75 issues until 1972. A major change in the Gold Key era was that Marsh retired in 1965 and his assistant Russ Manning began drawing the series.

In '72, the Tarzan license went to DC. They changed the name to Tarzan of the Apes and identified the switch with a big, yellow bullet that said "First DC Issue." But like Gold Key, they kept the numbering from the old series. Issue #207 featured a new adaptation of Burroughs' first book with art by Joe Kubert. And though DC got a lot of mileage out of their five years with the Burroughsverse, they ultimately lost it to Marvel in 1977.

Marvel's Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle - with art by John Buscema - ran 29 issues until 1979, at which point Tarzan comics ceased to be published in North America for more than a decade. Malibu published American editions of some European Tarzan comics in 1992, but it wasn't until 1995 that Dark Horse got the license and began doing brand new stories again. In addition to a 20-issue ongoing series, they published numerous mini-series and crossovers in which Tarzan met up not only with other Burroughs characters like John Carter and Carson of Venus, but also Predators, Superman, and Batman.

Though Dark Horse still has the Tarzan license, it's not currently publishing original Tarzan stories. Instead, it's focusing on archival reprints of classic comics by guys like Marsh, Manning, and Kubert. I'm happy for those, but that leaves new Tarzan comics to Dynamite, who's adapting Burroughs' public domain Tarzan stories in its Lord of the Jungle series. I understand that those are very good (and have the first volume creeping its way up my reading pile), but I'm also eager for new, original tales. Hoping Dark Horse gets back to those soon.