Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the six hundred and fifty-first week where we examine comic book legends and whether they are true or false. Yes, we’ve seriously done 650 of these bad boys. Yikes.
Click here for Part 1 of this week’s legends. Click here for Part 2 of this week’s legends.
COMIC LEGEND:
Prize Comics #24, featuring its heroes fighting against Frankenstein, was the first intercompany crossover.
STATUS:
False
At the end of 1940, Prize Comics (the centerpiece title of the small comic book publisher, Prize, who was one of the first comic book companies to give Jack Kirby a shot) introduced what is likely the first horror comic book feature in Prize Comics #7, with a story written and drawn by Dick Briefer…
The strip proved to be popular and soon became a regular feature in Prize Comics, which otherwise starred the typical group of superheroes that you would see back in the day, although admittedly, the Green Lama definitely was a bit odder than most, as his powers came from Eastern Mysticism. There was also the Black Owl and, during the patriotic superhero boom, the superhero duo Yank and Doodle. Plus, there were the humorous characters The General and the Corporel.
Anyhow, Briefer eventually introduced Bulldog Denny, a heroic adversary for Frankenstein (the monster just adopted the name for himself).
Finally, in Prize Comics #24, Denny recruited THE OTHER CHARACTERS from the comic book to fight Frankenstein! It’s just eight pages long and since the whole thing is in the public domain, I figured I’d just share the whole thing for you right now…
Reader Rich A. wrote in a while back to ask if it was true that this was the first intercompany crossover. That is plainly false, Rich, as All-Star Comics #3 (with the introduction of the Justice Society of America, consisting of heroes from all over the All-American and National Comics Group) came out almost TWO years before this book.
Was this sort of thing still very much a rarity by 1942? Certainly, especially the idea of featuring other characters in somebody else’s feature, but it was not the first instance of this sort of thing happening. It’s still very cool, though!
Thanks to Rich for the suggestion!
Check out my latest Movie Legends Revealed – Discover how Bela Lugosi not playing Frankenstein’s Monster changed movie history forever!
OK, that’s it for this week!
Thanks to the Grand Comics Database for this week’s covers! And thanks to Brandon Hanvey for the Comic Book Legends Revealed logo!
Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is cronb01@aol.com. And my Twitter feed is http://twitter.com/brian_cronin, so you can ask me legends there, as well!
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Here’s my book of Comic Book Legends (130 legends. — half of them are re-worked classic legends I’ve featured on the blog and half of them are legends never published on the blog!).
The cover is by artist Mickey Duzyj. He did a great job on it…
If you’d like to order it, you can use the following code if you’d like to send me a bit of a referral fee…
Was Superman a Spy?: And Other Comic Book Legends Revealed
See you all next week!
Have a Happy Halloween!