Dick Briefer, Briefly
One of the pioneers of comic book illustration, Dick Briefer is less known than his contemporaries primarily because he moved out of superhero comics and never looked back. In the early 1940’s he adapted Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein for Prize Comics, in an appropriately gruesome style. The feature grew in popularity, and eventually became a, uh… humour comic. Don’t ask me. All I know is the funny stuff kicks ass, is is amoung my favourite comic book work of that period. Erik Weems has some great, big samples of this bold, brushy work at his site… terrific stuff. Even more obscure is the fact that Dick Briefer tried to get a Frankenstein strip syndicated in 1954. Long before the mainstream successes of the Addams Family or Munsters TV shows, Briefer’s timing was more than a little off. The strips were rejected, and never published in comic books (by the ’50’s, Briefer refused to lower himself back to those standards). Fortunately, I found these samples in an old fanzine… purty stuff.
Nice find, Jay. I love the little guy with the dog body…
Too bad the Erik Weems link seems to be broken. He had some beautiful samples up. Oh, well.
Hey – - the broken link is due to the syntax. For whatever reason I used uppercase capitals in the HTML, e.g.,
http://eeweems.com/artandartifice/Dick_Briefer.html
That should fix it.
Hope that helps.
Erik Weems
Coincidence or not? Dick Briefer’s grandaughter, Aliciajo Rabins plays in a group “Golem” which is the old story of a man created monster that predates Shelley. Golemrocks.com or aliciajo.com
Where these ever reprinted in CRACKED? I seem to remember seeing them as a tike.
[...] Herriman, Chad Grothkopf, Fred Opper, Jimmy Swinnerton, Fred Lasswell, Chic Young, Jim Steranko, Dick Briefer, Dan DeCarlo, Charlie Chaplin, Warren Kremer, Gene Deitch, Sheldon Mayer, Federico Fellini, Henry [...]