Briefer, Richard

BRIEFER, RICHARD (1915-80). Inspired by Mary Shelley and her literary creation Frankenstein, Richard “Dick” Briefer was a unique leftwing comic artist. Raised in the heavily left-leaning Jewish neighborhood of Washington Heights, New York, Briefer pondered a medical career before enrolling in the Art Students League, where progressive sympathies were more the rule than the exception. He began his comics days shortly before the debut of comic books themselves, hired by future mogul Jerry Iger for Wow, What a Magazine! in 1936.

Briefer’s career first took off during the emerging “Golden Age” of comic book sales, with his own adaptation of the literary classic Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1938-1939), along with assorted freelance work for various comic companies. He also began his political, non-commercial career of Daily Worker strips of Pinky Rankin, a tough antifascist saga.

Briefer’s best-known work began in 1940. Under the nom de plume of “Frank N. Stein,” he scripted and drew a series for Prize Comics later considered by scholars of the field as the earliest comic series of horror-fantasy. Briefer’s first updating of Frankenstein placed the misunderstood creature in Manhattan of 1930. By 1945, Briefer shifted his focus to the post-World War II scene in which the monster, like other antifascist fighters, is back from the war, in the little village of Mippyville curiously full of seemingly terrible creatures rendered humorous. Misadventures of all kinds have the residents, with Frankenstein at their center, facing inflation, the sudden paucity of funeral parlors, and a series of supernatural crises like the appearance of molecularly unstable juvenile delinquents that the friendly monster manages to overcome. He also visits Egypt and makes friends with mummies.

The mixture of children’s stories and adult humor marked Briefer’s narrative line, but his art work continued to attract greater attention. Readers and later critics found his drawing both hilarious and beautifully constructed, so inventive that certain panels might be taken for surrealist art. Several series in different comics ran until 1949, revived in 1952, ending finally in 1954. Avant-garde comic artist Gary Panter later observed that Briefer’s Frankenstein was a “conglomeration of stolen body parts” that still work somehow, and that his story line, driving or driven by the art, had much the same quality. “Under the pressure of primitive market research, from episode to episode, he was required to be serious, then comical, then scary. His technique is a bravura one: loose, confident, goofy, vertiginous.”

The artist’s “Pinky Rankin” had closed on a sour note in 1945, when a replacement artist was attacked within the Daily Worker itself, amidst the shift away from the Communist Party’s “Browderism” toward a harder political line in the face of the emerging Cold War.

The repression of comic books in the McCarthy Era, signaled by publicity around Fredric Wertham’s classic Seduction of the Innocent (1954) and by Congressional hearings, fell hardest upon the horror genre. The end of Briefer’s professional career drove him into commercial advertising art. He spent his final years in Broward County, Florida.

Panter, Gary. “Dick Briefer,” HiLoBrow. Jan.9, 2013. https://www.hilobrow.com/2013/01/09/dick-briefer/

Yoe, Craig. ed., Frankenstein: Dick Briefer, the Mad Science of Dick Briefer. Milwaukee, OR: Dark Horse Books, 2015.