Marie Severin: The Mirthful Mistress of Comics

Marie Severin MiRTHful THE

MisTREss Of

COMiCs

bY bY

DEwEy CAssEll WiTH AAROn sulTAn

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TwoMorrows.Celebrating The Art & History Of Comics. (& LEGO! ) TwoMorrows • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 • E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com • www.twomorrows.com

Marie Severin THE

MiRTHful

MisTREss Of

COMiCs

bY DEWEY CAssEll WiTH AAROn sulTAn TwoMorrows Publishing

Raleigh, North Carolina

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Written by Dewey Cassell with Aaron Sultan Edited and proofread by Rob Smentek Designed by Scott Saavedra Front cover art by Marie Severin and is adapted from a selfportrait created for the Marvel Comics fan club, Marvelmania.

All artwork or other trademarked material herein is printed in these pages with the consent of the copyright holder and/or for journalistic, educational purposes with no infringement intended or implied.

Postcard from Marie to Craig Rogers featur and Daredev il ing caricature . Courtesy of C s of herself raig Rogers.

This book is © 2012 by TwoMorrows Publishing and Dewey Cassell.

Dedication To “Mirthful” Marie, with thanks for making us all smile.

The name Kull and the names of Robert E. Howard’s other principal characters are trademarked by Paradox Entertainment of Stockholm, Sweden, through its US subsidiary Paradox Entertainment Inc. Captain America, the Cat, Daredevil, Dr. Strange, Fantastic Four, Hulk, Human Torch, Iron Man,Spider-Man, Sub-Mariner, X-Men and related characters are TM & © 2012 Marvel Characters, Inc.

TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Drive Raleigh, North Carolina 27614 www.twomorrows.com e-mail: store@twomorrowspubs.com

Superman is TM & © 2012 by DC Comics.

All other characters are TM & © 2012 by the respective copyright holder.

First Printing July 2012 Printed in the USA

Art © Marie Severin

ISBN-13: 978-1-60549-042-7 2

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Marvelmania................................................ 143 Interview with Mark Evanier......................144 Friends of Ol’ Marvel (FOOM)..................... 147 Interview with David Anthony Kraft..............................................................148 Fanzines............................................................... 155 Comic Crusader Interview with Marie Severin............................................... 155 Kid Stuff............................................................... 158 Caricatures..........................................................160 For Fun..........................................................160

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In Comics.....................................................160 HOME AGAIN....................................................... 163 Sketch Cards................................................. 163 Marvel Silver Age......................................... 163 Marvel Legends............................................ 163 Conventions and Commissions................... 163 Conclusion................................................... 165 INDEX OF CREDITS...............................................166 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS......................................... 174 May not be sold without cover affixed.

Foreword TAKE A STROLL THROUGH the headquarters of Magazine Management some time near the middle of the last century and you might share an elevator with the likes of Rona Barrett, Bruce Jay Friedman, David Markson, Mario Puzo, Martin Cruz Smith, Mickey Spillane, and Ernest Tidyman, all of whom, at one time or another, worked for Magazine Management, all of whom, after sojourning at the company, went on to various sorts of renown. Seen all there is to see? Look harder at the pleasant young woman in a back office who seems to live behind a drawing board. Her name is Marie Severin and she is most worthy of your attention.

Marie’s employer, Magazine Management, occupied a suite on the second floor of a building at 59th and Madison, largely indistinguishable from the dozens of other buildings in midtown Manhattan, and it was a diverse operation, putting out a lot of magazines: crosswords, romances, war stories—whatever the market wanted. And comic books. Stan Lee, the head of the comic book division, became as famous and respected as anyone mentioned above, though that would have been difficult to believe when I met him in 1965, an era when comics were widely regarded at best as literature for the illiterate and at worst as smut.

Marvel Comics was a no frills enterprise in those days: a few desks, a few drawing boards, a few offices.

A beige kind of place. Suits and ties for the gents, dresses and heels for the ladies.

I shared an office with one of those ladies, one of the few women who made a living doing comic books.

I don’t know who introduced us—probably Roy Thomas, Stan’s assistant, or Flo Steinberg, his secretary.

Somebody. This is Dennis O’Neil, the new editorial assistant, and this is Marie Severin. I don’t know if Marie had a title, or a prescribed set of duties: probably no, on both counts. She was…Marie, and no further identification was necessary. And she did…lots of things. Art corrections, spot illos, paste-up, comic book stories—if it could be done from behind a drawing board, Marie could do it. Not only do it, but do it with unfailing professionalism and enormous good humor.

If there were a goddess of cheer, that would have been Marie.

The wide smile over the top of her board, the jokes, the survival tips to the new kid. One morning, early on, I told Marie that my pregnant wife wanted to do natural childbirth—way, way exotic in those days—and I was, to put it charitably, squeamish. Over the following weeks, until the baby was born, Marie began turning out quick cartoons—pencil, marker, maybe crayon—on typing paper. These illustrated the adventures of a bewildered me, gobsmacked with the idea of fatherhood, inept and klutzy, and my forbearing spouse. A blessing, these: how many of us are given a running, humorous commentary on our lives while we’re living them? Those sketches are gone, lost to many relocations, or storms, or carelessness, and I deeply regret that; they were treasures.

I mention the cartoons because they were typical Marie—amusing, offered freely and in their way, generous and charitable.

Marie was young when we shared space on Madison Avenue, and she had a lot ahead of her—including, finally, recognition of her talent. She didn’t seek such recognition because she was a pro who did the job she agreed to do as well as she could, and tooting one’s own horn was never part of the assignment. The work was important and everything else was just everything else.

I haven’t seen Marie in years, yet I still occasionally think about her, and so I am delighted that someone has honored her with a biography.

Marie’s cartoons are gone but believe me, I’m hanging onto this book.

— Denny O’Neil

TOP Denny O’ Neil. Photo by Luigi Novi.

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Introduction THIS BOOK IS A tribute to one of the icons in the comic book industry, whose professional career spanned over fifty years. In an industry dominated by men, Marie Severin made her mark in a way that few, if any, of her male counterparts have equaled. She was not the first lady in comics— several distinguished women preceded her in the business, including Lily Renee and Toni Blum—but she is unquestionably the first lady of comics. She shaped the way we saw and thought about comics for multiple generations. She was well respected by peers and editors and fans alike, and she did it all with a humility that belied her stature. Her influence on many of the industry’s best creators is undeniable, as evident in the testimonies of Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, Al Feldstein, Ramona Fradon, Trina Robbins, and many others. This book, then, is a celebration of the best of Marie Severin, whose legacy continues to delight young and old alike.

In a sense, I have known Marie Severin since I was a kid, reading Not Brand Echh. Her wry wit and distinctive artistic style were unmistakable, and she left an indelible impression on a youngster previously preoccupied exclusively with the long underwear crowd. But I did not meet Marie in person until the San Diego Comic Con in 2001. She was her usual endearing, modest self, and I walked away even more captivated by the lady and her work. Over the years, we have talked and corresponded, and my collection is blessed with numerous examples of her artistic talent. In more recent years, when I have asked how she was doing, her typical reply would be, “Well, nothing has fallen off yet.”

However, writing a book about Marie Severin was easier said than done. You will find that it is a blend of interviews and prose. I wanted to make the book approachable to anyone interested in learning more about Marie, so I ask that long term comic book fans bear with me when I do things like explain the origin of the Hulk. I wanted to make sure that I included as many different elements of her distinguished career in comics as possible, including advertising, fan clubs, and promotional work. I also wanted to make sure that you heard about Marie from as many different voices as possible, including her own, and it has taken many years to do so. You will note that several people quoted herein are sadly no longer with us, though their tribute to Marie lives on in the stories that follow. So, turn the page and turn back the clock as we start at the beginning and examine a life well lived, through the years of Home, Horror, Heroes, and Humor of Marie Severin, the mirthful mistress of comics.

­— Dewey Cassell January 2012

TOP Marie Severin as she appears in Ms. Marvel #15.

RIGHT Forbush-Man, mascot of Not Brand Echh.

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Happy together—smiling John and Marie Severin (left), circa 1936, with two unnamed cousins. Courtesy of Marie (and Jon B. Cooke).

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1 Home For all of us, the process of defining who we are and the person we will grow up to be starts at home. So, to gain insight into the “origins” of Marie Severin, what better place to start than with her family and friends?

to be a good income to aspire to. So a lot of people were discouraged, but we weren’t. My parents said, “If you like to draw, go ahead and make something of it.” So that was a prelim to my growing up and falling into comics.

Cassell: What did your father do for a living?

Severin: He was a designer for Elizabeth Arden, the cosmetics firm. He had gone to Pratt Institute and was really a very good painter, but in the Twenties and Thirties you couldn’t earn a living for a family, I guess, so he went into business, and they recognized him as very talented. So Elizabeth Arden was, and I think still is, a pretty good, respected cosmetic firm. He would design the labels, packaging design, bottle ornamentation.

The bottles, I think most of them were made in France, but he would design all kinds of lettering and new products, and so forth. And she gave him his own little studio, and he was her personal artist. Of course, they had a studio, but usually she had him start something off, and then he would ship it off. I believe that’s how it was done at the time. He would do initial design for her approval, and then it would go to a promotional studio to be worked up into a label, where it would be manufactured.

My father, that’s how he earned his living, and my mother was always encouraging us because she knew we were all crazy, so she went along with it. Books and stuff were very important in our lives, and that was very nice. So we always had a pretty good background as a source for our imagination growing.

fAMilY SOMETIMES, IT SEEMS THAT a person is predestined to follow a certain path. As if they were born to their vocation, endowed with gifts the rest of us can only envy and try to emulate.

People for whom their innate ability, combined with a nurturing environment, leads to greatness. Not that they don’t have to work at it, but rather that the work is made to appear almost effortless. A natural.

So it was with Marie Severin. The interview that follows provides insight into the talented family into which Marie was born on August 21, 1929, and the support and encouragement that she received when she displayed an early interest in drawing.

Interview with Marie Dewey Cassell: Can you tell me a little bit about your parents?

Where were they from and what did they do?

Marie Severin: Well, both were talented people. I think they brought John and I up with great respect for what we wanted to do. My father always had paper in the house for us to draw on. My mother could sew and she used to design her own clothes when she was a young woman. She was from Syracuse, New York. And my father was born in Oslo, Norway, and he came here when he was three years old, and was in World War I. He worked in the trenches and had great respect for the United States, and he was a great guy, and my mother was terrific. But my brother and I really respected our parents a lot. And John was marvelous when he was younger. He always shared stuff with me. I think John was seven years old [when I was born]. Anyway, at that age, he was protective of me, until he started playing baseball and all that stuff. But he was a good brother. [We] always had fun. And always it was accepted in our house if you liked to draw. That was nice. I’ve heard when I was growing up about people who wanted to draw and their parents at the time thought it was foolish. It wasn’t thought

Cassell: Did your dad work In New York City?

Severin: Yes, he did, and also in Long Island City, which is in Queens, I believe. They had a factory there, and they gave him a nice studio there to work with. And he would go in to New York when he had to see her or whatever was going on. It was pretty good, although I’m sure he would have been happier doing regular artwork, but it was at least related to what he was good at, and he earned a good living.

Cassell: So did your mother work outside the home at all?

Severin: No, my mother was a homebody. She never really did that much drawing, but she would love to sit around and talk with us. She was very encouraging, and liked art, songs, and things. And she was very appreciative of our application of talent.

Cassell: You said that she liked to sew, so it sounds like she was a creative person, too.

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moved to Brooklyn. I must have seen people drawing and then [started] scribbling at a very early age, because I was four when I came to Brooklyn. So I was making ugly things on paper before then. I don’t remember a lot of things when I was very little, but I do remember doing that in the old house. I don’t remember what I’d draw. It was probably scribbling. But I remember, it was what you did in my house, you drew. And I liked it. I always have.

Severin: Oh, yeah, she was. They definitely encouraged my brother and I. Cassell: So how did your mother and father meet?

Severin: My father was in World War I, and my mother and what turned out to be their best friend worked as young people who did his job while he was away. When he came back from the service, that’s when she met him. And they started dating and got married.

Cassell: Did they encourage you to color between the lines and all that?

Severin: I didn’t have access to color, that I remember. I don’t remember crayons when I was a kid. I don’t remember coloring like that. I remember watercolors because my father used to have them. I don’t remember [using] watercolors. I guess I would have been dangerous with them. [laughter] I wasn’t allowed to get into that because I was too young, at the time.

I remember my father was always helping my brother and I doing posters for school. Y’know, we always were doing posters for the play or fund raisers. But, for the most part, I was very happy drawing just pencil stuff. I don’t even remember what I drew, I just drew. And I loved once I got old enough to go to the movies, and I really enjoyed drawing stuff from the movies.

Cassell: Oh, wow.

Severin: Yeah, it was nice. On Wall Street. I think he was an accountant. I never asked too much about her schooling, but she did go to school, and I guess she was able to partake in whatever he did with Wall Street, [and] when he came back from the war, they started dating, eventually. So that’s how they got together.

Cassell: Oh, that’s great.

Severin: That statue of Nathan Hale, who was hung in New York for being an American spy? “I regret I have but one life to give for my country”—I don’t know whether you know it. Well, under that statue is where he proposed to her. They were out for lunch one day and he asked her to marry him. I’m so glad.

Cassell: Oh, really? Like the characters?

Severin: And the situations. I didn’t do portraits of movie stars at all. I just let my imagination go. But, mostly, when I was little, people used to read to me, which I loved. Even today, if somebody reads to me, I love it. And my imagination came from—my brother had the old Edgar Rice Burroughs books, Tarzan, and I would follow right through with that. My aunts would give me nice girly books, but I loved the adventure ones. I was already ruined by being read to. When I got to read the adventure books like Ivanhoe and all that stuff, I ate it up. We had a nice book room in our house, but also I would love, once I got to the library, once I was old enough

Cassell: So he didn’t go to work for Elizabeth Arden until after the war?

Severin: Oh, he didn’t start at Elizabeth Arden until, I guess about 1930. He was doing odd jobs in the business, because he was a good accountant. But, yeah, he worked for Elizabeth Arden I believe starting around 1930, maybe a couple of years later. When I was growing up that’s where he was, and he stayed there until he retired.

Cassell: So what year was your brother born?

Severin: Let me see. I was born in ’29 and he’s seven years older than I. Cassell: So ’22, huh?

Severin: Yes. We’re two old farts. [laughter] Cassell: Where were you all living when you were born?

Severin: I was born out in East Rockaway, Long Island, and my brother I think was born in Jersey City. Then they moved to Long Island, New York, and then I came along and disrupted everything.

Cassell: So how early did you start showing artistic ability?

Severin: Well, growing up I remember sitting in front of the fireplace drawing, before we

Marie as a toddler (left), from issue #8 of FOOM, and a mid1950s photo taken in the offices of EC Comics. Courtesy of Marie (and Jon B. Cooke).

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LEFT Photo of Peg and Jack Severin, parents of John and Marie, with Johnny Craig (right) in the early 1950s at their home. RIGHT John and Marie. Courtesy of Bill Leach and Anne Grandinetti, respectively. for that, I devoured it. And I think that’s so good for anybody who can draw, because you fill your mind up with stuff. I feel that [now] a lot of people are just watching TV instead of reading. Reading is more of an exercise than TV, where you’re fed a lot of information. I think reading makes you exercise your mind to visualize it.

That giving spirit of Marie’s is one that would stay with her during her school years and on into her professional career. School also brought new opportunities to exhibit her artistic talents, as noted in the next chapter about her friends. But first, a few words about Marie from her equally talented sibling.

Cassell: I agree. I think it improves your vocabulary, too.

Severin: Yeah. Although I love television, too, but I don’t know whether I’d be the same person if I hadn’t been raised reading.

I don’t know. You know what I mean? I can’t analyze it that much, but all I know is that I liked the combination I had of reading and pictures. And old radio was wonderful. We really have no concept today of what it would be like if we just had radio, because what an exercise that was.

THE SEVERIN FAMILY PRODUCED more than one exceptional artist. John Severin is extremely well respected in the industry and has had a prolific and noteworthy career of his own.

John not only helped Marie get started in comics, but the pair worked together at both EC and Marvel Comics, and even teamed up on Marvel’s sword-and-sorcery title, Kull the Conqueror (which is described in more detail in the section on Heroes.) Here, then, is some insight from the unique perspective of “Ri-ri’s” brother, John, in this interview conducted by Aaron Sultan.

Cassell: It’s true. I don’t think people today can properly appreciate how the “War of the Worlds” occurred, with H. G. Wells.

Severin: Of course! Yeah, I guess, as much as we’ve said about it, things were created very beautifully in past centuries without TV, radio or anything else, [just] a lot of reading. So we’re progressing pretty good. Gosh knows what we’ll be like in the 24 Century.

Cassell: So your father designed things for a living, used artistry as part of his occupation, but did he enjoy drawing for fun, as well?

Severin: Oh, yeah. He would like to do cartoons, and that’s what my brother and I [learned]. He loved to [do it to] tease people or for somebody’s birthday, and my brother and I were very giving that way, too. We found people got such a kick out of something that you make for somebody, whether it be an afghan, or a greeting card, or knitting a hat, I mean, people love it as presents for them. And I think a drawing exhibits... attention. It’s attention. It’s a special gift, and you feel very gratified when you do it and people appreciate it. It’s nice.

Interview with John Severin Aaron Sultan: So how old were you when Marie was born, roughly?

John Severin: Oh, eight or nine.

Sultan: So you’re quite a bit older.

John Severin: Yeah. But we got closer after I came back from the service. We were on a par, and we could talk about art and stuff like that. But we had our different things. Different lifestyles.

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Sultan: I’ve got a sibling seven years younger than I am, so I can relate to what you’re saying.

John Severin: That’s about the same thing, yeah. But all I’d do is protect her. From what, I don’t know. There weren’t many boogeymen around. Well, they may have been around, but they kept themselves more hidden than these days.

John Severin: No, I played the practical jokes. I don’t remember her doing it.

LEFT Caricature of John Severin by Marie from the 1953 EC Christmas party. RIGHT A 1949 Christmas card featuring the Severin siblings, both reflecting Marie’s sense of humor.

Sultan: Do you remember anything about what Marie liked to draw as a child?

John Severin: She developed a character out of herself that she would put in all sorts of situations. Like, if she’s welcoming somebody, or “happy birthdays,” she had this little character. And she called her “Ri-ri” because, when she was a baby, she couldn’t say “Marie.” She would say “Ri-ri.”

Sultan: What are your earliest memories of Marie? Any kind of anecdote you can think of?

John Severin: Well, I put her in a strong cardboard box, put a hole on either side, run a rope through, and tie it to our dog, and said, “Ho! Ho!” And off she’d go down around the house.

She’d get a riot out of the darned thing. I didn’t hang out with her much though. I had a lot of friends.

Sultan: She still does that. My friend Dewey sent her a Christmas card one year, and she sent an EC-related thing back with her walking down these dungeon steps and looking over her shoulder, but it was a little tiny Marie.

John Severin: Yeah. That’s Ri-ri.

Sultan: What was she like as a child? Was she rambunctious?

John Severin: I just have to think. She was a pretty easygoing kid.

She had a good sense of humor, laughed a lot, and talked a lot.

Sultan: Did she have a lot of neighborhood girls as friends? Or did she start drawing, like you did, in the highchair?

John Severin: I don’t know about the highchair, but she started drawing quite young. And I don’t remember so much of her playing dolls. She played with guns. I don’t know where she got their influence; she had a lot of girlfriends. And she went to a girls’ high school. Of course, then, tons of girlfriends. But, you know, since we moved in parallels but not next to one another, I don’t know what. I surmise from certain key things that I’m aware of.

Sultan: Wow. Did she give you birthday cards or anything with little Ri-ris?

John Severin: Oh, yeah. When I was overseas, I even got this little Ri-ri in my mail.

Sultan: Did you go the movies with her? If so, what kinds of movies?

John Severin: When she was little I used to take her to the movies, but aside from Shirley Temple, what do I know? I don’t remember.

Sultan: Where did you both get your sense of humor from? Is that the way it was in your household, lots of laughing and joking?

John Severin: Joking, but most of them didn’t laugh at the jokes. Everybody sort of made jokes. They were unconsciously making jokes. They just said things in a funny way, and I guess it accumulated with the younger ones.

Sultan: Let’s go to the EC days. You started working at EC before Marie. How did Marie get the job at EC? John Severin: Well, she was working at a card company. I don’t remember what she was doing. And Harvey [Kurtzman] needed a colorist to work in the office under his supervision, and he asked me if I thought my sister would be interested or could do it. I don’t know what he said, but I said “yes,” and so she got the job.

Sultan: Do you remember Marie playing any practical jokes?

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Sultan: Did Marie work in the bullpen with Stan at the time when you were working there?

John Severin: Actually, I had been working there some time.

I hadn’t the slightest idea of how it happened. Stan probably asked me if Marie was doing coloring for EC, or had been, or was still, I don’t know, and would she be willing to… something like that. So she came over and it worked out fine. She started off making corrections on other people’s work, and before you know it, she ended up doing things.

for in artwork. They buy my stuff because they think it’s good.

Okay. But it’s hard to compare my work with the people in the comics industry. And her. She’s got the idea up here. I may have it, but I don’t use it at all. I go my own way. And it works great, but I really like her looseness.

Sultan: Did you two ever collaborate together?

John Severin: Yeah. [On] Kull.

Sultan: That’s a good answer. Because you’re proud of your sister.

John Severin: Yeah! Spoken like a true older brother. Did I say I was older than her?

Sultan: If there was one thing that you would want people to know about Marie, what would it be?

John Severin: That she’s my sister—oh! That’s good, though.

Sultan: Marie was a pioneer because she was a female, one of the few artists in comics that was a female. Do you recall how she was regarded?

John Severin: It was the same. I noticed nobody treating her any differently.

Sultan: Yes, you did.

John Severin: Damn.

Sultan: I asked that, actually.

John Severin: I gotta watch myself …She won’t remember this.

When she was a little kid, she wandered off out on Long Island.

It wasn’t as dangerous a thing as it would have been today, but, I mean, it was dangerous in the sense she could walk out in front of a car, if there was a car on the block. In those days, there were twenty houses, there’d be three cars, maybe. Now there’d be 400 cars and twenty houses. And all of a sudden a police car shows up, and who’s sitting on top of the police car, being held by one of the cops? My sister.

Sultan: So she was just one of the guys, if you will.

John Severin: Yeah, she was one of the group. She was Marie.

She was accepted as an artist.

Sultan: What do you admire about Marie’s artistic style?

John Severin: What do I admire? That’s a terrible way to put it, because it restricts my thinking. I’m going to tell you in a weirder way. I like, I admire her looseness as opposed to mine.

It’s free and loose, much more than mine. As a matter of fact, she has a better view of what the comic industry is looking

Sultan: She’s sitting on top of the police car?

John Severin: Yeah. With a badge and a police cap. [laughter] They found her and brought her home.

Sultan: If you were asked to say five words that come into your mind when you think about Marie, just simple one-word things, how would you describe Marie?

John Severin: Well, I’ll say great sense of—oops, that’s—.

Sultan: Any number of words is fine.

John Severin: Sense of humor. [pause] [laughs] I don’t know how to describe sense of humor. I don’t know how to analyze a person. I either like or don’t like them. It’s obvious that she has a sense of humor.

Sultan: That’s fine. You’ve already pretty much said it all when I said, “if there’s one thing you’d like people to know about Marie, what would it be, “ and you said, “She’s my sister.” That’s a loving, brotherly answer.

John Severin: I’m a loving brother.

Sultan: It’s perfect.

John Severin: I hope she thinks so.

It is clear that drawing ability is not the only thing Marie and John have in common—they have a similar sense of humor as well. More about these artistic siblings later. For now, we turn to the other people who Portrait of John influenced Marie most while Powers Severin at growing up—her friends. work by sister Marie.

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fRiEnDs THE TALENT FOR DRAWING, which Marie exhibited at an early age, bore her well when it came to school. It was a great way to make friends (and get on the good side of the nuns.) Marie talks here about the role her art played in school, play, and starting to work.

Interview with Marie 1946 photograph and caricature of lifelong friends Marie (upper left) and Eleanor Hezel (upper right). Courtesy of Eleanor Hezel.

Cassell: So when you started going to school, elementary or high school, when did you first take an art class?

Severin: Geez. I used to have to give art classes when I was in school. But when you go to a Catholic school, the nuns know just how to use you, y’know? And I was very flattered, and once they knew I could draw, they’d say, “Well, Marie, get up here. A Christmas hat, do something for Christmas.” So I would do Santa Claus, then I’d have to do something religious—I was showing off all through the eight years around. And I enjoyed it all. And the nuns got a big kick out of it. They could just sit at their desk while I drew.

Severin: Later on. Super-heroes hadn’t really taken over yet, but I used to do chalk drawings on the street, because in those days there weren’t that many cars. I would be the one who did everybody’s hopscotch board because I could draw the squares right. They were right in proportion and stuff.

And, also, my mother could see me from the window. I wasn’t running off and getting into trouble. At that time you had, like, three cars parked on the street, and one car in an hour would come down, so you could play in the street. The guys would play baseball and everything. I think it was great. It’s a shame today kids have to travel twenty minutes to go play somewhere.

Cassell: Would they have you draw on the chalkboard?

Severin: Yes, I did it on the chalkboard. And, in our grammar school, we had one panel of the chalkboard which was a monthly thing, or the weekly thing, going on, and I would do that. And I loved it. I did not feel used at all. They liked it, and I enjoyed doing it. Also, the medium of chalk is very interesting.

They didn’t have a whole wide selection of colors, but it was a medium that I wouldn’t have had a chance to work with, otherwise. I mean, where would you work on chalk? You’d work on paper, watercolors, pen-and-ink, crayon, whatever. But chalk? It was good. I liked it. I learned a lot teaching myself.

Cassell: Where did you go to high school?

Severin: Bishop McDonnell Memorial High School. I went to a Catholic grammar school and I got into a Catholic high school.

It wasn’t that hard to get in, I passed a test. It was an all-girls school. Bishop Loughlin was the boys’ school.

Cassell: The kids that were your friends, did they get you to draw stuff for them, too?

Cassell: So when you got out of high school, did you go to college?

Severin: Nope.

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Marie went to “Cartoonists and Illustrators” classes for a couple of months. She was admitted to the Pratt Institute, but only went for one day. But she picked up everything else she needed to know about art along the way, frequently trying it out on her friends.

Cassell: You went straight to work?

Severin: Well, my father wanted me to go to Pratt Institute for four years, and I said, “I don’t want to go to college.” It was a wonderful school, but I was adamant. All my girlfriends were working and buying clothes and going out. My brother and my father really wanted me to go, and my mother, did, too. But I was adamant. “I don’t want to go.” So I worked downtown, and I had friends, and everything.

Cassell: What was your first job?

Severin: Oh, my first job was on Saturdays. All my friends, when we were going to school, would get a job during the summer. We worked at North Forks Greeting Card Company, and we sorted the greeting cards and put them in packages.

They didn’t have any automated machines. It was terrible.

But I had a lot of fun with my friends. And you do dopey jobs like that. My first regular job was downtown New York, an insurance company, and I was one of these dopey kids who filed things, and sealed things, and put things in chronological order. It was an absolute waste of time. But that’s what I wanted to do, because all of my friends were doing it, and that’s how I existed for a couple of years.

IF YOU MET MARIE at a comic book convention, you would likely be left with the impression that she is congenial and gregarious and outgoing. And in public, she is all of those things.

But in reality, she is a very private person. She has a close circle of friends, whom she has known for years, and with whom she shares her greatest joys in life. I had the good fortune to meet two of those friends, Jean Davenport and Eleanor Hezel, and talk with them at length about the Marie Severin they have known for a lifetime. Here, Jean talks about her recollections of her cherished friend, Marie.

Cassell: When you were working for the insurance company, did you still live at home?

Severin: Oh, I lived at home, sure. I did the lazy thing and cheat. And if you don’t misbehave, your parents love it.

Interview with Jean Davenport Dewey Cassell: How did you first meet Marie?

Jean Davenport: Oh, my goodness, I first met her when she was in high school. I was a couple of years older that she was. I was working and we met through a mutual friend. As time went on, we didn’t see each other for a couple of years, and then we reconnected. It was funny. Then, we became very good friends later on. So, I’ve known Marie for about 50 years anyway.

Cassell: Well, it sounds like you were easy to get along with.

Severin: Geez, I haven’t punched anybody since I was nine.

Cassell: You punched somebody when you were nine?

Severin: Oh, I used to love to play with the boys, and if they got smart, I’d smack them.

Cassell: What was Marie like in high school?

Davenport: Well, I really didn’t know her that well in high school. I knew her better after, when she was working. She had other friends in high school because I was older than her.

At that age, when someone is older than you, you’re not that close. I considered her too young.

Cassell: Oh, really?

Severin: Oh, sure! I was not shy in the least. I wasn’t playing with dolls, you know what I mean? I liked that stuff, but I was a tomboy. When we lived out here on the Island when I was real little, we’d play out in the yard, and we had a bunch of kids, and my aunt had a pony. And we stood up for ourselves, y’know? I wasn’t afraid to defend myself in any way. And I’m still not, so watch it!

Cassell: So, how was it when you got closer?

Davenport: She was a riot. We had so much fun. She had a great sense of humor. We had great times together. She hadn’t

LEFT Valentine card from Marie to enduring friend Jean Davenport (seen at right). Courtesy of Jean Davenport.

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traveled that much and I used to like to travel. So, then I got her into that. I said, “Marie, how about going here and there?”

And she would. She was great to travel with. We had just wonderful times on different trips that we took together. It was really great.

Cassell: What kind of places did you go?

Davenport: One time we went to Mexico. Then we went to Cape Cod, up to New England. And then, a couple of years after that, I got a job over in Germany. I worked over in Germany with the Air Force. And she came to visit me while I was over there. We traveled up to Scandinavia together. That was great.

She really enjoyed it. That was a very nice experience we had.

Cassell: Did you do the usual tourist kind of things?

Davenport: Yeah, but she was always fun to be with. She would do little cartoons while we were traveling from day to day. And then, after I came back from Europe, I got married.

Marie was my maid of honor. The following year, I had a son John, and Marie is the godmother. We were really close. Then she and I took a trip to Ireland. That was a great trip. Then, I went with her to some of the conventions. I went to San Diego with her. I went out to Seattle and I went to Edmonton, Canada. They were great.

at home, would you do one for him, too?” And she would say, “Oh, sure.” And she never charged. Other artists, they would charge, but not Marie. She was very generous.

Cassell: So you were not a comic book fan?

Davenport: Not at all. I really was not into it. So, me and her other friends were a whole other part of her life. And I guess that was good, you know? Because, when she was into the comics, that was her career, but the rest of us really weren’t into comics. It was her social life. She would talk about it.

Something would come up and she would have something in a magazine, and we would say, “Marie, isn’t that great?,” and she was very modest. She didn’t exaggerate about any of her talents. So many of the cartoons she has done for me, they were great. It was wonderful.

Cassell: What did you think of San Diego?

Davenport: I liked it. What we used to do is, we would plan on staying an extra few days after the convention was over, so that we could tour around while we were out there. I think one of my favorites was Edmonton, when we went up there, because I had my own room and so did she. They gave us two separate rooms, right next to each other. It was a lot of fun. I think that is when I met Stan Lee. I think he was at that convention. Then, once again, we took extra time and stayed up there for a while. That was great. And the one in Seattle also.

I liked that convention out there. I didn’t really care for the convention itself. I’m not into comics or anything like that, but I would go with Marie sometimes and she was just wonderful and they would love her. The fans would line up to have her autograph and she would give so much time to them. I would go, “Hey, Marie, come on.” You know how she was. She was so generous with her time. And then someone would ask for her autograph and she would give it and then they would say, “Would you do a little cartoon for me, too?” and “My brother is

Cassell: She is extremely talented.

Davenport: She is. Even when I look at some of them now, I think, “My God! What a great talent.” And it was just so wonderful that she shared that talent with others. That’s what I always admired about her. Very modest. And very generous.

It was funny—when I was in Germany, I would write to her about different experiences that I would have and she would send back a cartoon on the envelope, a very funny drawing of my experience. The Airmen used to go in to get mail and they couldn’t wait to get the mail to see what she did. I saved all of those envelopes, with the cartoons on the outside. They were just wonderful.

Cassell: So, have you ever met her brother John?

Davenport: Very early on. I haven’t seen John in … must be over fifty years. I only met him after he was married. I think he was living in New Jersey and I remember me and Marie and her parents went over there to visit him and his wife and some of

LEFT Caricature of Marie agape at the sight of her friend Jean as a brunette (bottom left).

ABOVE Marie toiling away at the drawing board, as illustrated on an envelope sent to Jean Davenport in the early 1960s. Courtesy of Jean Davenport.

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for a while after John passed away. They lived not too far from where Marie lived.

his kids. So, it has been a very long time. Oh, and then maybe I saw him when his mother died. He and his wife came to the wake. That was a long time ago.

Cassell: What other artists did you meet?

Davenport: I met Herb Trimpe. It was also at a convention.

Cassell: It was really amazing how much talent came out of that family.

Davenport: It really is. Mr. Severin was very artistic. I saw some of his work. Marie had some of the things that he did years ago. He was very talented, too. And Mrs. Severin, although she wasn’t an artist, per se, she was very artistic in her mannerisms. I guess Marie got that from both of them.

Cassell: What did you think of Herb?

Davenport: I liked him. At that time, he was with his wife. I understand they are divorced now. Marie had heard about it.

We felt so badly because they seemed to be so well matched.

Cassell: They were together a long time.

Davenport: Oh, and I know Flo Steinberg. Flo calls me and she is always asking about Marie. I like Flo. She calls me periodically. And she has called Marie a few times and said it was good talking to Marie.

Cassell: You mentioned that you have met some of Marie’s comic book acquaintances, like Stan Lee. Davenport: Yeah, but it was very briefly. I think we were out in Edmonton, in the elevator or something, and Marie introduced

Cassell: Do you have a sense that Marie enjoyed doing comics?

ABOVE That Severin Davenport: Oh, sure, defisense of humor again nitely. I think so. It was never in this St. Patrick’s Day a chore. And she worked so card to Jean Davenport. quickly. That’s what used to Courtesy of Jean amaze me. It would just flow.

Davenport.

I think she really enjoyed it, from what I could see. The money didn’t seem to be the most important thing, you know?

She just enjoyed it. And then she would get a check and it was no big deal. With others, you felt like they wanted the money, but not so with Marie. Not materialistic at all.

me to him. And then, I met Ramona [Fradon]. I want to say she was out there with us. I liked her. She was great. She is a lot of fun, too. We had a couple of nice times together out there. I haven’t spoken to her recently.

Cassell: She is doing well. She is still going to conventions. She loved seeing Marie at the conventions.

Davenport: Yeah, she would always try to get Marie to go to the conventions, too. I remember that.

Cassell: I gathered that after a while, Marie just sort of lost interest in going?

Davenport: Yeah, I guess the last one was a couple of years ago. I remember Ramona wanted Marie to go, but she really wasn’t up to it at that point. I think Marie went to a convention in Spain. That’s going back, maybe five years ago. I think her cousin was supposed to go with her, but that fell through.

But John Buscema’s wife, Delores, and her daughter were there. She is a nice lady. I met her and John at some other convention that we went to. I think it was in White Plains, some place nearby. That was when I met John Buscema, but that was the only time. Marie really admired him. Marie felt very badly when he passed away. His wife kept in touch with Marie

Cassell: She was quick.

Davenport: Yes, she was so fast when she would do these cartoons or anything. 1-2-3, they were done. She was very gifted.

Cassell: Do you know why Marie never got married?

Davenport: She used to say that her mother told her, “Until you meet somebody that you like as much as yourself …” I guess she was so involved with her work and she had a lot of friends. I guess that was it. When I knew her, I don’t remember her dating anybody that I know of. Maybe before, but I don’t think so or I would remember.

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a cellar. It wasn’t modern like today, it was just a regular cellar. And she worked down there. It was a riot. She would be working late at night. We didn’t even know what time she worked until. Whenever she did that Joe Namath thing for Esquire? Maybe that was when she was working there. And she worked for the Federal Reserve. She did a lot of work for them.

She would be working half the night even. She had a lot of stamina. Then, she would get up and go to work. But I remember her working in the basement of our house. It was crazy.

That was Marie. She would make do. She did all this wonderful artwork from the cellar.

Cassell: I saw the work she did at the Federal Reserve and it was great.

Davenport: Wasn’t it? I don’t know why she wasn’t in comics at that time. What happened, I don’t know. This friend of ours, her brother worked at the Federal Reserve and he got Marie the job there. It was odd her working at the Federal Reserve, however it was in a department where her artwork came through. She did “The Story of Checks,” which was wonderful.

Some of the people in it are people that she knew. Caricatures, like my brother. Sometimes she would do a caricature and say it was her mother or me.

Cassell: I think most of the guys she worked with at the comic book companies were already married.

Davenport: Yes, I think they were. She used to kid around with them and stuff. You have to, being in the comic business.

Cassell: She told me, too, that sometimes, other than the secretary, she would have been the only woman in the office.

Davenport: Yes. At that time, that was very unusual. She’s so famous because she was one of the first women cartoonists.

Cassell: During the time that she went to work for the Fed, it was a bad time period for comics.

Davenport: Right. I guess she was happy to have the job. And it was a good experience for her. She was working downtown then and I was working downtown, so it was great. We used to meet for lunch. Then she met some other people who are still friends today that she met at the bank. That was nice, too.

Cassell: Marie mentioned that occasionally, the guys would forget that she was there and tell a risqué joke or she would catch them standing at the window looking at some girl walking by and she would have to remind them that she was there.

Davenport: Morally, she was very good. She wouldn’t have been involved in anything bad. She had high morals.

Cassell: What would you say is Marie’s favorite food?

Davenport: She likes steak. She likes everything rare. If she had a hamburger or whatever, everything would be rare.

Cassell: That’s one of the things I always admired about her.

Davenport: Absolutely. Very honest. If there was anything dishonest, it would bother her, she wouldn’t do it. Very straight.

She grew up with that. Her parents were very good people.

Cassell: You have had an interesting and unique opportunity to know Marie outside of comics.

Davenport: I wasn’t the least bit interested in it [comics]. Not that I was disinterested, but Marie knew that. Our relationship was social and family, like with John my son, and I was with her family. I knew her parents. Stuff like that. It was disconnected from her work, except when I went to conventions with her later on.

Cassell: Do you have any Marie stories you would like to share?

Davenport: Oh, I remember one time, she lived in an apartment in Brooklyn, so they didn’t have that much space and her father was living there, too. At that time, I was living at home with my mother. My father had passed away and we lived in Ozone Park. She fixed up the basement. It was really

Cassell: What would you like people to know about her?

Davenport: As I always said, she shared her gift with everyone she met. She was so giving.

She even said that it was a gift, it wasn’t her. It was a gift that she had gotten and she had to share it and she did. I mean, she made so many people happy with this gift. And her humor.

That’s probably why she was so successful in comic books, too, was her great humor.

ABOVE Photograph of Marie posing with a painting of her from the 1950s by EC artist Johnny Craig.

RIGHT Marie pokes fun at herself in this caricature to Jean. Photograph courtesy of Bill Leach.

Drawing courtesy of Jean Davenport.

Cassell: Like she did with her cartoons.

Davenport: And some of the ones she did of me, my God! People that she knew, she used to do cartoons of her friends. They were 16

great. And the detail. When we were out somewhere, the things she would notice. She would say, “Her eyes …” She saw such great detail. I wouldn’t even notice it. Then she would put it into a cartoon. The shoes that the person wore, the color of her dress. That’s what I used to be amazed at. The things that she sees, the detail. That was all part of her gift.

Jean Davenport related one other story. Marie was a huge fan of comedian Jonathan Winters, who was very popular in the early 1960s. One of Winters’ many impressions was a character he called “Baby Elizabeth.” Marie and Jean talked about Winters often and Marie, who apparently identified with the character, took to referring to herself as “Baby Elizabeth.”

She signed several letters to Jean as “Baby Elizabeth.” Marie once had an opportunity to meet Winters in person at a book signing in the city and she told him sincerely and unabashedly, “I love you.”

It is a blessing that Marie has such a close friend with whom she has shared so many cherished memories. Jean still has a number of caricatures that Marie did for her over the years, as well as a painting of Marie by EC artist Johnny Craig.

Self portrait and letter from Marie to Eleanor Hezel. Courtesy of Eleanor Hezel.

Cassell: Did that have a traditional high school course of study?

Hezel: Yes, very traditional.

And it was an all-girl school. There were a couple of hundred young ladies there. And it was a wonderful school. Everyone who went there has a gathering every year to reminisce and so forth. We just had our 60th anniversary there. Not at the school, we had it in a restaurant. And after 60 years plus, many of our classmates have gone to the Great Beyond, and many of them were too elderly, because we’re graduated 60 years now, so we’re all approaching 80. Anyway, anyone who could come, did come.

ANOTHER PERSON WHO HAS seen that very private side of Marie is her former high school classmate, Eleanor Murphy Hezel, with whom Marie remains close friends to this day.

Eleanor talks about her enduring friendship with Marie in this interview.

Interview with Eleanor Hezel

Cassell: Oh, that’s wonderful.

Hezel: Yes. There was always a very great spirit in Bishops. We just referred to it as Bishops.

Dewey Cassell: I understand you are a longtime friend of Marie Severin.

Eleanor Hezel: Yes, we met in 1944 at Bishop McDonnell Memorial High School, and we were classmates there for four years, and since then we’ve been friends.

Cassell: And to attend the school, did you have to be Catholic?

Hezel: I think so. It was the parish school that took care of your tuition, so it was probably just Catholic schools who participated in the scholarship program at that time.

Cassell: Was that a Catholic high school?

Hezel: Yes, it was. And [there was only one way] you could enter that—. You had to take a test, and a few people from each geographical area of your parish were selected. There was no tuition. It was a scholarship school. It is no longer in existence.

It is now a school for deaf children.

Cassell: You mentioned that it was a wonderful school. What made it so wonderful?

Hezel: Well, it had a lot of spirit, a lot of enthusiasm. They had a band, an orchestra, rather, and they would have the school play.

There were many activities there that involved the girls. They had athletics. They had very fine teachers. You had a science department, and math department, and history, and English, and art. They had a very good art program. I don’t have any artistic talent at all, as far as drawing or thinking is concerned, but I remember one day when we had to submit our art book, a sister said to me, “Eleanor, that’s lovely. Is that your work?” I said, “Sister, you know that it’s not my work. Marie did my cover.”

And Marie was always so very generous with her talent. In high school she was always called upon to be doing a poster for this, or help somebody with that, or with the school play, when she

Cassell: Where was it located?

Hezel: It was in Brooklyn, New York, on Eastern Parkway.

Cassell: Did you live in Brooklyn at the time?

Hezel: Yes, and so did Marie.

Cassell: So did you both start as freshmen the same year?

Hezel: Yes. We both went there the same day in 1944, and we stayed there for four years, and then graduated and went on to other things.

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would do posters and things. And always was most generous and happy to do it.

And her work was always very distinctive. Everybody could recognize her work.

Cassell: That’s still the case.

Hezel: Yes. And oftentimes if we had some kind of an outing, or she came to my house, or whatever, we used to go up to the Cloisters a lot, and Marie was always taking pictures up there. She was always interested in the art up at the Cloisters, up in New York. Are you familiar with that?

Cassell: No. Hezel: Well, it’s really a museum in New York City near Washington Heights.

Anyway, she would be there, and I would go with her. She was always interested in all kinds of art.

Cassell: Did you go up to the Cloisters just for fun?

Hezel: Yes. It was just for our own personal enjoyment. She was the one who invited me to go, and we went many times, took the bus up, and enjoyed many a day up there in the Cloisters.

Cassell: What other kinds of things did you do for fun?

Hezel: I lived in east New York, Brooklyn. Marie lived in an apartment in Bay Ridge. And sometime on Friday night, some of the girls would come on the train to my house, and my mother would have a cake, and we’d have tea, and Marie would do something like sticking her finger in the cake [laughter] just to give us all a good laugh. I always remember my mother saying on the phone to her mother the next day, “Mom, they’re better than a Broadway show.”

And we would have a lot of fun just talking about things that young girls talked about, I guess. Anyway, Marie was always very humorous. She always could create a very happy environment. We just had four years of wonderful times in high school, and when I went to college, I always said, “Well, now I’m paying the price, because I should have been a little more serious in high school.”

classhigh

More humor Severin style in these notes from Marie to Eleanor (Murphy) Hezel.

Courtesy of Eleanor Hezel.

Cassell: So when you both started high school, how did you and Marie become friends?

Hezel: Well, it’s a very interesting story. I saw Marie. I was already in the room and Marie walked across the front of the classroom and she had a schoolbag. Now, in those days, you weren’t supposed to have a schoolbag in school. Anyway, I looked twice to see who had this schoolbag, and why was she carrying it? Because it was a time when in elementary school you had a schoolbag, but now that we were in high school, we wouldn’t think of carrying a schoolbag. You carried your books in your arms, you know? You looked avant-garde or something. [laughter] That was our big claim to fame, then. Anyway, her schoolbag didn’t last long because we were all saying, “Why are you carrying a schoolbag?” So I think she got rid of it very soon. I know it sounds silly, doesn’t it?

Cassell: No, not at all.

Hezel: But, anyway, and then she did sit in the row right next to me. We sat alphabetically, my last name ended in “M,” and hers was “S,” and we sat next to each other. So we became good friends.

Cassell: Would you say that your personalities were similar?

Hezel: Well, I enjoyed Marie’s humor very much, and I admired her talent. I didn’t have any of that kind of talent, so I was kind of in awe of it, I guess. I don’t think our personalities were the same, but we just enjoyed each other’s company. There was a group of us that we were fast friends with. We went to the prom in the Blizzard of 1947. You may not remember that, you may be too young, but that was the night of our prom. And all the trains were running, but there was no phone service, so I packed up my suitcase and went into the city, took the subway into the city, and met a few of my friends who were there. Marie did not get to the prom. There was no one you could call to find out if things were going on. It was a real terrible snowstorm. Anyway, when I got there, I found out the prom was canceled. But the gentleman who was going to be my companion and his sister who was also in our class and a good friend, she was there, and he was there, and so we went up to the Starlit Room of the Statler 18

the parish assumed that responsibility. Anyway, we loved it. We all loved going to school, and we were always happy to see each other every morning when we got there. And in the classroom, Marie would have something to say, and always bring a little bit of humor to the classroom. And most of the teachers appreciated it. They could enjoy it, as well. Not always, but most of the time.

Hotel and danced the night away and went out to breakfast in the morning. Then the prom was postponed. A couple of weeks later we had our real prom. And Marie was there with her companion, and we had a lovely time. But that was the Blizzard of ’47, and we graduated in January of ’48.

Cassell: In January?

Hezel: Yes. In those times, you were in 1A, 1B, 2A, 2B, it was just different. So we graduated from elementary school in January, and we started high school in January. Those were the old days.

Cassell: Was she a pretty good student?

Hezel: Yes, she was. She was a very good student.

Cassell: Other than art, which she would presumably enjoy, do you recall if Marie had any other favorite classes?

Hezel: Well, we were just talking. I visit Marie every week, and I was telling her that I had got 75 in Latin. We had to take three years of Latin, and I came home and said to my mother, “Mom, what was your worst subject in high school?” And she said, “Oh, Latin.” And I said, “Oh, that’s wonderful, Mom!” And Marie said, when I was remembering this story, “Oh, yeah.

Who liked Latin?” At that time we were young, and we didn’t see any value to it. But as we took other languages, you realize that so many words have their basis in Latin, and how it really helped us so much in later years, even English words that had a Latin base. We were commenting on that this past Sunday when I went to see her.

Cassell: Did you and Marie do any sort of school-related activities?

Hezel: Well, Marie did so many art-related activities. They encouraged us to do kind of service activities, which we did.

We went to read for the blind at a place called Anthonian Hall for the Blind, and then there was an orphanage that we took the children out for ice cream or something like that. And we used to work in the mission office. I forget what we did there, it may have been just cutting stamps or some such thing, and they would send them to the missions, and I guess they could get some money with them. I had to take three trains to get to school. It took me over an hour to get there, so my mother didn’t want me to stay after school with too many activities. Some of the things we did on a Saturday. I used to go to the cancer hospital and just help out there, in Manhattan, on Delancey Street. I think it was St. Rose Cancer Hospital. Marie was an avid moviegoer, she always loved to go to the movies.

And, of course, then they had the double features, so she would go on a Saturday.

Cassell: Do you recall what her favorite type of movie have been?

Hezel: No, I really don’t. I didn’t really live near Marie, so the after-school socialization wasn’t too frequent. If we planned a trip up to the Cloisters, or if we went away for a weekend—my friend had a bungalow in Jersey, Lake Hopatcong [and] we would go away for a weekend. We lived too distant to socialize on a day-to-day basis. On a Friday night some of the girls from Bishops School would come to my house, or we’d go to another girl’s house, just have coffee and cake and enjoy.

Cassell: Did Marie ever have a boyfriend in high school?

Hezel: No, I don’t think so. She had a friend, a gentleman friend whom she asked to go to the prom. I don’t think she was serious with him then. I think after high school she went to art school. I can’t remember the name of the place.

Cassell: Did you ever have a chance to meet Marie’s parents?

Hezel: Oh, yes, I did. Her mother, she was a lovely lady, and her father was a lovely gentleman. Her father was an artist, and her brother, you must know John Severin. And they were very friendly and welcoming whenever I met them.

might

Cassell: I gather from what you said that at the time, during high school, they were living in an apartment?

Hezel: Yes. In Bay Ridge.

Cassell: That sounds like fun.

Hezel: Yes, we had a great time. High school was just wonderful. We were very fortunate to have been able to go to a school like that. Our parents probably never could have afforded the tuition, and most of the high schools you had to pay tuition in, unless you had a scholarship.

And tuition for a private, parochial high school was about $10 a month then.

It was hard times in the Forties, after the Depression Marie as the “Easta” in the Thirties, so we were Bunny in this card to very lucky to have had that Eleanor Hezel opportunity to go without Courtesy of Eleanor having to pay tuition. I think Hezel.

Cassell: What was Marie’s mother’s name?

Hezel: Marie’s mother was called Peg. We would call her, to her face, Mrs. Severin, but her husband called her Peg. Marie’s father died, and then Marie, when she was working, she kept the house, the apartment, and took care of her mother. Came home from work and cooked dinner for 19

them. And her mother always dressed beautifully, and they’d go on trips. She was a wonderful daughter who loved her parents.

Cassell: So were you ever a fan of comic books?

Hezel: Well, as a child I was, yes. In school she wasn’t involved in working for them, but when she was working for them, she would give them to us. All the kids in the family would love to get them. But I think we all learned to read through the comic books. You know, they were ten cents then, when we were kids. They were easily accessible for us. In fact, I remember when we would get the newspaper on Sunday morning, and, well, in my family, there were nine of us, and everybody wanted the comics first. And my mother was always dismayed that before we would go to church on Sunday that we would have the comics. So I think she told us that we couldn’t read them before we went to church, and, of course, everybody was trying to hide them so they’d get them first when they came home. But, anyway, when Marie was working in the comic industry, she was always very generous. If you had nieces and nephews and they would like some comic books, she would always have some for them. Marie was a very generous person to everyone. Very thoughtful.

Cassell: Did her father die early?

Hezel: Let’s see. I forget the year he died, but I think maybe he was in his Seventies. And Mrs. Severin lived a long time after that. It was many years that Marie took care of her mother.

Her brother, I think, at that time lived in Colorado.

Cassell: Yeah.

Hezel: Marie’s mother always enjoyed Marie’s friends when we would go there. Marie had invited my husband and I for a turkey dinner, and when we got there, we saw the frozen turkey hanging on the doorknob. And Marie said, “I forgot to take it out of the freezer.” So she went out and bought a roast beef. [laughter] We had a wonderful roast beef. She cooked it just the way my husband loved it, very rare. But when you’re walking in and you see the turkey hanging on the doorknob, you think, “There goes that turkey dinner.” [laughter] But she could always bring out the humor of the situation. Some people would panic, “I didn’t defrost the turkey.” But she just left it there on purpose so we could all have a good laugh about it. And she was a very good cook.

Cassell: That’s one of those common things you hear people say about her.

Hezel: Yes. And a very caring person. If you needed any help, she would be right there. “I’ll do it, I’ll be glad to do it, I’ll be glad to take you there.” Even just a few years ago I had foot surgery. [She said,]“I’ll take you to the doctor, I’ll do this.” I said, “Don’t worry, I’ll get a cab.” She’ll be at the front door, so you couldn’t put her off. She was a very caring person.

Cassell: Did she have a specialty, or was she just good at everything?

Hezel: She was good at everything. Her specialty I think was her roast beef.

Cassell: So who did she favor, her mother or her dad?

Hezel: She looks exactly like her mother now.

Cassell: My impression is that Marie seems to be a fairly private person.

Hezel: Oh, yes.

Cassell: You mentioned that Marie had a great sense of humor and would bring that out in a lot of different circumstances. Did you ever see Marie when she wasn’t happy?

Hezel: Well, we always met in a social situation and I can’t say that I ever did see her when she wasn’t happy.

Cassell: —and yet she would go to these comic book conventions with thousands of fans around, and she would do drawings for them all day long.

Hezel: Yes! And I think she probably enjoyed that. But she was a private person, yes. She liked her privacy. But I know she enjoyed the conventions also, and she enjoyed the fans, and she was happy to draw for them and give them the picture that they wanted. In fact, people continue to send her things, and Jean Davenport, whom you know, she has to write to them and tell them that Marie can’t do this anymore.

Cassell: You mentioned that she liked to travel. What kind of places did you like to go other than the Cloisters?

Hezel: Well, she went to Hawaii, she went to Alaska, she went to Scandinavia. She was very interested in her origins.

Her father was Scandinavian. I think it was Norway, where he came from, and she went there, to Scandinavia. And she always loved things with trolls, the little ugly trolls. She would always be picking up those little statues. She was always great for buying fantasy things, these little statues or figurines of the Hulk, and Batman, and Superman, those kinds of things. The Green Hornet or whatever was ever out there. She had a very rich fantasy life, I think, [with her] imagination and things like that. But she did go to Scandinavia. And her mom was of Irish origin. She went to Ireland, also. Yeah, she liked to travel. Her mother had polio, so she couldn’t travel too well. She had a limp and it was difficult for her to walk.

Cassell: When did she contract polio?

Hezel: I think as a child. But it didn’t impede her too much.

She walked quite well in the house, but to walk a great deal was difficult for her.

20

Cassell: Did Marie ever do any drawings for you?

Hezel: I have a whole album of things that she sent to me through the years. I mean, they’re really funny, but there was always a story behind them. Once, I don’t know where we went, but she was on one side of the subway station, and I was [on the other] going home, and I went in one direction, she went in another. And three days later in the mail, on the envelope of the letter, she had a caricature of myself in the exact clothing that I had on, standing on the subway station.

My mother would say to me, “Elly, what would the mailman think?” I said, “Mom, he’ll get a good laugh out of it!” [laughter] And this was the outside of the envelope, you know. And if something funny happened in school, you would get a little card, the whole thing delineated. She could put everything into pictures. The whole story would be in the picture. So, of

LEFT Birthday card with a wicked sense of humor from Marie to Eleanor Hezel. RIGHT What a difference a few years make—an allusion to how Marie and Eleanor first met in school. Courtesy of Eleanor Hezel.

come to visit me. We weren’t allowed to go home at that time. And then I started college after that. So, we always kept in touch through the years. I couldn’t visit her because the rules were very strict then, but she would come to visit me. I have, they’re not too noticeable, I don’t think, but my two front teeth are just a little large, but she always would say, “Oh, Murph.” She’d call me Murphy. She said, “You can see your two front teeth two blocks before we see the rest of you.” [laughter] She was liable to make everything monumental. But she would always send me cartoons. You could tell a story, and you’d get a cartoon in the mail the next few days, and you could recall the situation. But then, after 21 years I left the convent, and then we’d go visit together and so forth. And, of course, I’d call her, since I’d just moved to my little apartment, and we started to continue our friendship in that form.

course, I saved many of the things. I have a scrapbook of the things that she had sent me over the years.

Cassell: That’s wonderful.

Hezel: Yes. And I bring it to her sometimes. Every couple of months I’ll bring it again, and we reminisce. We look at everything and talk about the old days.

Cassell: Do you think Marie realized what an impact she had in comics?

Hezel: She never thought of herself as anything special. She knew that she was given this talent. She never made much of it at all.

Cassell: When did you get married?

Hezel: After ten years I met a wonderful gentleman. I never thought I would. I was 51 then. So then Marie came to know my husband, and she would come to our home, and we would go to her home, and so forth. She did a wonderful portrait of my husband, in fact. My husband died 11 years ago on New Year’s Day, but before, Marie did this wonderful portrait I have hanging in my home. She captured him. She had that ability to capture the essence of the person whenever she did a drawing of you. It’s a special thing that I have that she did. And my husband and she enjoyed each other’s company and were very good friends, too.

Cassell: Of course, back then, a lot of the artists just looked at it as a job.

Hezel: Yes, that’s right. And, of course, she was one of the early women to get into that field. It wasn’t easy. It was a male enclave for a long time. But I think the caliber of her work won the respect of her coworkers. But most of the time, she may have been the only woman at that time.

Cassell: For a long time she was. She was very well respected for her work, but I’ve talked to other women artists, who give her a lot of credit for blazing that trail.

Hezel: Well, she just took it all in stride, and she never was pompous about it, or bragged about it, or talked about it. You had to bring it to her attention, and when we would have a party and Marie was there, everybody enjoyed her sense of humor. She wasn’t afraid to step forward and be a little silly to make everybody have a good laugh, and so she contributed in that way, also, I suppose, with her art.

Cassell: She had great friends.

Hezel: Oh, yes. And if you were her friend, she was a good friend. She was a good friend to you, and you had to be a good friend to her, too.

Marie’s family and friends provided her with a wonderful foundation for both life and work. Coming from such a creative family, and with the support and encouragement of her friends, it is no wonder that Marie ended up seeking a career in art. In fact, it was her brother John who opened the door to a little publishing company called EC.

Cassell: Did you keep in touch after high school?

Hezel: Well, I happened to enter the convent when I got out of high school, so for two years I didn’t. Marie would 21

22

2 Horror All comics are not created equal, and horror, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder. But Tales From The Crypt was not just another comic book.

Nor was EC just another comic book company. And as Marie Severin found out, it was a great place to start a career.

time period, including titles like Tales From the Crypt, Weird Science Fiction, and Frontline Combat. And into that testosterone laden environment came a young lady named Marie Severin.

Interview with Marie

Cassell: How did you get the job at EC? Severin: Well, it all started when Harvey started doing the war books, and he was such a perfectionist, and my brother also loved that uniforms were correct, and insignia, and all that jazz. So he said, “Well, my sister is talented, she could probably do the coloring.” At that time the color was sent, with the art, up to Chemical Color Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and they had separators there that separated all the work that came in from Marvel or DC or whoever, and they did the coloring, and so forth. But, a lot of times [it was] not talented people doing it, and they might put green suits and yellow sidewalks, stuff like that, that was plentiful and was typical of comics. EC wanted it more accurate. Harvey was a stickler for having it realistic and upgrading the look of the books. He wanted them to look more like Prince Valiant in the newspaper.

Anyway, that’s how I got started, because they figured I could handle that, and I started on Harvey’s books. So I quit my job and started doing coloring for them.

EC IT IS OFTEN SMALL things that end up having a big impact. So it was with EC. Maxwell Charles Gaines was not new to the comic book business. As a salesman for Eastern Color Printing, he came up with the idea of repackaging newspaper comic strips into a comic book format to sell to companies as a promotional item. Together with Jack Lebowitz, he became publisher of All-American Publications, which began publishing comics with original material in 1938, including in its stable characters like Wonder Woman and the Flash. Then, in 1944, Gaines sold All-American to Harry Donenfeld, who merged it with his own company, National Allied Publications, the precursor to DC Comics. With the proceeds of the sale of All-American, Gaines founded Educational Comics. EC started out much like its competitors, publishing comics with funny animals and titles like Tiny Tot Comics. However, Gaines also published comics that were truly educational, like Picture Stories From the Bible.

Tragically, Max Gaines was killed in a boating accident in 1947, leaving the reins of EC to his 25 year old son, Bill.

Bill didn’t particularly like the comics EC had been publishing and set out to make his own mark. Bill changed the name to Entertaining Comics, foregoing any pretense of the comics being educational, and he recruited a couple of brilliant creators to pave the way for a new EC, Harvey Kurtzman and Al Feldstein. Serving as editors, writers, and artists, Kurtzman and Feldstein formed the backbone of a remarkably talented stable that included Jack Davis, Jack Kamen, Johnny Craig, Bernard Krigstein, FACING PAGE Color Graham Ingles, Wally Wood, guide to the cover of George Evans, John Severin Haunt of Fear #26 by and others. From that cadre Marie for the Russ came arguably the best Cochran reprints. comics of that or any other Courtesy of Scott Burnley.

Cassell: Were you coloring every book that came out of EC? Severin: At one time… Yeah, I guess I did. I mean, it didn’t take me long. A lot of the stories were only five, seven pages, so when they’d come in, I’d immediately get the simple things. I’d color them up while I was in the office. So it was staggered. In other words, when a book was completed, in its stages, he may have different artists doing different stories. Yeah, I was doing a heck of a lot of the coloring. All the covers at that point, too, and that’s the way they saw that the EC books would stand out on the counters because the coloring was good enough. The art in those days in so many comics, stacked up and all you saw was the top, was the title. But then they started putting them on racks where you could see the picture, and that’s what they wanted to show off, our covers with a little more detail in the coloring. And the good art.

Cassell: I know you’ve been credited with a lot of the success of EC because of those really vibrant covers.

Severin: Well, it’s the content that’s the thing. I mean, you can color Daffy Duck and it won’t make a difference as long as 23

you can see what’s going on. But, remember, we had splendid artists, and it was a pleasure to work on that stuff because it was like you were painting finished, real artwork, to me.

Most of the stuff that came out, Woody’s science-fiction stuff, I just loved it. I used to call it the Wally Wood Wallpaper, and the spaceships that had all these dials and buttons and bells and things, and knobs and handles and doors and buttons.

Everything. It made it look so different and space-like, and it added to it. And if the color could complement that instead of killing it all, it worked because I tried to go along with it. I tried to tell a story as well as the artist. When you don’t have somebody doing that, you have yellow backgrounds on something that should be dark. It depends on the pacing of the story, and I think that’s what they liked about what I was doing, and that I would pace the coloring to fit the incident that’s going on. So that’s why they liked it.

Cassell: So if it was sort of a dark and moody scene, you would color it differently?

Severin: Well, yeah. Suppose a lady’s in a bedroom and she’s reading and walking, and everything is calm and nice, it’s just like in the movies, the lighting, and then something happens, the window breaks. Naturally, like everything, the color changes. In a movie you see the darker red, or hair in her eyes, and the dramatic lighting, and the lamp falls over, and that’s what you’ve got to project in the comic, which is simply still frames. So you stagger the drama according to that. You don’t have moving action. But you try to stagger it, as the artist dramatizes, you try to dramatize, without taking it out of context, without turning it into the look of a volcano. You know what I mean? A murder in a bedroom, it still could be colored dramatically without getting crazy. It was thoughtful. In other words, they appreciated that I would try to help tell the story and color as well as the inker did, and as well as the penciler did, and as well as the writer put the drama in the story. They liked it that way, because I gave it thoughtful attention.

Cassell: I was talking a little bit with Jack Davis the other day, and he was describing some of how this process worked. For example, Jack told me that when he would get a story, that he would get the six or seven pages, and they would already have the lettering on them.

Severin: Yeah, well, that’s the way they did it then. I think Feldstein had everything pretty well batted out. I think, in many cases, it was lettered, as you say, and everything but it was up to the artist to dramatize it. Fortunately, the guys were so talented working at EC that the books took off like wildfire.

Cassell: So Feldstein obviously wrote the dialogue, wrote the stories, but would he literally lay out the panels, or did somebody else do that in the lettering part?

Severin: No, I don’t think anybody laid it out. Well, they might have, for all I know, that might have happened. I wasn’t in that much of the real story creation. As a matter of fact, at one point Al had to have an office upstairs somewhere. He used to be right next to Gaines’ office, and then he went upstairs just because things were expanding. Guys came on staff for a while, and it got to be hectic. Feldstein, mostly, he had the control. I mean, he deserves a lot of credit for what went on, and with

Original EC color guides by Marie.

Courtesy of Steven Bialick.

24

five shades of brown, from van Dyke brown into yellow ochre.

It had oranges. Cerulean blue was the blue I wanted then for everything. If you were having a real midnight sky, you had all kinds of nice Prussian blue. It’s a gorgeous color set. You can do anything with it. Watercolors are so easy to work with.

the freedom that Bill gave him. Also, Bill contributed a lot. You know, they started together, story and script.

Cassell: So the artists, did they do their own inking?

Severin: Yeah. I don’t think they had much penciler and then inker. I think it was mostly they did their own thing. Some did. My brother—he worked with Elder, too, that’s right. But then they split. And Davis, I know, did his own stuff. Being on the peripheral, I wasn’t in on the whole production early on, so I don’t remember or know if they felt that had to stop for approval. I think they might have just brought it in, and then they looked at the finished product and made any changes which probably were minimal because the guys were so great, but I think it was the finished product. They usually liked to have the lettering done first, only because you don’t want the tails to be moving and everything where they should be.

Cassell: And then I gather there was some kind of codes or something that were associated with each different color so that the printer would know what to do.

Severin: Well, now, it’s different. Now they have all kinds of shading and percentages. But in those days it was 25%, 50%, and 100% of each color. So you had three primaries, yellow, red, and blue, and then you had three selections, and the overprinting on each of that gave you… I forget the number now, but you had that multiplication of the colors you could use. And it’s just thinking wisely in doing it. Like, if you have a guy in a brown uniform, you’d try to use a hot color of brown and a dark color in the background. It could be brown, it could

Cassell: I actually saw a story one time that Dick Giordano worked on where it had been inked before it was lettered, and there were huge gaps in the artwork because when it was lettered, it didn’t take up nearly as much space as they thought it would.

Severin: Well, see, that’s why it’s bad. That’s why most of the time what the artist should do, when he gets the script, is pencil in the dialogue. They did that in the early days. And then they would pencil in the artwork and place the balloons with the tails missing and you’d just begin to do the artwork. But there were different methods. In the early stages, I think a lot of it was lettered beforehand.

From upper left) Margaret Severin (wife of John), Marie, and Toni Craig (wife of Johnny) in this 1950s photo taken in the Severin home. Courtesy of Bill Leach.

Cassell: So, when the finished artwork would come in to EC, then they made a “silver print”?

Severin: What happened was, they would send it up to Chemical, and Chemical would make these silver prints and send them back, and I would color them. But then, when things got late, we started using a local Photostat guy. And I didn’t like coloring on Photostat paper, but sometimes you had to. But then they started the Xerox machines, which was marvelous, because that paper was fine for coloring.

Cassell: Was silver print heavier paper?

Severin: Yeah, it was. I don’t know why. It must have been because of what came through the machine up there that they duplicated… it was slightly thicker, a different surface.

Whatever the composition was, you could color it, but I preferred when we were able to do it and put it in the Xerox machine and get regular bond paper to color, because the colors were easier to lay on. Sometimes they would come in, and they might have coating on one point in the printer when it was done at Chemical, and the color would take up where the print was. It happened rarely, but it was annoying. But it was much better when we were able to use it on bond paper and make copies on bond paper. The colors stuck, and would separate to be discernible.

Cassell: And you did the coloring with watercolors?

Severin: Yeah, Doctor Martens synchromatic dyes. I had two huge coloring sets. But the colors were magnificent. You hardly had to mix anything on the palette except the flesh tones, so I would make a whole bottle of flesh tones and stick that in the color set. And I always loved it, because you had about 25

because it’s garish, and also you could see what was going on.

Or red, for the blood element, but not to subdue the artwork.

If it was too complicated with these gory scenes, I’d rather put one color on it because, number one, you can see more, and if you start coloring every detail of the knife throwing, the blood flowing, the shirt being ripped, all of a sudden, if it’s off-register, you get a mucky panel. It’s all messed up. Well, the whole page would be messed up. Frankly, I’d rather color with solids for, like, a murder scene, and yellow so you can see everything.

I wasn’t trying to hide it. I mean, the main reason these people were buying these books was to see somebody’s head cut off, y’know? Lose fingers and everything.

be purple, depending on the time of day. That’s why I used overlays sometimes, not because I was trying to save time, but because sometimes it saved the art—you could see the artwork.

Like, if it was a charging bunch of guys running at you, and Jack Davis would put in every doggone thing going on, you might color the charging guys coming from the background blue, and I’d color them yellow so you can see what’s going on. And also it’s thematic. Because that was the kind of thinking they appreciated, you know? Rather than trying to color the first guy in line in uniform, and then it’s so tiny, and if you would get off-register, which in those days, because it was done with a primitive printing process, you’d get off-register and it’d be terrible. That’s why most everybody had blue eyes. People don’t realize we did that because, if they had brown eyes and it was off-register, you’d have blue coming out of the iris, and on the other side yellow, and that…[laughs] Everybody has blue eyes, or just black dots for the eyes. They liked to save me the trouble, but you had close-ups, or somebody would forget, and they would give you an open eyeball there, for example. So a lot of times you’d rather just have blue and have that blue offregister than to have three colors off-register.

Cassell: Once you prepared the color guides for the books and the covers, did they also have to be approved by Feldstein or somebody?

Severin: Oh, sure! I would always pass everything in, whether they even looked at it after a while, but I think they probably sifted through it. They trusted me because I really wanted to succeed, because it was my job, y’know? A lot of people don’t realize, if you do a good job, you have a job. And they trusted me with a lot of stuff. They knew that I wouldn’t subdue artwork, I would just kind of shield it a little bit so if a parent picked up the book in the drug store, they wouldn’t see that somebody’s stomach was all red. And it worked. Nobody complained.

Cassell: I’ve never noticed that. I’ll have to go back and look.

Severin: Well, in the old books, sometimes the register was off. It was a cheap process in the early days, so a lot of times things got off-center. You would see it sometimes glaringly, and then whole books would go by and everything was fine, but every once in a while something would pop out. So that’s what you tried to avoid, because it ruined the whole thing for a story. You’re reading and all of a sudden everybody’s off-center.

It’s disconcerting for the reader, and as young as they might be, they would be annoyed at the off-register coloring. They’d rather read it black-and-white than have the colors sloppy. They were pretty good about that, on the whole. It didn’t happen that often.

Cassell: That’s true.

Severin: And everybody knew it. It was nonsense. It was a comic book. It was, what do they call it, the blink of an eye? It was kidding. We weren’t telling kids how to kill their mother or anything. Not directly, anyway.

Cassell: The story has it that, on occasion, if you were coloring a book and felt like maybe a particular scene was a little too gory, maybe it might get colored a little more darkly than normal.

Severin: Well, people have said that. I would never assume an editorial position. What I would do very often is, if somebody was being dismembered, I would rather color it in yellow

Cassell: So was it Kurtzman who actually hired you?

Severin: What happened was, I was going to art school a little bit, and I was working down on Wall Street, just a job, making some money, and feeling my way. And Johnny said, “Y’know, Marie, Harvey Kurtzman is up on doing these war books and stuff. He’s very unhappy with Chemical Color. They color the

Cassell: It’s true. Until they got to Fredric Wertham.

Severin: Oh, no. I mean, the man was trying to make a job for himself.

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Severin: They were on the second or third floor, I forget, and you walked into a receptionist area, and at the back of that was a door leading to Feldstein’s first office, where he used to work, and any artist that would come in, they had an inking and a drawing table back there. But when you’d come in, it was the reception area, and then you’d make a left, and it was Mr. Lee. He was the guy who took care of subscriptions, an old fellow, and he’d been there with the original Mr. Gaines.

He eventually retired. But, anyway, he had a big cabinet full of all these old EC books, all the recent ones, he stacked everything. He was a real worker. And then Gaines’ office was the big one, and that had a big couch and a couple of easy chairs, and then a window, I think, and a big desk. And he and Al would plot the stories and write the stuff, and when artists would come in, they would go in, show the stuff, and talk about the next thing. And Al’s office. And then Al eventually went upstairs, I guess when I came, and Johnny Craig was there, it was easier for Al to write upstairs when we interrupted him. He had a nice little office up there, and that was pretty much the layout. I left when the comics had started going down because of the Code, and we were in all kinds of trouble with the horror books, which was a shame because they were really fun to do, and they weren’t bad. John had left and gone to Stan Lee. There was that much work at Marvel, at Stan’s. And then eventually I went uptown, too, and I worked for Stan in that office. And eventually that cooled down, too,

books and it’s not realistic enough.” And he said, “I’ll bet you could do it.” So he said, “I’m going to bring home some art.”

And I said, “Okay.” So I did a story, and Harvey liked it! The first thing he said was, “She didn’t color the room yellow.” And he was so happy. And I said, “Well, the room isn’t yellow. It’s white!” And that’s what he liked. He said, everybody colors at that time when they made comics, walls were colored, everything was colored. Bow ties were colored, everything. And I didn’t. I just left the room white, and he was very impressed.

And I eventually went on staff, and I enjoyed it. It was a nice place to work. They were nice guys. So, anyway, I enjoyed the coloring because it was good artwork and you felt very gratified. You were adding goodness to something that was already good. And they’ve held up over the years. The books are terrific, I think.

Cassell: I agree. So tell me about the EC offices. What were the offices like?

Severin: This was at 225 Lafayette Street. The area had been a real business district, a big place. It was the old section of Manhattan. The buildings were big, but they weren’t monstrous. And old-fashioned. The area of the garment district is one section of it, which was very interesting 1890s kind of stuff.

Cassell: How was the office laid out?

FACING PAGE Tongue in cheek humor about the evil effects of comics on children by Marie. Courtesy of Eleanor Hezel. BELOW The EC gang in medieval attire surrounding “King” Gaines, as rendered by Marie in 2000.

Courtesy of Bill Leach.

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Caricatures of Harvey Kurtzman (left) and Bill Gaines by Marie from the 1953 EC Christmas party.

cal on a doorknob, so you really had to pay attention to it. He was having a lot of fun.

Cassell: You could tell that he was enjoying himself.

Severin: Oh, yes. Harvey was a nut. I haven’t seen him since Bill had a birthday party or something at the top of the World Trade Center years ago, and he had a big party up there. It was the first time I was all the way up, and, I tell you, I got up there, and I went to one window, and I looked out and I said, “I am scared to death.” It was so big. When that thing went down [in 2001], I was so traumatized because my first impression when it first went up and Bill had this party, I was in awe of the whole thing. Different than the Empire State Building. It had a whole different feel to the height. It was like you were in a floating platform.

because comics were taking hits all over the place, and I went to work for the Federal Reserve Bank.

Cassell: Let me turn you back to EC for just a minute. Did you sit in the EC offices to do the coloring?

Severin: Sometimes. Sometimes I’d take a thing home at night, and do it overnight, and bring it in the next day and voucher it.

Cassell: Oh, really?

Severin: Yeah. I was very fast. I had a color set at home, and then I had one in the office. I didn’t go in every day right in the beginning, but then, when MAD came along and all that stuff, I was really busy. Harvey was going strong with his war books, I was coloring them, and then they asked me to color the other stuff. It was great! I enjoyed it. Coloring that kind of stuff is a lot of fun. It’s easy for me. It’s like being ten years old again.

Cassell: Was that after you all had parted company at EC? Severin: I think it was. Yeah, it was after the height of all of us working there, and then we tried to get together, and we were all at separate tables, walking around, talking to each other. It was a swell party. It was really nice.

Cassell: Did you color the early issues of MAD that were in the comic book form?

Severin: Yes. I think Harvey colored some of his stuff, his covers and a couple of his stories. He loved to control the whole thing, which was good. And his coloring was different than mine. He was very artsy-fartsy. Which is good, with his style. As far as coloring and showing detail and stuff, they knew they could trust me, I could do all that stuff. I wouldn’t lose some of those ridiculous little goofy things he had on the walls and so forth. You couldn’t color anything until you looked at the whole panel, because you might have something hysteri-

Cassell: So what did you think of Bill Gaines?

Severin: He’s a doll. Bill was one of the most honest people you could ever meet. He also was generous, maybe to a fault, and you know, the best thing, I can still hear his laugh. He could laugh. He enjoyed life, he really did, and he was a nice guy. No one should ever speak ill of him, and I’ve never heard anything bad about him. He was a good guy.

Cassell: I’ve never heard a bad word about him.

Severin: No. He was really good stuff.

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what I mean? Interested in what he was doing, and very honest about it. I liked working with him. It was great.

Cassell: Do you recall any stories about Bill from the EC days?

Anything amusing he did?

Severin: Well, I remember one time, I wasn’t there, but Johnny Craig and… Who else? Al Feldstein. There was something about Bill always being annoyed when they called him to come look at something. Like, he would be reading or proofing something, and if they were in the other room, he didn’t want to get up and go in there. He was lazy, y’know? He’d say, “Come in here.” [And they’d say,] “No, come on.” And what they did, they had the door closed, and he said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake.” And they had thrown lighter fluid on the floor, and as he came in, they threw a match. Oh! I remember what it was. They were complaining that the air conditioning wasn’t high enough, that they were so hot. And they said, “It’s all hot in here, Bill!” That was the story. And they said, “Come out and you’ll see how hot it is!” And when he opened the door, they threw a match, and the flames shot up. And Bill started to whipsaw, and then he slid into it. He fell!

And jumped up, and they were bashing and hitting him, putting the flames out.

He wasn’t hurt at all, it was just a little puddle of flames.

But that was so funny when I heard about it. I said, “You guys are really taking a chance.” I would never do something like that! I’d be so afraid somebody would get hurt. But Bill was laughing the whole time. He was a nut. He had a great sense of humor.

Cassell: He’s quite an accomplished painter, himself.

Severin: Yes, he had a couple of his paintings out at this—I can’t remember where we were, Michigan. But, yeah, he’s good, and he likes it. Which is nice. Lots of people find it difficult to get rid of the creative urges, and he’s found a way, which is great.

Cassell: One of my prize possessions is a page from the Haunt of Fear that Graham Ingels did that has the Old Witch on it.

Severin: Oh, boy, yeah. His pencils were beautiful. He was perfect for that whole scene, the way Ghastly inked and drew.

Cassell: Now, guys like Ingels, did he mostly work from home?

Cassell: Oh, that’s terrific. So tell me about Al Feldstein. How was Al to work with?

Severin: Great! He taught me so much. I saw him, was it last year, the year before?

Out in, where the hell was I? Michigan. It was some EC thing, and it was very nice to see him again. He’s always a gentleman, and he knows what he’s doing, and I think he was an excellent teacher.

He taught me so much about the comics. He picked it right up, you know, from the way he talked. I thought he was very into it, you know

“Happy Horrordays” from the Old Witch.

(Note the “M.S.” on the shoes of the little girl coming down the stairs).

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Severin: Yeah! And that was fine, it was just that people don’t realize what you have to go through to make it that way.

Severin: I think everybody worked from home. Feldstein was at the office, but if he penciled something, I imagine he did it on weekends and stuff. But he was busy.

Cassell: So what did the guy at the Armory say when you showed up wanting to take pictures?

Severin: Well, I think there must have been a phone call.

There was a guy there to dismantle it. [He probably thought,] “This dopey doesn’t know what the hell she’s doing.” I mean, my brother would have been perfect on this. He would loved to have taken the pictures, and taken the thing, and taken it apart, and shot it. [laughs] But he sent me. I get it. Most of the time it was a lot of fun with the work. Very entertaining.

Cassell: Feldstein was not only writing, but he was doing all the editing, too, wasn’t he? Except for the war books.

Severin: I think he and Bill did a lot of the editing together or individually, depending. I wasn’t in the office all that much. I was doing the coloring, and what have you, and research for Harvey.

Cassell: What kind of research did you do?

Severin: That’s when I started. Kurtzman was such a nut about accuracy and research. This one time I had to go to the Armory way up town with a camera and have this guy dismantle and load one of those long tube things…

Cassell: So tell me about Johnny Craig.

Severin: Oh, he was a doll. What a nice guy. We had a lot of fun together, and he was so clean. We used to tease him about it. “Mr. Clean.” Most artists have a rag hanging from their drawing board, and they wipe their pen on it, and the brushes are all over the place, and the water’s dirty. Now, Johnny was Mr. Clean. Everything was so precise and clean, and he washed his brushes. He said, “Well, they cost a lot of money, y’know.” But he just liked everything nice around him.

Of course, it was lovely working in a room with somebody like that. I remember this one kid came in who was trying out as a letterer, and he just, he didn’t know what the heck, he was so nervous. And all of a sudden he had finished half a page to show them, and he touched something and the bottle of ink tilted and went all over the page. And he just got up, and walked out, and he never showed up again. I don’t even remember his name. He spilled the thing all over. I mean, in those days, people took things real personal. Today, probably, he’d say, “Give me another page. I just ruined this.” Not in those days. He was gone. I don’t even remember his name, the poor guy. He probably left the industry.

Cassell: A bazooka.

Severin: He wanted a couple panels of a guy loading it, so I had to go up there with a camera. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. And I was wearing heels. In those days, you didn’t wear slacks. You got dressed to go to the office. I was lugging this camera and a big duffel bag full of books for Harvey, and I go to this Armory, and this man loads and shows me, and I am taking pictures. And when I came back to Harvey, I was so tired, my feet were so tired of standing all day, walking from the subway, and I had these damned pictures. It was like three panels in the story, but Harvey had to have it right, y’know?

He was such a pain in the ass, but the books were beautiful, weren’t they?

Cassell: They were, and, as you said, completely accurate.

Caricature of Johnny Craig by Marie from the 1953 EC Christmas party and painted portrait of Marie

by Craig, both from the early 1950s. Courtesy of Bill Leach.

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Cassell: So Johnny, you said, worked in the office for a while.

Severin: For a while, yes.

Maybe he didn’t have room at home. I mean, sometimes guys, they had an apartment, just got married, and got tired of trying to draw in the kitchen. And that was what happened with a lot of people. They didn’t have the money, you had to buy a house. And I’m not saying Johnny, I don’t how much money he had, but he found it easier to be in the office. And, also, they liked it because they could call upon him to do things, either corrections, or designing something, or story consultation, whatever you want to call it. He was very talented, so it was

useful to have him around. He wasn’t there constantly, but most of the time, in the period that I saw.

Cassell: So what did you think about Jack Davis?

Severin: Oh, he was a genius. I thought he was so fast and furious.

His stuff was really great. And it colored beautifully. Woody was hard to color because he didn’t put things forward and back like Davis did. Davis could do a background and a foreground, you knew exactly. You just put a color for the background and it just popped right out. But Woody would put so many blacks and everything.

And it was beautiful, don’t get me wrong. But, like his spaceship.

The buttons and bows on the background were just amazing, so you’d just put a flat tone on it because you didn’t want to cover it. But the different techniques. Like my brother John, completely different. He really took the time to distinguish stuff, and if they were outlined, completely different technique, it was so different from Woody. Woody’s didn’t look real, it looked like Woody’s inking, but John made every detail on a tree, y’know, “It’s alive.”

Everybody was different there, and that’s why I think the books looked so good, because they had all different kinds of artists, and at the time, most comics could have been drawn by one guy with five inkers.

Cassell: Yeah, the other companies were so big on the “house style” thing. What about Jack Kamen?

Severin: Kamen’s stuff was nice and clean, but you couldn’t get too dramatic with it because he did everything. And that’s why he was so good at the horror, because he did it so normal-looking that when something hideous was happening, it really was hideous, because his stuff looked like a romance book. And then somebody’s getting their head chopped off. That was actually one of the things that made EC was that it had the variety. You’d get a book, and you’d have four stories in it, all looked different. So you felt like you were getting your money’s worth. That’s what I think. I think people really got their money’s worth because they had four good stories, or three good stories, whatever, and the artwork was all different, and it was all good artwork. So you got your ten cents worth. It’s true!

Cassell: It’s just hard to believe it only cost ten cents.

Severin: Isn’t that something? Well, ten cents was ten cents, then.

Now, ten cents is a penny. It’s nothing.

Cassell: What about Bernie Krigstein?

Severin: He was hard because I wasn’t used to artsy-fartsy stuff. I wasn’t used to coloring that kind of stuff. I mean, I knew I had to really think what I was doing with his stuff. And he liked to color his own, anyway. Well, part of what made EC so good is that we were so diversified. Like, the reprints of Krigstein, the hardcover book, was so attractive. But he was really an artsy-fartsy guy, and the thing was different than the delineation of the regular comic book. And it was nice to have that variety. I had to think more about coloring it, and that was annoying. But then it looked good. There was something in the design that was really… How can I explain it? I’m sure you know what I mean.

Cassell: He had a very distinctive style and almost fine art sort of look to it.

Severin: Yeah. It was not comic book material, on the whole. And yet he’d get totally good stories, wouldn’t he? Yeah, I didn’t mind if he wanted to color his own. That was fine with me.

Cassell: And he did do that on occasion?

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Caricatures of Graham Ingles and George Evans by Marie from the 1953 EC Christmas party.

I just left. I just said, “I’m going to go to up and work for Stan Lee on staff, coloring their stuff.” And they understood. I mean, they couldn’t sustain my work. There wasn’t that much to do.

So I went up to Stan Lee and worked there, until that folded, too. But it was fun.

Severin: He did, yeah. It was so long ago, y’know? I have all the hardbound [books], they were nice enough to send me when they reprinted everything. But a lot of it is my coloring, so it’s nice to have.

Cassell: What about Reed Crandall?

Severin: Oh, his stuff, I loved coloring him. It was like the old Treasure Island artwork. But I liked it, I liked his stuff. It was so illustration. It wasn’t cartoony, it was illustration.

Cassell: It sounds like it. It sounds like EC was a good place to work.

Severin: Oh, they were nice. And they weren’t chintzy. They weren’t stinky. But it was a small outfit. It was just Bill and Al, and the artists would come in, and they enjoyed what they were doing, because there was Al utilizing talent, instead of dominating them, they let them have a little free reign. Which is why somebody like Al Williamson just loved doing stuff because he loved to draw. It was more of a fun thing, I think, than other companies could do.

Cassell: How about George Evans?

Severin: Oh, Evans was great. They were all good, and that’s what I liked, because they all had distinctive techniques, and you really felt like, when you opened the comic book, I used to think, “Kids really are getting their money’s worth, because these guys are good.” And Reed had a distinctive [style, it was] nice to color his stuff, it was so realistic. And Woody was wild, with the space stuff and all that jazz. And, of course, his ridiculous women. His ladies were so sexy. But they didn’t have that much sex in the EC books, which was good.

Cassell: And I gather they paid fairly well, too.

Severin: I think they paid the best, yeah. As far as I was, to the guys, I was just a colorist and on staff, so I wasn’t what you would quote-call the big bucks, but the guys made out well.

And they worked hard for their money, and it paid off, and they were very proud to be accepted at EC, because it was like adding to their portfolio. If they did stuff at EC, “Ah, I worked there,” and companies appreciated that.

Cassell: It’s true, even though the women looked very attractive, they were all fully-clothed.

Severin: Oh, in those days, you couldn’t.

Cassell: I think it shows that it was possible to make them look attractive without looking cheap.

Severin: Exactly! And a lot of this generation has missed the point, that you can be sexy and fully-clothed, or you can be unclothed and not sexy. It can happen. You have to be a little mature, I guess, to understand it.

Cassell: So you drew a salary at EC rather than getting paid by the piece?

Severin: Gee, in the beginning, when I worked with Harvey, I think I was on staff there because I did research, got books, and took pictures of people disarming bazookas. Yeah, I must have been on staff for that, and then I was paid by, y’know, piecemeal if I colored a book—then you got freelance stuff.

Cassell: So when you were coloring the stories, did you ever find yourself reading them?

Severin: I wouldn’t color a story until I had the whole story.

They couldn’t give me page 2, 4, and 7, came in inked, and color it. I wouldn’t do it until I had the whole, finished story, and then I read it, and colored it accordingly. I would not color piecemeal. Because, otherwise—it’s continuity. It’s as important as the inker. I mean, a story can be printed without color and still be appreciated, but the thing is, if you color spasmodically, it’s going to look like somebody was drunk when they were doing it. You have to do it in sequence of the story, just like the inker, just like the penciler, just like the writer. Going way back, it’s done in sequence, and it’s all together. You don’t do it individually.

Cassell: When you were working for EC, did you do any other kind of artwork during that time period, or did you work exclusively for them?

Severin: Maybe I did some stuff for my friends, but—nah. I don’t think I did any freelance other than there. I was too lazy.

I lived at home, so I didn’t have to really knock myself out. Like, a lot of people wondered why didn’t I do a story at that time. I didn’t have to. These guys were supporting families. They just came back from the service, and they were doing artwork, and I didn’t have to do that. I wasn’t supporting anybody but me, and I was enjoying what I did. These guys had to work, though, because they were sustaining their whole future. But I was fine, I didn’t have to kill myself doing stuff. I wasn’t buying a house.

Cassell: What about the EC fan club? Did you have anything to do with it?

Severin: I remember vaguely there was something, but I don’t remember it being a big deal.

Cassell: And I gathered in more recent years, Russ Cochran has had you recolor some of the covers for EC and that sort of thing?

Severin: Yeah. I don’t know why, but he just wanted to—either that, or they weren’t available. I don’t know. The originals may not have existed, I don’t know. Bill usually saved stuff. So, yeah, Russ said, “Could you recolor stuff?” I guess so his separators could do a decent job reproducing them.

Cassell: No, I don’t think it was. I think it was a whole lot bigger deal later on, after EC was gone. So how did you find out that things were not going well with EC at the end?

Severin: Oh, well, they lost their titles because [dealers,] they wouldn’t put them on the stands and all that jazz, and then finally the artists had gone off. My brother went up to work with Stan Lee, and there wasn’t any work except MAD, but Harvey was doing that and there wasn’t enough to pay staff. So

Cassell: I guess that while Gaines kept file copies of all the comics that were printed, and he kept the original artwork, he didn’t keep the color guides, did he?

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“Marie Severin arrives early for her sitting with Johnny Craig.” Courtesy of Bill Leach.

Cassell: You did a wonderful job of capturing each person’s personality.

Severin: Yeah, but have you seen Johnny’s, my brother’s?

Severin: I don’t know. They would be sent up to Chemical Coloring for the separators to separate from the color guides, so Chemical probably just threw them out. I think the covers, when the proofs came back, the original colored covers came back with it so it could be compared, but the insides I don’t think that happened. I really don’t remember. Geez, maybe they did come back and we just chucked them out. I don’t know.

When I think of it, most companies didn’t want it, but EC liked to check the four-page proofs of the whole book. They’d send them down, and we’d look at them.

Cassell: Oh, yeah. It’s great, too. I love your brother’s style.

Severin: Yeah, oh, his stuff is marvelous. He should do more, but he’s getting old!

Cassell: Can you think of anything I forgot to ask you about EC? Severin: No. I mean, I loved working there, they were great people, and the talent was fantastic, and it was a good run, a very good run. There will never be one like it, I bet.

Cassell: I gather that EC would get fan mail from time to time, and I’ve seen a thing that you did that has caricatures of all the EC guys on it that I think was sent to fans.

Severin: Oh, it was a flyer. Well, John, my brother, did the first one, and that was sent out in answer to fan mail. It was great.

And then they wanted an update because they had about four new artists, like Williamson was new, and myself. So then I did an updated one, and that was, instead of sending the kids a letter, they’d just send this thing, “Thanks for writing,” and then it would have a picture of the office with everybody on it.

Cassell: I don’t think there will, either.

There is a common misconception regarding the time period in which Marie first came to work for EC. She has been credited with coloring some EC comics as early as 1949, but that does not make chronological sense, given that it was her brother John who introduced her to Harvey Kurtzman and 33

can of whitewash, tending to reinforce the idea that she acted as the unofficial “censor” for EC.) It is also believed that Marie may have drawn some of the illustrations that accompanied the requisite one or two-page text stories in EC comics.

As for the ongoing debate regarding whether or not she was the EC censor, Marie makes a great case for the latter. In an article in the April 14, 1996 Asbury Park Press Sunday, Marie told staff writer Mark Voger, “I would have no right to do that, and I would never do it to obliterate art. I was helping to tell a story. I was supplying the background music... a lot of times, I would clarify by using what came to be known as ‘knockouts.’ Like, in a war scene, if there was an explosion and guys went flying all around, there would be so much equipment on them and so forth that you couldn’t color them realistically, because it would be muddy. So I would put a knockout of either red or yellow, and you’d see the artwork.

In the horror books, sometimes it would add a little mood to it. Blue is about as bad as I got … But I never did it with the intention of blocking the art. The printing might have been heavy. What I was doing was subduing, but believe me, I never took on the editorial stuff. If they didn’t like what I did, they would have changed it.”

Later in the Asbury Park Press Sunday article, Marie expressed appreciation for the guys at EC, “Men were a lot more gentlemanly in those days, because they weren’t afraid of women.

Especially those guys (at EC). Nobody there ever refused any question to show me how to do something. I was taught an awful lot there. People are not jealous of information unless they’re not sure of themselves.”

Marie not only colored the stories inside the EC comics, but she colored “Marie Severin has a Nightmare” featuring the EC hosts and some colorist humor. most of the covers, too.

Courtesy of Bill Leach.

When Russ Cochran made arrangements with Bill Gaines to reproduce the EC comics, he turned to Marie Marie actually did some artwork for EC as well. As Severin to color the reproductions. The first thing Cochran mentioned in the interview, when fans would write into EC produced was a poster of the cover to Haunt of Fear #18, expressing praise or criticism, the company would send them which sold for one dollar in 1971. Cochran also had Marie a “Thank You For Your Note” flyer in reply. The flyer depicted hand-color ten of the posters, which sold for $100 each. The the members of the EC bullpen, in a humorous manner success of the hand colored prints led Cochran to offer ones consistent with each of their personalities or reflecting the from Weird Fantasy, Weird Science, and Tales From The Crypt. titles they illustrated. It was a way of encouraging the EC fans When Cochran began to produce the EC Portfolios, he got without having to write individual responses. (It also included Marie to color those as well. She also colored the sets of a detachable subscription form.) There were several different color covers that were offered by Cochran, as well as the “Thank You For Your Note” flyers produced over the years, covers for the EC Library. [Note: It was learned after the each bearing the artwork of a different artist, including John interview that Russ Cochran has auctioned off original EC Severin, Bill Elder, and Marie Severin. (In the flyer drawn by color guides.]

Marie, she can be seen in the background holding a brush and his first work for EC wasn’t until 1951. EC historian Roger Hill sheds some light on the mystery, “I was told by Al Feldstein years ago that the pre-trend stuff and up until around late 1951 was colored by either the artists who turned in the stories, or left up to the engraver. I think in Kurtzman’s case, he colored his own work early on and probably most of his covers all the way through. Don’t forget, Kurtzman did color cover roughs for each of his covers. The story about John telling Harvey about Marie is true, so she defintely couldn’t have been at EC before her brother. I have seen original EC silverprints and I seem to remember that early silverprints were hand-colored, but with no marking codes on them for the engravers. The engraver/printer would have to match the color guide as best he could, which left room for errors and deviations. When Marie took over, she started using the color codes to make sure the engravers/printers were following the designated colors correctly. It took the guess work out of it, if you know what I mean. My personal opinion is that Marie came on board EC in early 1952.”

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Feldstein: I don’t remember exactly what she started out doing. John was working for us, so that meant that we were already publishing Weird Science and Weird Fantasy, because that’s where the Severin and Elder team was doing our sci-fi stuff. So I’m not sure where she started. I know we were doing horror at the time, and we already had Crime and Shock, and the science-fiction books, plus Harvey had MAD, or at least at that time Frontline Combat, so she started out coloring that stuff. She did those, but she also did the horror. She started out with whatever was due at that particular time in terms of our schedule.

By her own admission, one of the people at EC who taught Marie a lot was Al Feldstein, editor of the horror and science-fiction books. Feldstein got his start in comics doing freelance work for Victor Fox. He met Bill Gaines in 1948 and there began a professional relationship and friendship that would last a lifetime.

Cassell: So Marie colored on the silver print. Is that right?

Feldstein: Yeah, she used Doctor Marten dyes, I think it was called, and they were watercolor dyes, and she started coloring the silver prints. And the stories, the photographs of each of our stories, would then be interpreted by the engravers. They used some sort of chemical developing process on some sort of board that the silver print would then be imprinted on it in

THE GUIDING FORCE BEHIND much of what EC accomplished, both in the early years in comics and later years with MAD, was Al Feldstein. Feldstein started out drawing stories for EC, but was soon writing and later editing the comics. Gaines and Feldstein tended to think alike when it came to the tenor of the books and Gaines afforded Feldstein a lot of free reign when it came to writing and editing the horror and sciencefiction titles for EC. Feldstein was there from the beginning of Entertaining Comics and he worked with most of the creators who brought the books to life, including a colorist by the name of Marie Severin. Here Al Feldstein sheds some light on what it was like working at EC, and his recollections of Marie.

Interview with Al Feldstein Dewey Cassell: How did you first meet Marie?

Al Feldstein: Well, back in those days, and you have to remember that we’re going back a long way, and comics were created entirely different in those days, and produced entirely different.

They had a system in which they shot the artwork, and then they made a silver print, which was a black-and-white fancy stat on matte paper, and then they colored this, and then the engravers hand-created the plates based on the color in what they called the silver print, which was the stat that I talked about. And, in our case, EC was being serviced by a company called Chemical Engraving, which did our plates, and then the plates were cast from those separations that the technicians at the engraving plant created from the colored silver prints. The plates were run on a newspaper press, like your Sunday comics, and that’s how comic books were printed in those days. But our stuff was being colored by the staff of Chemical Engraving, which was a bunch of old biddies. They just sat there and colored. They didn’t care what the heck we were doing, or what the story content was, or anything like that. And that was uninspired. We had an artist team, Severin and Elder, working for us. Johnny Severin had a sister, and when he understood that we were unhappy with our coloring, he suggested his sister. His sister was a colorist. And so we met Marie, and Marie came down, and we fell in love with her. Her coloring was excellent and she really shined, and she became our official colorist. I don’t know what kind of a business arrangement Bill made with Chemical Engraving, but we supplied our own coloring of the silver print. And that’s how we met.

Al Feldstein and the author at the 2002 Mid-Ohio Con. blue, so it wouldn’t photograph. And these were chemically treated where the chemical either developed a line, or a dot, or a solid. And that’s how they developed the coloring. The colors were combination of dots, or lines, or solid.

Cassell: When Marie would get a silver print to color, say, a Weird Science, was she given any guidance about how to color it, or did she just decide what was best for it?

Feldstein: We left it to Marie and her creativity. In fact, I assume that one of these questions you’re about to ask me is how did she serve as our censor. Actually, Marie wasn’t [deliberately] developed to be the conscience of EC. She was a young Catholic girl and she had specific limitations as to how far she

Cassell: Do I understand correctly that she started out just coloring the war books and then moved into coloring the rest of the stuff?

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and the explanation is very humble. When he published a title, he had to put up a bond in order to gain Second Class Entry.

Second Class Entry was the chief way that boxes of comics were shipped from the printer to the local distributor in the various cities around the country. It was a United States government [provision] of freedom of the press, that they allowed published books and magazines to be mailed cheaper than the regular standard mail prices. A couple of Congressmen decided that with comic books, since they were never going to encourage kids to read, which was a lot of baloney at the time, but they were very conscientious. They decided they would put limitations on the Second Class Entry of comic books. One was that they could only have two pages, two-and-a-quarter or two-and-a-half pages of advertising. The other was that they had to have two pages of text, a printed text story, not illustrated, no balloons, so the kids would be encouraged to read. Of course, the kids never read those. They read the comics, but those stories, they had to be there. But in order for Bill to recover his bond, if it went for this Second Class Entry privilege, he would have to have twelve copies of everything to prove that he adhered to the Second Class Entry. And those were hailed the Gaines File Copies. They were wrapped up in craft paper and stuck on a big console desk bureau that he had in his office, and later, when he was spilling out of that, were moved to a fireproof storage warehouse facility that he rented, which also, of course, contained all the original artwork that he later sold at the [Russ] Cochran auctions, but are now wandering around in secondary markets being sold for a lot of money. Like, for example, a cover that I did, which I received $35 for back in those days, recently sold on Heritage Comics Auction for $18,500. [laughter] The original black-and-white, Russian ink, on paper cover. Amazing. And I don’t get a dime of that.

Caricature of Al Feldstein by Marie from the 1953 EC Christmas party. would go, and if we went farther than she wanted to go, she would kind of object and tone down some of the stuff that we did. Once in a while she would paint an entire panel blue so you could hardly see the details of the gore we were putting in. [laughter]

Cassell: That’s a shame.

Feldstein: I’ll tell you an interesting phenomenon, though.

There are no typewritten pages of script of any Feldstein story.

Cassell: Did she color all of your work?

Feldstein: Marie colored all of my particular stories that I did, and she and I had discussed, vaguely, little bits of things like I indicated in my artwork reflected light, etc., which she picked up on quickly. And Marie’s coloring was always just exceptional. In fact, now when I am commissioned to do cover-revisited paintings, which are revisits of my old covers as paintings, I try to improve on her coloring and it’s very difficult. I mean, she really nailed it. I’m talking about the original colors. I understand that she had to do some recoloring because they couldn’t find the color silver prints for the Cochran box sets, and she did some recoloring there. Some of the recoloring I didn’t agree with. I don’t know whether she was on her own, without the threatening supervision that we were present with, but I went back to some of the originals. The originals are spectacular.

Cassell: Why not?

Feldstein: Well, I guess [it] was a thing that I started way back when, I wrote my stories directly on the board. I would drop two lines from the top of the panel so that the letterer could see the balloon, and he would start at the top of the panel and do the balloons, and the captions, and everything. And everything was written and then lettered directly on the art page, and then the original script was erased. So there are no scripts of Al Feldstein stories. Another collectors’ item down the drain.

Cassell: So from a production standpoint, how did it work at EC? Feldstein: You see, the penciling comes from the original script that some scriptwriter writes, and then it’s turned over to the artist and he does what’s known as a breakdown, and I think this is being done today the way it was back then. And then the breakdown with the balloon areas indicated were turned over to the letterer with letters in them. But I, being the writer and editor of the seven books that I edited, and writing the stories, except for Johnny Craig’s, the sequence was the writing, the lettering, and then the pencils, and then the inks. And after the pencils and inks were done, which I think is the same today as it is back then, then the photographed artwork was colored.

Cassell: And, speaking of the originals, I know that Bill Gaines was meticulous about saving archival copies of each issue of the comic, as well as the art.

Feldstein: Well, he put away the original artwork, and I think he even put away the colored silver print. But that he did because he had a great feeling for the intrinsic value of original art. But the twelve copies of everything we printed, which are now called Gaines File Copies, that’s an entirely different thing.

[They] were put away accidentally more than anything else, 36

And today, of course, I’m not familiar with how they do it, but it’s done by computer, and in those days it was done by talented young ladies like Marie Severin.

Cassell: Who did the lettering for EC? Feldstein: We had a guy named Jim Wroten and his wife. Jim had been a salesman for K&E, which is Keuffel & Esser. It’s an engineering supply company and they did things for producing blueprints and stuff like that. It was all that kind of equipment, and one of the things that they had was a lettering system using a stencil for blueprints. And Jim, being a salesman and knowing about it, figured out a way of mounting these stencils on sliding something-or-others, and being able to use the stencil with the accompanying ink pen very quickly. And he realized that he could letter comic books. And so he went into that business. He left his K&E job with these lettering devices and started lettering. And he was lettering for Fox while I was doing the teenage books. Anyway, [he was] lettering for M.C. Gaines before his death, which Bill inherited the business. Jim Wroten was responsible for my going to meet and eventually forming a lifelong friendship and creative partnership with Bill Gaines. He knew about M.C. Gaines, and Sal Cohen, who was M.C. Gaines’ business manager. While Bill was being pushed to take over the business by his mother, he wanted to do a teenage book before then to show that he was a good business manager, and he contacted me through Jim Wroten. But Jim Wroten did all the lettering, and he did it effectively. As I said, I used to drop down two lines so that he could letter it and have the balloons and captions. Harvey Kurtzman never used him. He didn’t like Leroy lettering. That was the name of the company, so it was called Leroy lettering. And Harvey never liked it. Harvey liked hand-lettering. He used Ben Oda, who was our hand letterer and did a lot of our logos, story titles, etc. Magazine titles, as well, some of which I changed. Like, for example, Tales From the Crypt. When he did the original Crypt of Terror lettering, and then he did Tales From the Crypt, it was machinelike. And when Bill asked me to do the covers for Tales From the Crypt for a while, I designed my own logo for Tales From the Crypt, because I wanted it to look like a horror comic, with dropping letters and stuff. And that particular logo is what remains today, and was used by the HBO people for their television adaptation.

Cassell: That’s probably one of the most distinctive logos.

Feldstein: Yeah. That’s my logo. I don’t know how many people know that, but it is. It appears when I took over doing the Tales From the Crypt cover from Johnny, because he was doing the Vault of Horror, which was his book. And I did that for a while until I turned it over to Jack Davis. I did that original lettering, and it stayed with Tales From the Crypt ever since. Some of the other titles that I did, I think I did Weird Science or Weird Fantasy. But anyway, Harvey did not like the Leroy lettering, and so he used Ben Oda for his hand lettering. And sometimes I felt that maybe he was right. The Leroy lettering was kind of cold. It didn’t have much in the way of a personality, especially

TOP Cover color guide for the Russ Cochran reprint of EC Comics’ Weird Science #13 by Marie.

BOTTOM The published cover.

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they wanted. And I think that was more of an explanation, but nobody wanted to look at it. So comic books became the scapegoat, and Fredric Wertham, the Austrian psychiatrist who ran a clinic in Harlem and treated incorrigible kids, decided because his kids had all read comics, that was a contributing cause for juvenile delinquency. Which is also fallacy of reasoning. But, in any case, that’s what happened. And so we gotta drop those comics, because our darling competitors were happy to throw us out of business with the comic book code by adopting things like you couldn’t use the word “weird,” you couldn’t use the word “terror,” you couldn’t use “horror.”

Which they probably made a list as they went through our books. So they totally put us out of business. And now we had to do the New Direction, not that we tried to get through the code, M.D. and Piracy and…

Cassell: Valor.

Feldstein: Valor, yeah. And that was pretty sad. And then our distributor went bankrupt and that threw Bill for a loop, and he had to drop everything.

Cassell: Was ANC the distributor you used?

Feldstein: No, that was Leader News Company. American News Company was the savior of MAD, because when Leader News went bankrupt and Bill had to drop all his comics, MAD was not a comic book at the time. It had been changed a few months prior, luckily, because Harvey had got an offer from Pageant magazine, and he wanted to go and work for an adult magazine and not a comic book, so Bill said, “Turn MAD into an adult magazine,” which he did. And that was the 25-cent edition of MAD. It was not involved in the code, and so Bill, at the urging of Harvey, paid off all of the bills that were due regardless of the fact that they weren’t going to get any money from Leader News to pay them off, and continued MAD. And so we were all out of business. We did try Picto-Fiction for a while, and that’s when Bill really had to throw in the towel.

Caricature of Wally Wood by Marie from the 1953 EC Christmas party. with the special effect lettering for screams and sound effects, etc. But I stuck with it because back in those days we were all loyal to each other. It wasn’t like today’s business environment.

So we just kept it because he was depending on it for a living, and we were satisfied, and we were selling well. It may very well be that the Leroy lettering was what made it so readable.

I don’t know.

Cassell: So when MAD went to magazine format, it was already being distributed by a different company?

Feldstein: No, it was originally Leader. When Leader went bankrupt, we immediately got another distributor. And MAD was taking off because it didn’t have the stigma of the EC comics, which the world didn’t want, and which hurt us terribly when we did the New Direction, and also hurt us when we did Picto-Fiction. Most of Picto-Ficiton never even saw the light of day. [Newsstands] would return it because they were from EC via Leader News Company, the distributor of the old EC horror comics, and that ogre publisher Bill Gaines. They raked him over the coals, the Republicans, in the hearings, and made him the ogre of the industry, the ruiner of our children.

Cassell: I think it definitely made it very distinctive.

Feldstein: Yeah. I know that one thing I did which I rue to this day but I used the exclamation point just a little too much. [laughter] Cassell: Did Jim stay with you then, until the end?

Feldstein: Yeah, he was with us right to the end as far as my books were concerned, and when the debacle occurred, which was the Senate Investigation into Juvenile Delinquency in which they decided that comic books were the cause…hah!

Which was insanity at the time. They were looking for a scapegoat to explain why kids were rebelling against the adult world.

Well, what they were doing was saying, “You know, you’re telling us to duck and cover in this cold war, like we’re going to be able to save our asses under a faulty desk from the coming explosion, and we’re vaporized.” And these kids were getting a little surly about the fact that their parents didn’t know what

Cassell: I think the kids were beginning to get smarter, and I think that’s why the EC comics appealed to them is because they were extremely well-written, they were a challenge.

Feldstein: That was our philosophy. We wanted to write intelligent, creative, fresh new kinds of material in our stories, and we wrote up to our readers, not down to our readers. The cutting edge stories that we did about crooked politicians and corrupt police officials and stuff like that that we were running back in those days, when it was not the de rigueur of publish38

ers to be that critical of surrounding government agencies and the people that occupied those offices. They were eating that stuff up. Nobody mentioned any of that when we were being censored or dumped upon by Kefauver and Wertham. And all the terrible things that comics were doing, nobody mentioned any of the good stuff that we were doing, like the religious and racial tolerance stories, etc.

Cassell: Like the story “Judgment Day.” Feldstein: Yeah, like that. Judge Murphy wanted to throw it out, and then he told me I couldn’t have a Negro at the end, which was the whole basis of the story! And then when Bill told him to go screw himself, they were going to publish it anyway and have a press conference and show that the Comic Code Authority was racially intolerant. He said, “Okay, it can be a black, you’ve got to take this sweat off his brow.” Because I had done a drawing at the end, at the revelation that he was black, like the distant stars on the perspiration on his face. He said we had to take those off or he wouldn’t let it go through.

It was ridiculous. As far as the code was concerned, as Judge Murphy was concerned, he was operating under the orders of the other publishers who wanted us out of business, period.

We were trouble. We were writing good stuff, we had great artwork, and we were making it difficult for them, stealing their dimes.

Cassell: It’s a shame, because it was literally before it’s time. If EC had been around in, say, the early Seventies, I think we’d still probably be reading EC comics today.

Feldstein: Oh, yeah. Well, because by the Seventies the publishers woke up and threw out the code and said the hell with it, because they went through a dark ages. [With MAD,] I didn’t have to worry about it. Harvey was offered a job by Hefner and he left Bill. And I inherited it and took it over. We sold over 375,000 copies quarterly while we could make the deadline, and I took it to well over two million eight, eight times a year, with 250 paperback books, four annuals, 11 foreign editions, and it became a cash cow.

Caricature of Al Williamson by Marie from the 1953 EC Christmas party.

Cassell: Were you the editor for books that you didn’t draw for?

Feldstein: Well, yes. I stopped drawing as Bill insisted that I write for everybody. I was writing seven books, except for Johnny Craig’s story. And then I hired the artist to do the illustration. I worked with the artist. So, actually, I was kind of like the controller, because, first of all, I laid out the stories in order to write them, which was something that they bitched and moaned about, because a lot of them were looking at some of the very wild and crazy layouts that people were doing for those comic book people, which were no particular story depth, but which had great presentation of artwork, and I was doing kind of a humdrum, six-panel, eight-panel per page, square panels, very little overlays, very little stuff going down into other panels. Because I always found it interesting not only in illustrating, in presenting a well-written story, but having it illustrated without too much superfluous crap.

Cassell: Marie obviously didn’t make the transition to MAD, and I assume that’s because MAD was essentially black-and-white.

Feldstein: It was black-and-white, there was no reason for her to color it. And so, with the end of the New Direction, Piracy and the rest, she just was out a job. She was let go, I was let go, everybody was let go. And the Picto-Fiction that we tried didn’t have any color, either. So she just had to go on. She went on to Marvel and made a name for herself as a colorist and as a comic book artist.

Cassell: You mentioned that back in the EC days you would have gotten about thirty five (or forty) dollars for a cover. Any idea what Marie might have gotten paid to do the coloring?

Feldstein: I have absolutely no idea, but I don’t think it was very much. She probably made five or six or eight dollars per silver print page, and for cover coloring. So, if she did an entire book, 32 pages, and the cover, you multiply that by five or eight and you’ll see that she wasn’t making that great an income, but she did have nine, ten comic books at her height, including Harvey’s three and my seven. And she was making out okay, I guess.

Cassell: So you laid out the page and then sent it to the penciler.

When it came back with the pencils done, did you have to review and approve it before it went to the inker?

Feldstein: Yeah, I looked at it. I wrote the story, they lettered it, and I’m not sure whether Wroten did the panel outlines or not, or if the artist did. But, in any case, the artist would come in and pick up the story, written and laid out and lettered, and I would go over the story with them. I would not tell them how to draw it. Harvey and I had an entirely different phi39

dent, and she did a wonderful job. And even my covers that she colored, I’d look them over when they were ready to go down to the engraver, and I’d be perfectly satisfied…

Cassell: When Marie finished doing the coloring, how did it get, then, to the engraver?

Feldstein: The engraver had messengers who came and picked up our stuff and delivered our stuff. I mean, you know, being a publisher and working with an engraver was a complicated process. They would pick up the artwork and camera shoot it, then they would send back silver prints, and hold the artwork until we approved the silver prints.

Then Marie would color them, and then we would call for a messenger to pick up the silver prints. And then the technical guys would do the separations, as they called them, which was the interpretation of the colors into engravings, and then they would send us proofs, and then we would approve those or correct them, and then it went to press. And so Marie just did the coloring of the silver prints when they were presented to her, but she didn’t do anything in the way of running down as a messenger.

Cassell: So did Marie have anything to do with the whole EC Fan-Addict club?

Feldstein: I don’t think she had anything to do with that except maybe to color the certificate.

Cassell: Right, the one with your and Bill’s picture on it?

Feldstein: Oh, I don’t remember the darned thing. I know when I did it, though. I remember we had a patch embroidered. We had pin, and we had a membership card. Back before the investigation into juvenile delinquency, we were riding high with popularity, with our fan club. The first fanzines were being published.

There was a fanzine by…

Last page from “The Night Before Christmas” with caricatures of the EC gang (including Marie) by Bill Elder, from Panic #1. losophy about that. I felt that I was a baker baking a cake, the story, and these guys were the icing. These guys were making it attractive and palatable and delicious, so I wasn’t going to tell them what to do in the way of a close-up or a far shot or anything like that. I would sit down, they would read the story, I would say, “Do you understand it? Any questions?” They’d say, “No, I think I’ll do it.” And they would come back [having] penciled it, and I would look it over, and there were very few changes that I would make. Sometimes they might have missed something that I needed in that panel and I would have them include it or redraw it in the pencils, and then the inks were done, and that was it.

Cassell: Fred von Bernewitz.

Feldstein: That’s it. Fred von Bernewitz put out a checklist back in those days of all we were publishing. And there were fanzines that were starting to pop up. Of course, the EC fan club, and that was all just an attempt to get us more following and more [sales], etc.

Cassell: When people used to write in to EC, you guys created these souvenir things that you would send out to them, that had drawings of the EC staff. I know Marie did one of those. I think you did one of them.

Feldstein: I never did one, but I was in them. We did one where all the artists did their own, and it was kind of a conglomeration. But, anyway, yeah, they were done, and then we would also give them to anybody who dropped by the office as a visitor.

Cassell: So did you also have to review and approve the color silver prints before they went to the engraver?

Feldstein: No. I might have had the ability and maybe the power to do it, but I didn’t, because Marie was extremely confi40

not a happy one, and I had to go looking for new artists that had a humorous approach from there.

Cassell: So how did that come about? Who had the idea to do that?

Feldstein: Oh, I probably did. Me, I was a pushy Jewish kid back then, and I would do everything I could to sell our magazines because the more we sold, the more I would make, because Bill used to pay an editorial fee for writing and doing the actual work with the artists and everything and getting the book out.

Cassell: I guess that’s where the Usual Gang of Idiots came in.

Feldstein: Yeah, that’s where they all came into the office, not knowing there was a change of regime, thank goodness for me, and I discovered great talents like Don Martin, and Antonio Prohias, and eventually Sergio Aragones, Mort Drucker, and Bob Clarke, and Dave Berg. That was marvelous for me, and made me a great editor because I had such great talent working for me, including the writers, Stan Hart, and Larry Siegel, and Arnie Kogen, and Gary Belkin. These guys were also writing and winning Emmys in Hollywood, where they went eventually.

Cassell: Was Marie the only woman working in the office at the time?

Feldstein: No, there was a secretary and a receptionist. One of the secretaries, Nancy Siegel, became Bill Gaines’s second wife.

So she wasn’t the only one, but the others kind of kept out of the creativity and the comic book sector, and they were mostly handling subscriptions and people coming in, etc.

As Feldstein noted, EC managed to attract a remarkably talented stable of creators—editors, writers, and artists. By virtue of their style, many of the artists ended up working predominately in one or two books. But Jack Davis demonstrated the ability to effectively illustrate a variety of stories, from horror to war to science-fiction to humor, making him a particularly valuable member of the EC bullpen.

Cassell: Did you all ever socialize together, the people from the office?

Feldstein: Yes, we socialized. I rarely socialized with everybody, because I felt being an editor, having to approve of writers’ scripts, of their premises, etc., I couldn’t be their buddy at the same time. But back in the EC days, yes, we were a big family. Bill would have Christmas parties, and some outings he had. Later on, of course, he’d take everybody on the MAD trips, which were a gathering of everybody that was freelancing from all over the country to go together and have a great time with trips that were paid by the company. Like, I rented a boat on one and I used to take the guys out fishing, etc. Yeah, we were all friends. It was a family. And it was also a kind of a friendly competition. The guys would see what other guys were doing and try to compare, try to improve on what they were doing. Each guy was in competition with the other guy, and that’s how we were getting this fantastic artwork.

ONE OF MARIE’S CONTEMPORARIES at EC was the now-legendary artist Jack Davis, renowned for his work not only in horror comics, but also in the long-running humor magazine MAD and in commercial advertising. When Davis came to EC, he was not long out of school, but they welcomed him into the ranks. Over the ensuing years, Davis drew some of the most memorable horror stories that appeared in Tales From The Crypt, Vault of Horror, and Haunt of Fear, as well as the definitive rendition of the EC horror host, the Crypt Keeper. He also contributed to numerous other EC comics, including Frontline Combat, Incredible Science Fiction, and a fledgling MAD, beginning with the first issue. Davis talks about his experiences with EC and MAD, and his interactions with EC’s legendary colorist, Marie Severin.

Cassell: When you did socialize, did Marie typically participate?

Feldstein: Well, yeah. One of the highlights of each Christmas party was I would sit down and do covers we’d like to see, stuff we would never be able to publish. And that would be the theme for that Christmas, our new title. It would be awful, sexual innuendo. And one Christmas, Marie volunteered to do all of the display, and she did a bunch of cartoons of each of us, which have been reprinted, I understand. Yeah, she was quite creative. We loved her.

Interview with Jack Davis

Cassell: At the time she was doing coloring for you all, did you have any inkling that she also drew?

Feldstein: Oh, yeah. We knew that she did cute little drawings because she would draw them every once in a while, and then she did all that stuff for the Christmas party, and then she did one of those souvenir spreads. So we knew already that she was a talented gal, but we needed her to do the coloring. She wasn’t the kind of artist I needed for our stuff. It was cartoony and caricatury, and we were illustrators. In fact, the sad thing about most of the guys that worked for me when I finally got MAD, when Bill asked me to take over for Harvey, I could not employ them. I couldn’t use Johnny Craig in MAD because he was an illustrator. I couldn’t use most of the guys. I tried a few. A lot of the guys who had drawn stories for us became TV artists, like Angelo Torres. Other than that, the transition was

Dewey Cassell: I know you went to the University of Georgia. Did you have any formal artistic training?

Jack Davis: No, I really never had any. When I was very young, I think I was in grammar school, I attended the High Museum of Arts in Atlanta, which is now a big museum. But that’s my only exposure to any training or anything.

Cassell: I understand you won a contest, though, when you were young, with Tip Top Comics?

Davis: Well, that was when comic books first came out, and they had a thing in there where you could send off to put your artwork in that, and I did that, won the contest. They selected it, and I got a dollar and I got my name printed. I was very young. I think I copied an idea from somebody.

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Cassell: Did you do most of your drawing from home?

Davis: Yes, everything. I never worked in an office.

Cassell: [laughs] You’re a lucky man.

Davis: Oh, yes.

Cassell: When you got the work from EC, did it come in the format of a complete script?

Davis: Well, what happened, usually they had a story laid out for you, actually drawn on that page, about a three- or four-ply Strathmore with a regular finish, and you took that home, you read the script, and the lettering was already laid out for you, so all you did was illustrate what the story called for. And then you took it back in, and they looked it over and said, “Do this and do that,” and I changed it, and that’s about it.

Cassell: So when you got the art boards, the panels and everything were already laid out and the lettering was already there?

Davis: Yeah.

Cassell: So you would do the pencils, and then take them in, and they would check them over before you inked them?

Davis: Right.

Cassell: Well, that’s the definition of flattery. When you graduated, you did a couple of other comic book things before you went to EC, right?

Davis: Well, what I did, when I got out of Georgia, I went to the Art Students League in New York, and there I looked for work with the syndicates with no success. I had drawn up a lot of comic strips to show, and they just didn’t go. I got ready to go home, and then I went down to EC, which was on Lafayette Street down in Little Italy. And that was when they were doing the horror books, and they liked my work, and so I got a shot.

I picked up a script from there, because my work was, y’know, pretty horrible. But that’s where it started. But that is the only thing I had when I got out of Georgia. I had worked with the Herald Tribune for a while, and then it went kaput. I did backgrounds on The Saint, Leslie Charteris.

Cassell: And then did you take it back home to ink it and then bring the job back in?

Davis: I’d bring it home and work on it in a little studio room.

Cassell: Was there any space at all at the offices to do artwork?

Davis: Only to do corrections. And I think John Putnam, he was kind of the layout man who would lay things out for you. But that was the only board, at his board you made corrections or anything like that.

Cassell: I know John Putnam worked for MAD too, later on, right?

I didn’t realize that John worked for EC in the early days.

Davis: Oh, yes. Well, back when I first started with EC, John was there. And he was a paste-up man, he would do the paste-up type, the lettering, and all that. He was in the office.

Cassell: That was a great strip.

Davis: Mike Roy was the artist, and I just did the backgrounds.

I thought that would be great, but the Tribune folded. So I had to get back out on the street, and that’s when I went down to EC. And one thing led to another, and that’s where I stayed.

Cassell: Did it work pretty much the same way with covers? Did the cover already have the lettering and stuff on it when you got it?

Davis: Yeah, pretty much. The lettering and everything, all you did was do the illustration.

Cassell: So when you went to EC, who did you interview with?

Davis: I interviewed with Bill Gaines, the publisher, and Al Feldstein, who was the editor of all the horror books and everything.

Cassell: You mentioned that Harvey Kurtzman was there, and Al Feldstein. So who else was there?

Davis: Well, there was Johnny Craig, who was a fantastic artist, I don’t know what’s happened to him. We kind of stayed out of touch. But he did a lot of the horror stuff, and it was very good. And then, of course, Wally Wood was there, and a lot of the older guys, I forgot them. George Evans. But everybody would bring it in—we all were freelance, which you had most of your work come from EC.

Cassell: And what were the offices like on Lafayette Street?

Davis: Well, they were old. They had an old, rickety elevator, but it was the lone elevator, and it went up to the third and second floor, I think, and you went through kind of a glass office door to a regular office, which was pretty nice. Not real plush or whatever. It was not like uptown offices, but it was nice.

Cassell: And was it sort of a bullpen setting? Did all of the guys sort of sit around in one room?

Davis: No. They would come in and out, I think. They would pick up a script and then do it, and bring it back in, and pick up another one.

Cassell: So did you have an opportunity to socialize much with those guys?

42

Cassell: So when you were working for EC, I realize in some respects it was probably a job, but did you have an awareness of the social importance of the books that you were working on?

Davis: I don’t know. For some reason, I’ve always loved the horror biz—you know, the movies, Frankenstein and all that, when I was a kid, so that came pretty easy, and I enjoyed drawing it. But I did not really realize what an imprint it would have on the kids, or the public, or whatever. They had an investigation. I was kind of shocked, and then that was the end of the horror comics and the beginning of MAD magazine. So it all turned out very good, very well.

Davis: No, not at all, unless you came in the same time that they came in, and you’d probably go out for lunch. And Bill always had a Christmas party, and we always went to that. And if a magazine did well, he’d have a party or something and we would all get together. Everybody knew each other, but I don’t think there was any real socializing.

Cassell: Did you ever run into Marie at the parties that Bill had on occasion?

Davis: Oh, sure, she would be there.

Cassell: Did you live nearby the offices?

Davis: I lived up in Scarsdale, in Westchester, and that was about a 45-minute ride down to Canal Street and to Lafayette Street, where EC was, way downtown.

Cassell: I know at some point you ended up leaving EC for a period of time. Did you work on any of the “New Trend” books that came out after the horror books?

Davis: Yes. I think they tried to come out with some, and I don’t think they were very successful. They folded, and that’s when MAD took off.

Cassell: And were you typically working on more than one story at a time?

Davis: You’d take one job at a time.

Cassell: And you stayed with MAD for years, I know. Did you enjoy doing the humor stuff for MAD? Davis: Yeah, I did. I loved that. It came very easy and I enjoyed doing that.

Cassell: Did they sometimes alternate between the war books or the horror stories?

Davis: Well, it was up to Al Feldstein and Harvey Kurtzman to fit it into the schedule for an artist, because they planned who to give the next story to of whatever. We had no control over that.

Cassell: How did you get paid at EC? Davis: Well, what used to be, the way that things worked, you would go in and you would pick up a check right there on the spot. You didn’t have to bill or anything like

Cassell: But each time you went in, it might be a different kind of story, I take it?

Davis: Oh, yes.

Cassell: So when did you meet Marie Severin?

Davis: I actually met Marie when she was working in the office at EC, and she worked with, I think Johnny Craig came in a lot and they sort of worked together. And she did the coloring for the comics, to print. And she was very good at it. And she was the sister to John Severin, who is fantastic. He was a great cowboy/Western artist, and he knew his military, and was really good at detail. That was the only way I really came in contact with Marie.

Cassell: Was Marie already working there when you started at EC? Davis: I don’t think so. You would get a printed thing when the job would come in, and they’d color it. They would run a sort of a proof. In other words, bring the proofs back for you to indicate where the color was going to go. But I think Marie came in very early, I just don’t remember exactly when. She was always a very humorous, great personality, and everybody liked her. She was not a shy person. She was very talented with her coloring. I think she can draw, too.

Cassell: That she can. So what did you think of Marie’s coloring?

Davis: I think she was very artistic. She could add to the story by coloring the way the mood went. You know, if it was a bright day, she’d do that, but if it was gloomy or frightening, she would do that. She was very talented.

Cassell: I know when she later worked for Marvel, she did caricatures sometimes...

Davis: I think she did some of the EC group, too. A good sense of humor.

FACING PAGE Photo of Jack Davis at work on The Crypt of Terror. BOTTOM Caricature of Jack Davis by Marie from the 1953 EC Christmas party.

43

that. Bill would write out a check, and that was so great.

Unbelievable.

Cassell: So whenever you turned in a job, you got paid right then?

Davis: Right then. And they kept me busy. I never went with anybody else, with any other publisher, until I left MAD and went with Harvey Kurtzman to do Trump. Trump was a failure, and Humbug was a failure, and I went back to MAD. Cassell: So how quickly could you turn around a six- or seven-page story?

Davis: It would take a week. A page a day.

Cassell: And, if you don’t mind my asking, what sort of page rate were you getting back then?

Davis: Well, I don’t know. I think it started off at about fifty dollars a page, and then it climbed up to very good prices for MAD and the whole thing.

Cassell: Do you think that Bill had some sense that what you all were doing was really important? Because he was so meticulous about keeping copies of the comics, and keeping the original artwork.

Davis: You know, every time when you signed a check, you also signed a statement that said that Bill had the right to the artwork. And later on, before Bill died, he changed that, and so the artists could keep their originals, and I do have some of my originals.

Caricature of Jack Kamen by Marie from the 1953 EC Christmas party.

Cassell: From MAD? Davis: Yeah. I don’t draw for MAD any more. It’s kind of gotten raunchy. I love the guys down there, they’re all nice guys, but I just don’t want to work in something that’s kind of that rough.

I’m a pretty conservative kind of guy. [laughs] I’m 81. I’ve had a good life and enjoyed it.

same jobs. But I really couldn’t recall any specific memories unless there was a job that you can tell me about where maybe I was a participant. That would be it. It would be something that I did with her.

One of the things that made EC comics so compelling was that the EC artists had such distinctive, unique styles. You could pick out a Jack Davis story, no matter the genre. Another EC artist with a distinctive style was Jack Kamen, whose gift for realism made the stories he illustrated all the more engaging.

Sultan: I know when you were working in the EC days for Bill Gaines, that you worked on titles like Crime SuspenStories and Shock SuspenStories.

Kamen: Yeah.

Sultan: Where did you used to work out of?

Kamen: I never worked in the office. I was a homebody.

Sultan: Did you used to send your work in? Or did you ever come in at all to the office?

Kamen: At times I did, but very rarely. Al Feldstein would be the guy you would run into. If I did anything for Bill Gaines, it would have been through Al Feldstein, who was always his advisor and the man to accomplish the storylines or something that he wanted done.

ANOTHER OF MARIE’S COMPATRIOTS from her tenure are EC was artist Jack Kamen. Kamen had a clean, extremely realistic style that made his work in the EC horror comics particularly shocking. In this short interview with Aaron Sultan, Kamen talks about his days at EC and his impressions of Marie.

Sultan: Did you ever meet Marie in person?

Kamen: I did meet her occasionally, but that would have been at the office, if she was doing any coloring on work that I was doing at the time. But, quite frankly, she was on her own. It was never a question of whether it was good, bad, or whatever it was, because whatever she did was very satisfactory. We

Interview with Jack Kamen Aaron Sultan: What do you remember about Marie Severin?

Jack Kamen: Being in the business with her, and we were working on some assignments, or we were working on the 44

Original EC color guides by Marie.

Courtesy Heritage Auctions.

Sultan: And then, after you left EC, what did you do after that?

Kamen: After EC? Well, I went straight freelance, and I was doing national ads. I wouldn’t have been a major supplier, but I did paintings for Mack Truck, Smith Corona, and U.S. Steel.

never bumped heads on any ideas as to what colors should be, this, that, and the other thing. And there was never any problem that I know of, with the coloring or anything she did like that, but it was always the right thing, the right way. She was very great to work with, and there wasn’t any tension or anything like that.

Sultan: Did you mostly do that for the rest of your career, or did you do any more comic book work?

Kamen: No. When I left EC, I left comics completely.

Sultan: Did you ever interact socially with Marie?

Kamen: Yeah. There were office parties and things like that, and there would be times over lunch, we’d meet casually. Very often.

Sultan: Do you still actively draw for some clients today, or no?

Kamen: No, I’m completely retired.

Sultan: I guess you always had a reputation of drawing beautiful women. Is that right?

Kamen: That was my specialty.

With a stable of artists like Kamen, Davis, Feldstein, and John Severin, and the coloring of Marie, it’s no wonder EC was such a success. But there was a price for success. The suppositions of psychiatrist Fredric Wertham in his book, The Seduction of the Innocent, and the obsession of the 1954 Senate Hearings on Juvenile Delinquency spelled the beginning of the end of EC. The testimony of Bill Gaines, while well intended, did not help the cause. Gaines would attempt to adapt to the resulting Comics Code, but no one wanted to read a tamer version of EC. In the end, the only thing to survive was MAD, which became a blackand-white magazine, not subject to the Code. Black-and-white magazines, however, had no need for a colorist, and so like many of the EC artists, Marie found herself looking for work.

Sultan: How did that come about? Just naturally?

Kamen: It was a knack I had, and one time when I was working for Bill, I was doing advertising art, and national ads, when you’re doing national ads, the women in the art, they’ve gotta be pretty, they’ve gotta be beautiful, they’ve gotta be…

Well, you know, you’ve seen the ads. It’s not by accident. And they always used artists who can do that type of thing, and I was always in the line of that, wherever it was, whether it was for fashion, or for articles, or anything like that involving women.

45

As a bonus, here is an article transcribed from a telephone conversation with Marie by John Province, who published it in 1995 in issue #36 of the longrunning publication of the Comic and Fantasy Art Amateur Press Association, which was founded by EC historian Roger Hill in 1985. For more information about the CFA-APA, see their website at cfa-apa. blogspot.com. The article is presented verbatim.

“ THE ARTisTs Of

that smelled and also bleached everything out, the black art as well. I did get some specific reference for some of the Kurtzman war stories, but on the whole the coloring was left to me, but of course it was edited.

Covers were carefully handled. Even the simpler printing process got some very nice effects. Kurtzman colored his own art, especially on covers, which was good because they really turned out lovely. Some of the other artists sent in color roughs for their covers which was helpful, but most of them left it up to Bill and Al’s judgment or Harvey’s, or myself. I remember Ingles sent in a couple of cover guides that were gorgeous and really moody, but his watercolors were so muddy that we knew that the separators would never follow them. I really worked on following his style as you couldn’t depend on getting a good result by expecting the separators, who really weren’t trained artists, to second-guess the work. Davis sent in a beautiful rough for a war cover of a close up of a soldier’s head, and we used that as-is. Most of the guys really had a good color sense. Many comics are colored so beautifully. I thought of playing with Russ Cochran’s black-and-white reprint volumes, just to see how the stories would look.

The EC comics cost ten cents and had four complete stories, four different artists’ moods, etc. The readers were satisfied and came back for more. I’m sure that today one of the six-page story plots would be stretched to a mini-series, or a four-issue super-duper comic book series. But not to criticize. Comics today are making more money than the EC staff ever dreamed of.

Because the stories were polished and complete in EC, they were very professional and distinct from each other. I believe they added to the growing fan’s choice of EC. The horror comics were really easy to see. Artists gave you wonderful lighting and moods. Graham Ingles’ work should’ve had the modern reproductions and some of the weird colors possible today that would have made his stories even more outstanding. He was pretty easy to color and his art was very strong. Even Kamen, who has given stories usually of normal looking people in situations, your average U.S. Citizen, the stories would blow up in the end in some bizarre horrible ending, which worked very well in color.

EC COMiCs”

by Marie Severin

SOME FORTY YEARS AFTER the EC Comics, my head spins when I thumb through a catalogue like the Kitchen Sink Press and see how the graphics have grown and what’s available today. It has leaped forward like the space program, so bear with me as I ramble a bit about the way we were!

I was introduced to the business when my brother suggested I color stories for the EC line. This was about 1952. The stories were sent to Chemical Color in Bridgeport, Connecticut where the black and color plates were made. The art was shot from the black plates and silver prints were made the same size as the printed page. There they were hand-colored and this coloring was used as a guide for the separators who made (by hand) three different sheets for each color in 25%, 50%, and 100% tones that were then shot and made into plates with the black plate and sent to the printer. I believe at the time this was Buffalo or Buffalo Press or something. Very primitive compared to today’s glorious hues and whizbang airbrush and glitz paper stock. The covers of our comics then, in the 1950s, weren’t as classy as some of the future fanzines.

On occasion, when Kelly green suits and yellow cars or just Mickey Mouse type coloring on realistic stories would appear, the EC boys would have a fit. They wanted some control so that the coloring would help tell the story along with the text and the art. I’m sure we weren’t the only ones who colored their stories, but at the time it was well noticed because I think we really clarified some of the stories. You could see some of the details a little better and things like that. Remember, there were no Xerox machines and the copying process was a photostat house that you had to send out to, or the silverprints provided

by Chemical Color. Silverprint paper was not the ideal thing to work on, as sometimes chemicals would be left on a page by a fingerprint or something. This would eat up the color! If I made a mistake I had to bleach it out by using that horrible Clorox 46

Krigstein was difficult, as I sensed this was artwork left uncolored by the artist and I had to find out what he had in mind. I imagine Kurtzman had been the same way.

Science-fiction was great fun and I loved the new concept; Woody with the spaceship interiors and weird wild shots of space. Same with Orlando, similar, but he had his own way and did some great stories. Davis who was into all the books, was versatile and easy to color, as his inking was so powerful. Very much like a Kirby story—hard to ruin.

One thing about working at EC was that you never got bored! No two artists were alike and each one was a challenge. The hardest to color was Woody. In sciencefiction, my mind would see ten ways to approach one panel! He gave you areas for highlights; you could color it or take it or leave it. He had marvelous growths—trees and trunks and critters crawling about. In coloring this stuff, you had to consider if it would detract from the storytelling. Usually belts, buttons, scarves, jackets, and weapons would appear and disappear, and change on every page, so you could be sure that readers would notice throughout the whole story and ask, “Where did the hero’s red scarf go?” and “Who’s that guy—he doesn’t have a red medal on his chest now!” But no matter, he was always good and looked marvelous at EC. Williamson was delightful in science-fiction but I had to be careful as his style was delicate and we didn’t want to lose anything with heavy color. He put a lot of energy into his work, and his inking was fine and delicate. Boy, could he give in the finished product! It was really nice looking. Johnny Craig could do no wrong. His art was crisp and neat. He was crisp and neat, and did everything well.

If only he could have been faster we could have seen much more of his work. He was a very nice fellow. I love the art in Aces High; a delight to color and Evans and Severin put you right in the cockpit! Civil War stories were a bit tedious a times, it had to be so accurate. It looked pretty good, but it was a bit too much. Reed Crandall was a real pro and I liked his style, which glowed when it was colored. I only colored Feldstein’s covers, which were pure comic art, excellent reproduction and well thought out. Too bad he didn’t have time to draw. There was a lot going on inside his head I bet, and he could only share it in writing. He was patient and taught me a lot about comics.

I preferred Severin and Elder layouts and storytelling, they added many gags, as we all know. I had to be careful to maintain the story continuity and not lose these side gags.

The work took time to color but it was very satisfying and the fans loved it. Last but not least, Severin (who was the pick of the bunch to me of course); the life and energy of his work was fun to color. The detail and texture gave such reality that his art would and could stand alone.

Besides coloring I did “Girl Friday” tasks and research for Kurtzman. He sent me with a hideous duffel bag filled with books and cameras to the National Guard Amory

to photograph a solider assembling and disassembling a bazooka to be used in a war story. It was not stylish in the 1950s to carry a soldier’s duffel bag over your shoulder while wearing a dress and heels. I was forced to be a forerunner of the “everybody carries big stuff” generation.

As you can probably gather, I really enjoyed working there. Harvey was a really shy guy. I don’t know what he was like later, I didn’t know him that well later. At times he would change into this hysterically funny person when acting out a story. He was once describing to me a H.H. Bateman gag drawing (an English cartoonist from Punch during the Twenties). Harvey turned into this drawing. He turned into one of his own drawings and he was absolutely hysterical! It was an amazing transformation. Gloria Steinem worked in later years for Harvey. That must have been interesting.

One thing I learned at EC right at the very beginning of my little comic book career was that although the artist is the stagemanager, the actor, the lighting director, and in charge of background and scenery and all of that, without a good story—forget it, and vice-versa.

In the office we had Mr. Lee who was the office manager, a fine gentleman and really the only completely normal person. He was very patient and tolerated us all.

John Putnam came with MAD and was a splendid teacher who taught me a lot. By degrees I got to know the artists as they came and went with their stories. We’d have lunches with the gang and all this revolved around one person—Bill Gaines. Bill was a very unusual man. He was intelligent, talented, generous, and thoughtful. I think he realized that this philosophy helped him enjoy life, and did he ever.

The unfortunate Senate hearings that deflated the industry for so long showed Bill Gaines bravely defending our little comic book industry, which was blamed for the degeneration of our youth. Well, they censored comics, and guess what? We grew up a worse generation than had gone before. Now they can only blame TV, but I think TV can more than defend itself because it has more money and a lot more spokespersons.

Bill was overjoyed when he was given a Horror Hall of Fame award on TV. The ECs are long gone, but have generated a lot of entertainment on TV, and in movies and have inspired people like Spielberg and that type of entertainment. It’s really great. He’s vindicated his work and his people. Bill is more famous that Kurtzman, I guess.

I remember how struck I was by his death. On the radio, Imus, whose humor I find very much the same satire and method of madness, said, “Well, Bill Gaines died… I liked him!” And so did we all, so did we all.

­— Marie Severin

The horror days were behind her, but Marie’s unique experience at EC earned her a reputation for excellence among her peers, and prepared her well for a lengthy career in comics. All it took was another well-placed word on the part of her brother, and Marie would meet the next great influence on her life, a man named Stan Lee. 47

Parody advertisement from Timely Comics’ humor magazine SNAFU #2 attributed to Marie.

48

3 In-Between The 1950s were a period of transition for Marie.

With the demise of the color comics of EC, Marie went looking for greener pastures. In addition to a stint with a greeting card company and some freelance work, what she found along the way were a couple of interesting jobs that enabled her to continue to hone her talents and broaden her skillset, in preparation for the job of a lifetime yet to come.

TiMElY/ATlAs COMiCs

feelings about leaving there. As a matter of fact, I really missed them because it was a lot of fun. I went up to Stan because there wasn’t that much going on at EC, as I said, and he wanted a good colorist, and he knew I knew reproduction on comics. Anyway, I worked for Stan, then, and when the books really got in trouble, the whole bullpen was done away with at Timely, as Marvel was known then, and Stan felt terrible. They had some books going, but it wasn’t enough to have a bullpen staff, letterers in-house, etc. So it was mostly freelancers.

Cassell: Do you know what year you left EC? Severin: I think it was ’53, ’54.

Cassell: And how long were you with Timely until they folded?

Severin: Oh, I think it was maybe… If it was a year, I’d be surprised. I don’t know.

BEFORE THERE WAS MARVEL Comics, there was Timely. Timely Comics was founded by publisher Martin Goodman in 1939.

The first issue of Marvel Comics published later that year launched the seminal characters Sub-Mariner and the original Human Torch. Goodman then hired Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, who created Captain America. Goodman also hired his cousin, Stanley Lieber (a.k.a. Stan Lee), who started out as an assistant, but graduated to editor in 1942. For several years, Timely enjoyed success with its super-hero triumvirate. But the end of the war meant the end of the super-hero craze (at least for the time being) and Timely diversified its line of comics, focusing on imitation of its competitors as the sincerest form of flattery (and the quickest way to profitability.) When EC began to decline, John Severin found work at Timely. And Marie was not far behind.

In this short interview, Marie talks about her brief tenure freelancing at Timely Comics.

Cassell: And what kind of work did you do at Timely?

Severin: Well, I did coloring, I knew production, I could do corrections. I didn’t do the corrections like Maneely and my brother did. They were the staff artists at the time, and they had a bullpen of letterers where they did an awful lot of lettering on staff. But I was there doing pretty much what I did at EC. And there were plenty of comics to color, but then everything started to fold in, and when I came back later, comics were picking up again, and that’s when I started really full-time at Timely/Marvel, and it worked out fine. I stayed there a long, long time.

Cassell: Tell me about Joe Maneely. I understand he was quite an interesting man and, unfortunately, died an early death.

Severin: Yeah, he had an accident going home on the train.

He lived in New Jersey, I believe, and he was walking, I think, between the cars. It was awful. I was at my brother’s house when Maneely’s wife called up John. John and he were friendly, y’know. Maneely was an awfully nice guy. Funny, so talented, and, like my brother, they’d both play in the office. One would draw something and the other one would ink it, and one would draw the arm, one would draw the leg. And they really produced some great stuff, but they were kidding around. And they were so quick, and their techniques, although they were different in drawing, were excellent. The pencils were great. And it would be fun. They made the bullpen very pleasant. But it was

Interview with Marie Cassell: How did you first come to be at Timely?

Severin: Well, I came and went from there, because that was when the Comics Code came in the Fifties, and I was working at EC, and EC was put out of business. All they had left was MAD. My brother John went up to Stan Lee and worked there on staff, and I thought, “Gee, maybe that’s a good idea,” because there wasn’t that much for me to do anymore at EC. The coloring was gone. And I was doing quite a bit of production on MAD magazine, but I thought I would be more financially secure with more stuff to do. And there was no hard 49

a nice bullpen, anyway, there was a lot of nice guys there. I enjoyed it. I was the only woman in the back having a ball.

While at Timely, Marie not only worked in production, but she did some artwork for the company as well. In order to get the best postal rate (like EC), Timely comics typically included one or Cassell: Do you remember who else was two pages of text stories (sometimes there? written by Stan Lee) with titles like “The Severin: Joe Letterese. Ray Holloway was Remedy Oil” and “Treasure Trunk.” The the black guy. He was a doll. Everybody text stories were often accompanied by liked Ray. He had seven kids, he beat my an illustration, and the same story might brother. My brother had six. A goodrun in more than one title. Credits were looking guy, too. He was so much fun. rarely provided for the artwork in those Danny Crespi. Oh, I see their faces before days, but some of those illustrations of me, but I can’t remember their names. text stories appear to have been done There was another letterer there. I did

by Marie. That distinctive artistic style some work for him. When everything had already begun to emerge. Those text collapsed, I went into a greeting card stories would continue to be reprinted in company in Brooklyn. I did some work Marvel comics until 1963. there. I was pretty good at doing ideas In 1955, Timely launched a short-lived for greeting cards, and it was a nice little black-and-white humor magazine called bundle at the time. Erica Tell, she was SNAFU, designed to compete with MAD. It the head of the production department, was written by Stan Lee and illustrated by for the letterers, and making sure that Joe Maneely and “Johnny” Severin. Marie everything was mailed out properly and was credited as “Production,” but it seems stuff. She was a little German lady, a she did some drawing for the magazine German Jew, I guess, and she had been in as well. For example, in the second issue a concentration camp and survived, and (of a total of three), there is an advertiseshe was quite a character. Oh, Chris Rule! ment for “Posty Roasties” on the inside He was an older guy. He was an excellent back cover that bears Marie’s style of art letterer. And he came from money, and and humor. A foreshadowing of her later then, in the Depression I guess they lost humor work for Stan with Marvel. a bundle of it, but he was very aristoIn addition to comic books, Martin cratic, and he always, before he went Goodman also produced a bevy of men’s home from work, would be downstairs adventure magazines, such as Man’s World, in the local—well, it was a bar, but it was Male, and Stag. The magazines included a cocktail lounge, really. But he would articles about things like wilderness suralways have a martini before he would vival and political commentary, as well as go home. And he was very nice. He was fiction stories, interspersed with cheeseused to that kind of thing. I’d never been cake photographs and artistic illustrathere. I waited outside to see Gene Kelly tions. The painted illustrations were often when I was a teenager, but I had never provided by some of the same artists who gone inside. But, anyway, Chris was fun.

TOP “Lana’s Helper” from Melvin were drawing the comic books. Marie Maneely was great, he was so talented, the Monster #3, one of numerherself contributed political cartoons to and he and my brother got along so well. ous illustrations Marie did for the magazines, combining her gift for They sat next to one another, and they text stories appearing in Timely caricature with her wry sense of humor. would slip pages back and forth and see Comics titles. Timely illustration In the early 1950s, Martin Goodman who could do it faster or what have you. courtesy of Greg Gatlin and distributed comics through his own disIt was a nice place to work. And there www.atlastales.com. tribution company, Atlas (which led to the was an apartment house close by. There BOTTOM Cover of The Story of company sometimes being referred to as was this lady that I guess she changed Checks comic book designed by Atlas Comics).

In the mid-fifites, Goodman her clothes or something. But sometimes Marie and illustrated by brother contracted with American News Company at lunchtime they’d all be crowded by John for the Federal Reserve Bank. to distribute the comics, presumably to the back window, and I worked in the save money. However, American was sued back, back there. When I would come by the Justice Department in 1956. American lost the lawsuit and in, they’d all go back to their desks. And I said, “What are you the company folded, leaving Goodman without a distributor. His looking at?” And I never saw her. [laughs] I always missed it. But only option was to sign with Independent News Distributors, the they were great. Funny guys. They’d be hanging out the window distributor for DC Comics, which restricted his output to eight to look, y’know? Maybe she came home for lunch and changed titles a month. With a dramatically reduced revenue stream and her clothes, I don’t know. I’d come in and everybody’s scattering. a surplus of stories in inventory, Goodman laid off most of the Today the gals would be right there with the them, there’d be creative and production staff in 1957, including Marie. nothing said about it, y’know? It’s a different world.

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“THE sTORY Of CHECKs” WITH THE CUTBACK AT Timely Comics, Marie found herself once again looking for work, and she found it in the most unlikely of places—with the Federal Reserve Bank in New York.

The Federal Reserve Banks are part of the central banking system in the United States, created by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 to serve as a safe depository for federal money and a “lender of last resort.” There is a Federal Reserve Bank in each of twelve districts, responsible for regulating the commercial banks in its region.

Marie also worked for Filmfax Productions for a while.

Filmfax produced film strips, typically educational or literary in nature, targeted for distribution to schools and libraries. Titles included “Addition and Subtraction of Integers” and “How to honor and display the Flag.”

In this short interview, Marie talks about her experience with the Federal Reserve Bank and Filmfax.

print order of a comic, because it went to all twelve Federal Reserve System banks, which then distributed it to their local banks, so it was distributed all over the place It was a good deal. Except people don’t even know about it now. This was so many years ago, 30 years ago.

Cassell: We take it for granted now.

Severin: Oh, yeah. Well, you know, still people are funny about their money, and you can’t blame them. If you’ve got something in your bank account and all of a sudden there’s a number there, “What is this? What does it mean? This is my money!” So that was the story of the federal segment of my career.

Cassell: What was it like at the Federal Reserve Bank?

Severin: It was like working in Rome or something, for the church. You had to do everything so good and nice and no fooling around. But it was the Federal Reserve, representing the government, money, and all that razzmatazz, the bank’s money. It was very prestigious. But the people were nice, it’s just that they had to behave themselves. There was no nonsense like in the comics business.

Interview with Marie Cassell: What did you do at the Federal Reserve Bank?

Severin: This friend of mine was the public information head for the Federal Reserve Bank, and I was a staff artist.

Cassell: How did you end up working for Filmfax Productions?

Severin: This guy was doing a film strip, and he wanted me to do the art on the film strip. I think the Federal Reserve Bank hired him to do it. But he worked with me, and then he hired me away from the Fed.

Cassell: How did “The Story of Checks” come about?

Severin: Believe it or not, they wanted to put out a comic book on checks, on the new coding on the bottom of the checks.

You had that little black line of numbers on the bottom of your checks. Well, when that first came out, people were very shaky about anything printed on a check that they didn’t know what it meant. They don’t want something they don’t understand, they don’t want somebody being able to read a code that might tell how much money they had or something personal. The Fed wanted to explain it to the public, so we put out a comic book explaining what this code was, what it was for, and how and why this was used by the banks. It was to facilitate the speed of handling the checks process. In other words, they were trying to eliminate what we used to call “float,” that money would exist on the East Coast, but still exist on the West Coast when it was really paid out. So with this code, it electronically could process a check. I don’t know whether you’re following this.

Cassell: What kind of film strips did you do at Filmfax?

Severin: I did several strips. I did a whole series on mythology, and then they told me that my artwork was too comic-booky, that mythology should be a little more dignified, I guess. But mine was accurate! I had loaded a lot. Like, when I did this old lady, she rubbed a magic lamp or some crazy thing, and I did it, I thought, very dramatically, and she was grimacing and really emotional and stuff. And they said, “The school system may not like that much emotion going on.” And I said, “Okay.” [grumbles] Toned it down. In those days people were [conservative]—now, look what they do on TV and everything else. People turned inside out.

Cassell: Oh, yeah, the ABA routing code.

Severin: Yeah. Anyway, that was the Federal Reserve’s book put out to explain that to the public so they weren’t thinking that we were trying to pull something on them. And I designed the book. I did the storytelling and the whole thing, had it cleared, which was, like, 32 rooms to the papacy to have a new commandment done. My God, all the money spent. Having a baby wouldn’t take this long, y’know? But we got it okayed. And then I gave my brother the artwork because he’d get it done a heck of a lot faster than I would.

I said, “John, would you draw this?” And he grabbed it. So that was good. He illustrated it, and it’s called “The Story of Checks.” And John did a great job on it, and it was a big hit. I forget now the copies. It was, at the time, the biggest

Marie reportedly also did some television graphics for the bank. As of 1975, the Severin’s version of “The Story of Checks” was in its sixth printing. The story was later periodically updated with new text and artwork from various artists.

The last version was produced in 2008. There are several comic books explaining the workings of the Federal Reserve System still available for free on their website in electronic format.

While Marie was trying to bring some humor to the business of banking and filmstrips, that struggling company called Timely transformed into Marvel Comics and took the industry by storm with new characters like the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man. And so around 1965, Marie returned to the hallowed halls of Marvel and the tutelage of editor Stan Lee. 51

Cover of Kull the Destroyer #19 by Marie. Courtesy of Mike Collins.

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4 Heroes Super-heroes had enjoyed tremendous popularity since 1938 and the introduction of Superman in the first issue of Action Comics. Their popularity waned following the end of World War II, and the heroes took a backseat to horror and crime comics. But the Comics Code that brought an end to EC and other publishers in the mid-1950s opened up the door for the return of the super-hero. The publication of Showcase #4 in 1956 is widely regarded as the beginning of the Silver Age of Comics. It featured an updated version of the Golden Age Flash, re-envisioned by DC Comics editor Julie Schwartz, and the super-hero was once again on the rise.

that a super-hero could have problems, just like everyone else. The Thing wasn’t happy about his powers and he often argued with Mr. Fantastic, who was trying to cure him, and the Human Torch, who loved to tease him. Spider-Man’s alter ego, Peter Parker, struggled with guilt over causing the death of his uncle, while trying to go to school and hold down a job (with a boss who hated his other identity.) Sure, the Flash was often late to work or to meet Iris, but that irony did not compare with the pathos of the heroes in the burgeoning Marvel Universe. Marvel humanized the super-hero without diminishing their powers. And they did it with snappy dialogue and dynamic artwork that captivated a new generation of readers.

Over the years, Marie played a variety of roles at Marvel Comics, from production and coloring to penciling and inking (and even lettering on occasion) to art director and special projects. In this interview, Marie talks about her return to Marvel Comics and many of the people she worked with along the way.

Drawing super-hero comics is a skill, however, that not every artist possesses. Many artists who demonstrated exceptional ability in other genres floundered when trying to draw men in tights. The challenge is to make them look exciting and yet credible while flying around and clobbering fanatical costumed bad guys. This was especially true as older readers, many of them college students, joined the ranks of comic fandom. No small feat, and yet one that Marie Severin mastered with seeming ease.

Marie drew a variety of heroes over the years. She is most closely identified with the Incredible Hulk, Sub-Mariner, and Doctor Strange, but she also drew characters like the Cat as well as Kull the Conqueror, with her brother John. Her tenure is regarded as a high water mark for each of them. What they all have in common is that they are characters of Marvel Comics, the company with which Marie would remain for thirty years.

Interview with Marie Cassell: So you eventually left Filmfax and went back to work for Stan?

Severin: Yeah, I guess I did. Anyway, I was back with Stan.

Cassell: Who was there when you went back the second time?

Severin: Well, pretty much the same crew. John and I. When I went back, I think Maneely had died by then, and John was freelancing because he was well-established with his characters, and he was doing fine. He lived in Jersey, so he didn’t have to commute anymore, which was nice. I lived in Brooklyn at the time, in the old homestead. I really was reared from the same area, so there was no change for me.

MARVEl COMiCs

Cassell: Was Don Heck there?

Severin: Gee, I don’t think so. I think he was freelance, and these guys would be [working] outside. In the bullpen, you didn’t see them going in and out of Stan’s office, and they usually did not have the occasion to come back and talk to the production people unless one of the artists wanted to see one of the artists that happened to be working there that day.

Sometimes they’d come in and they’d give them a table to

WHEN MARIE RETURNED TO the company once known as Timely/Atlas, things were already in full swing. The combined creative genius of writer Stan Lee and artists Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and others, had produced a succession of successful new super-hero comic books, based on a new concept—the notion 53

and it was devastating because everybody liked his Spider-Man so much. And poor Romita had to follow that. But his stuff really took off, and it’s his Spider-Man representing Marvel in later years. And that was almost like the company trademark, y’know? Poor Romita was such a perfectionist, though, that he wasn’t as fast as the other guys. But the other guys were used to making up fast stuff, and Romita was doing a wonderful job.

And it was great, it was just constant attention to put the book out because he did such a good job.

finish some changes and stuff that Stan wanted, or if they were on staff, some guy might come back and say, “Hey, let’s have lunch.” For the most part, I didn’t have lunch with the guys.

Remember, I was younger, and the guys wanted to be with the guys. And I wasn’t doing any artwork at the time, I was in production. And sketches and stuff like that. But it was the guys.

Cassell: What about Romita? When did he come in?

Severin: I don’t know. I think he was doing freelance all this time, but I probably, if I saw him, it might have been passing him in the hall. This is before I went on the staff later on, where he and I worked in the same room for a couple years.

But I didn’t really meet him until, geez, when Stan was at 635 Madison. Well, I met him later on, and then he came on staff.

And then we were in the same room, and then they moved us to another building, and then all the artists were in the same room. Herb Trimpe came along. I guess Danny Crespi was still around. Artie Simek was in the old bullpen, too. That was the one before. He was a funny guy.

Cassell: Tell me about Steve Ditko. What was he like?

Severin: I have no idea because I only met him at a party at Roy’s house. I would see him when he came in. I’ve spoken to him on the phone maybe three times. I had no reason to know him or deal with him directly, because he was phasing himself out at that time. But, also, the short time that I was there, I didn’t have occasion to have any dealings [with him]. He was just considered so bloody talented, it was marvelous, and then when he left, Stan really felt bad.

Cassell: I take it he and Stan just had irreconcilable differences?

Severin: Yeah, something. I really don’t know, because I didn’t want to be nosy, and Ditko, he is different from most of us, in that he doesn’t take advantage of people. He could do artwork and sell pages for thousands of dollars, and he just doesn’t do it. It’s sad. I think he could be pretty well off if he wanted to.

But he has something about the comics, and nobody has ever explained it to me. Just one of the mysteries.

Cassell: So what was it like? You must have been there when Marvel was coming up with the beginnings of the super-heroes, right?

Severin: Well, not at first [at Timely]. I remember one of the VPs came in and said, “Why don’t we revive the Sub-Mariner?”

And they thought it was too old-fashioned. They were doing mostly crime and funny books and stuff. It was later [at Marvel]. I wasn’t there when Stan really got the super-heroes going. I think he claimed that it was almost a lark to do the Fantastic Four. “Hey, we can put something like this out, let’s see if it works.” And it worked. And when I came back, the super-heroes were just taking off. All the characters Stan was developing.

They brought the Sub-Mariner back, and Iron Man, Daredevil, Spider-Man. I was there a little while, and Ditko left,

Cassell: I understand that, during the early days at Marvel, there were some guys like Don Heck—.

Severin: Oh, yeah. He was good. Very reliable, very nice.

Cassell: That Stan would come to if something got behind schedule, or somebody missed a deadline,

1969 Merry Marvel Marching Society promotional piece

by Marie. Courtesy of Jon B. Cooke.

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that Heck was one of those guys that Stan used as a pinch hitter.

Was that your sense, as well?

Severin: No, because I really wasn’t that in on the production of the books at that time. I wasn’t that close to doing the stuff that I was, say, a year later. I was pretty new there, so I didn’t know the politics or any of that stuff going on with Stan and the guys. I’d hear what they’d say in the bullpen.

Cassell: When everybody was working in the bullpen, did they have the radio going, or did they just talk?

Severin: No, they worked and they—well, they’d have the radio on if something was going on, but it was distracting for some people to have that going on, so if you had it [on], it was low.

And I could see that. If you’re working alone, you can have the radio on as much as you want, but I don’t remember hearing specific programs. Although, if a news event was going on, they’d all want to know about it. And the baseball, I forgot, my God, the baseball. They were, “Shut up! Don’t say anything!” [laughs] It was really funny. They all loved the baseball games in the summertime. But it didn’t slow down the work, not at all.

Cassell: Were they Yankees fans or Mets fans?

Severin: I don’t know. I was a Dodger fan.

Marie’s card from the 1992 Famous Comic Book Creators card set.

Cassell: That’s true, back then they could have been Dodgers fans.

Severin: Yeah. And, I’m sure, the Giants, of course, too.

Remember, we had guys from the five boroughs, so you’ve got the Giants from the Bronx, and so on. They were good.

What do I know? I didn’t buy them. In my neighborhood I knew a couple of guys who sold them, and that’s my experience of how they were displayed. Now, many stores might have done it differently.

Cassell: So when you first went back to Marvel, and started working, you said you were doing production kind of work. And coloring, too?

Severin: Oh, yes. There were times when Stan Lee liked Stan Goldberg’s coloring better than mine in many cases, and he said, “What do you have gray on the sidewalk for? Don’t put gray on the cover. You’ve got to have bright colors.” “All right, bright colors.” At EC we tried to be very realistic, but Stan’s books were selling, so you don’t question anybody. You go for broke.

Cassell: Did they try to keep the masthead the same color from month to month?

Severin: No, what I’m saying is that if September had a dark blue sky and a spaceship on the cover this month, then the masthead would be white, or yellow with a red outline and a shadow on the lettering. The next month they’d want it to be a light color, and an ink-colored masthead.

Cassell: So they went for contrast.

Severin: Yes, because that’s how the kid was saying, “Is that this month’s book or last month’s? Oh, that’s this month!

That’s different. I remember.” Sometimes kids would remember the number or what was on the cover. But at that time they wanted it to rotate from hot colors to, next month, cold colors.

Cassell: I picked up a copy of the Hulk the other day and the sky on the cover was yellow.

Severin: Well, whatever works. Sometimes that is because the masthead had to [be different]—that was a horrible pain in the neck if you had a good looking cover, and I would look at it [and think], “Oh, what I’m going to do this!” And then they’d say, “Well, the last masthead had a red lettering, so we can’t have a dark sky. You won’t be able to read it.” I’d have to put a light sky behind it, because Stan—at that time, they said you only see a certain amount of newsstand comics, and you always saw the lettering, and if it didn’t pop out, you don’t see the book.

So you want the upper part, the name, to be outstanding.

Like, if it’s Spider-Man, you want them to see that and not buy Superman. So the whole thing was to have the name, and that was the period when the books were displayed like that. But after they started being in the comic book stores, they didn’t care if you repeated, not the exact coloring from the previous month on the cover, but you could have something similar, because they were looking at them in bins and not up on the wall or on a rack where all you see is the title. I think that’s where a lot of the sales were at that time, to my knowledge.

Cassell: Sounds like a good strategy.

Severin: Well, in those days the candy stores were the source of the comics. There were no comics stores, per se. And kids would go in, and space was very limited, so you had to sock it to them. So a lot of times that influenced the mood of the cover, because sometimes you’d want a graveyard scene [and think], “Oh, wouldn’t that be great with a black or a gray scene going into misty fog on the bottom, and then the lettering could be yellow.” But maybe last month it was a blue sky, a deep blue, and light letters, so you didn’t want it to be similar.

That’s what they used to do. Now, I don’t think they give a hoot. They were on #79 of Captain America and now they’re on #157, and they may not care whether or not it’s the same background, or similar.

55

been there. And Goodman, he let Stan run [because] he’s doing great, y’know? He once said, “Heck, I hired a 12-yearold.” And it’s true, because Stan was writing and appealing to all these 12-year-olds, and older boys, for the most part. Stan went crazy. Stan kept his mind young and active, and that’s why he was able to do things like this. He was a walking hand grenade.

Cassell: When did you start actually drawing for Marvel?

Severin: When Steve Ditko left. Well, I did a lot of sketches and stuff, ideas for covers. I could sketch them real fast, Stan would approve it, and we’d send them out. And I was faster at it than Romita, although he did some. Well, I don’t know whether he was on staff yet. But, anyway, his finished art is what Stan loved about his stuff, and he also did very well plotting stories with Stan. They worked together, they were joined at the hip with Spider-Man, and that’s what made it huge at the time.

Cassell: I think you’re right. DC was mostly a bunch of old guys who thought like old guys.

Severin: Yeah. And they hung onto their power, and it was just Stan. And Roy was wacky, too, but he wasn’t as silly as Stan, but he was there with him. He revived so much stuff, and introduced the sword-and-sorcery stuff, and he came right at the right time. I give him a lot of credit.

Cassell: How was Stan to work with, as a writer and editor?

Severin: You had to leave a lot of room sometimes, because Stan would have heads talking or whatever was going on, and maybe when he got to it, he wanted a caption plus two or three balloons, and you’d have to erase the art and shrink it down because you just didn’t have the room for all that, but it was essential for the story. And if it was selling, no problem.

I would never argue with Stan about the plotting or layouts, because, unless something changed, he was the boss. And his stuff was doing well, y’know?

Cassell: Do you recall having story conferences with Stan?

Severin: When Stan was doing it, you would talk the story over, and you’d have an idea of the plot, what he wanted, and then in the margin you might [make notes]—because Stan would forget. If you went to the door, turned around, and said—which I’ve told this story many times—I turned at the door and said, “Stan, you know the guy is just going to jump out the window or something. Did you want him to have the costume underneath?” or something like that, and Stan said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” His mind would slip into the next thing. In other words, he was in another plot, the next person. So if you didn’t mark it down and you didn’t pay attention— as a matter of fact, Gene Colan used to bring a tape recorder when he’d go over a story with Stan. This was very early on, and he’d tape him, because Stan would forget the details and you don’t know what the heck is going on. He was very creative.

Cassell: It’s kind of hard to argue with success, huh?

Severin: Exactly. And he was the boss. And a lot of guys can’t swallow that you’ve got to take orders. My goodness, they’re paying your salary. You can give it a little argument, but you never get brazen about it. I mean, this is your income, y’know? But usually he was not difficult to work with. I enjoyed it. I thought it was funny, he’d be jumping all over the office. I’m sure he’s too old to do that [now], as well as I am, too old to be that active. But he used to [say], ‘I want a pose like this, nyah!” Make a big action pose, jumping on the desk. Oh, please, it was so funny. But it was good, it really got you all fired up. He was a joy to work with. And you learned a lot.

You know, a lot of people don’t give Stan credit. Just because the artist is the one that shows everything and not the words, without his storytelling and his knowhow, a lot of that success would not have been there.

If somebody snatched him early on, it wouldn’t have

Cassell: How did you end up becoming art director?

Severin: Oh, that didn’t last long. I was just a fill-in. And Jim Shooter didn’t want me, he didn’t want anybody to be art director. He wanted to run it his way, which was his prerogative. So maybe three days.

Cassell: Three days?

Severin: I wasn’t art director very long. I only filled in because Johnny [Romita] wanted to get working for Sol [Brodsky] because I think he knew there was going

Marie Severin taking aim at Eliot Brown in the Marvel Comics Bullpen in 1979. Copyright © 2012 Eliot R. Brown. Used With Permission.

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Severin: Yeah, that’s right. When we moved to the new offices, they moved around, and they [John and Virginia] worked in the same room together. Isn’t that a little too much, 24 hours a day? No matter how much you care. But they got along great.

They’d eat together, they’d worked together, they’d go home together. Everything’s together. [laughs] But I thought it was amazing. Not many marriages could stand that much. But everybody’s different.

to be a massacre because of Shooter, that he was going to be shuffled all around, so we went over to Sol, and Sol’s department was doing the outside books, the study hall kid books and stuff. Initially, I was there, too. It was a very strange time, to say the least. There was a reorganization, we had an editor for the first time, Shooter, who was really taking over, and he wanted it his way and his people. And that’s his prerogative. I lasted a while. But I guess a lot of people didn’t like him, unfortunately. But he made his mark, as far as I know.

Cassell: He went on to do Valiant Comics, and did quite well.

Severin: Yeah, and he’s tall.

That always helps.

Cassell: Tell me about John Romita.

Severin: Oh, John’s a doll.

He’s a good guy. He’s slow and methodic and his artwork is great. Nice to work with, polite. And businesslike. No silliness.

He didn’t fool around because he was supporting a family. The single guys would sometimes goof (From left) Hellen Katz, Dickie McKenzie, Jo Duffy, and Paty Cockrum lined up at Marie’s around. But Trimpe, Romita desk to sign a birthday card for Dave Cockrum in 1979. The large white box on her desk and I worked in one room, is Marie’s coloring kit. Copyright © 2012 Eliot R. Brown. Used With Permission. and the production guy, Tony Mortellaro. He was Cassell: So did you and John Romita, or Herb Trimpe, or Tony good, too. He died early, it was a shame. We had a nice thing Mortellaro, or Stan, for that matter, did you all socialize at all going, there. We were working well together, and we enjoyed outside of work? working—the personalities got along very well together. It was Severin: I didn’t, no. I don’t think anybody did. Romita lived on a good time.

Long Island, Trimpe was at the time upstate, I was in Brooklyn.

And I never really would have had lunch with the guys because Cassell: You seem to have similar personalities. [of] “guy talk,” do you know what I mean? I was out of there Severin: Yeah, I mean, we’re outgoing, and we used to do almost every lunch hour. It was great, I loved looking around insulting caricatures of each other. It was good to mix it up.

New York. But, yeah, you had a separation—I just didn’t feel like one of the guys, and I didn’t want to. It’s not that I was Cassell: You have to do it nine-to-five every day, it might as well put in that position, it was just the way I felt, too. When we be enjoyable. were working together, fine, but no socializing. Everybody had Severin: Yeah. I used to get so mad. They had a key for the to travel, too. The office was on 16th Street in Manhattan, and I ladies’ room and a key for the men’s room, but there were only two ladies, the secretary and me, and once in a while one of lived all the way down in the tip of Brooklyn. It was an hour’s the artist guys might come in. But the men’s key was always travel. disappearing because these guys, they’d go to the men’s room, and then they’d get on the elevator and go home, and they’d Cassell: Oh, wow! forget they had the men’s room key. [laughter] Everybody Severin: Yeah. I would be on the train a good 45-50 minutes. was stuck, y’know? I had this big revolver, toy revolver, and The very end of Brooklyn, last stop, all the way up to 16th Street when we got a new men’s room key, I attached the key to the in Manhattan. Always had a book. I did a lot of reading. revolver and said, “Try to go home with this! I don’t want to hear any more whining about the men’s room key!” [laughs] Cassell: What kind of stuff did you like to read?

It was funny. So it was this big, plastic gun with a little key Severin: Oh, I loved reading. I loved mysteries, and I loved hanging off of it. Try to lose that. history novels. And I read the newspaper. Most of the time in the morning I had to stand. It was hard to read the paper.

Cassell: Were you there when Virginia Romita started working for Going home I always fell asleep, because way up there, the Marvel? train was still fairly empty. I always had a shopping bag with 57

Severin: Well, that’s the kind of thing I had to do. I’d do a little more because I was more aware of what the kids wanted to see in something like that. They knew I could design stuff like that and it would be pleasing. If you had somebody from outside just doing the production, it wouldn’t have the insight as to what the fans would be looking for and enjoy.

me, because you never know. And also I took the subway home sometimes in the middle of the night.

Cassell: Did Marvel ever have Christmas parties?

Severin: Oh, I guess they did. I’ve never liked parties. I remember when something came up and we all went off to some hotel or some sort of convention or something. It was long ago, and it wasn’t fun. When you work with people, I find that it’s a lot easier to be nice in the office than at home. Because everybody’s got family, has got to travel. But I had fun with them and we joshed a lot. Nah, I don’t remember specifically real Christmas parties. Not like downtown when you work in the business district. They had the bonus parties and you’d see people slobbering all over themselves. I hated that. I worked downtown for a while, and I didn’t like the Christmases down there.

Cassell: I’ve heard stories about how they got a lot of requests for the fan club kits. Did you get involved in having to pack them up and ship them out?

Severin: I have no idea who did that.

Cassell: It might have been the secretary.

Severin: It might have been the mailroom lady. They had the kits, I guess, presorted or something. I think there was a big response, but it wasn’t big enough for us to carry through with more stuff every year. It was a big success for that period, and that was, as far as I know, the end of it.

Cassell: Tell me about the Merry Marvel Marching Society.

Severin: I don’t know that much about it. It was mostly just mailing stuff out to kids, I guess. I think [when] I came, that was just starting? I didn’t have much to do [with it] at all. I might have done production on things they gave out, like I think they gave a diploma… Or was that EC?

Cassell: Did you ever have fans come up to the offices?

Severin: Yeah. And some of them were very nice. Once I gave away a Ditko page when I first came there. Luckily a young girl came up and said, “Oh, this stuff went out already.” I had no idea. So I gave away a page of Ditko that had been floating around the office. And then I found out they were sending stuff to the warehouse, and a lot of the guys, they were saving the stuff. A lot of it never reached the warehouse. These guys had collections, huge collections of some of the best stuff.

Cassell: They gave a welcome letter from the bullpen.

Severin: Yeah. I did that. I didn’t do the artwork, but I did the production on it.

Cassell: Some of it looks like it has your hand in it.

Cassell: I’ve heard stories about DC and how they used to cut up the panels and hand them out.

Severin: And give them to kids. Isn’t that crazy? That’s very sad. But they didn’t know. They thought that was the thing to do. And Stan kept a lot of the stuff himself. A lot of it just got to the warehouse, or swiped.

Cassell: So when the fans would come up to the offices, would you give them a tour?

Severin: If we had the time. But if it got really busy, you had no time. But sometimes we’d take them around, and they really enjoyed it. Nancy, she was like a policewoman. “Don’t come in tomorrow or swipe some of my books!” She had the color guides, and she had all the black-and-white proofs and everything, and kids, and we already had some adults come in, they’d rob her, so she finally put the kibosh on that. She’s a good egg. I still talk to her now and then.

Cassell: What was Nancy responsible for?

Severin: The subscriptions, and also keeping the proofs, and logging them, keeping them on the shelf. Because if she didn’t—I mean, the artwork had disappeared, and we wouldn’t have been able to have those annuals and the 25-cent books, the reprints. For the most part, she deserves a lot of credit.

She saved the company thousands and thousands of dollars because, I’m sure, all that stuff would have been purloined had she not kept it—well, she did the best she could. She couldn’t

Caricature of Stan Lee by Marie for the 1975 San Diego Convention program.

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control it all the way. A lot of it was swiped before it got to her hands. But she filed everything, and that was her job.

Marie clearly had a lot of fun working at Marvel Comics, and we’ll hear more from her later about some of the characters she worked on. For now, we get insight from two of the people who worked most closely with Marie when she was at Marvel—Stan Lee and John Romita.

THE DRIVING FORCE BEHIND Marvel Comics, and the key to much of its success, was the man who was its editor and chief writer for years, Stan Lee. With exceptional artists like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, Stan ushered in a new era in super-hero comics. Stan was not only a creative genius, but an excellent judge of talent. He surrounded himself with some of the best in the business and together they led Marvel Comics into a leadership role in the industry, ahead of their primary competitor, DC Comics, which had been publishing super-hero comics since 1938.

In this interview, Aaron Sultan and I talk to Stan about Marvel Comics and one of those talented people who helped it rise to greatness, Marie Severin.

Photo of Stan “The Man” Lee from the Marvelmania Bullpen Photo Set. anyone else. She seemed happy. I don’t think anybody even thought of it as being awkward. See, Marie had the kind of personality, she fit right in. It was always a pleasure having her there.

Aaron Sultan: Marie said she was involved in the MMMS. How did it get started?

Lee: Well, I realized that we had so many fans and I wanted to find a way to get some benefit out of it, and I thought, “Why not have a fan club?” But I didn’t want to make it just an ordinary fan club, where they say, “Send us a dollar and we’ll send you a badge.” I wanted to make it a fun thing. Even the name. I thought it was a ridiculous name—the Merry Marvel Marching Society. It was just like one big joke we were all having with each other. Marie contributed to much of the gaity.

Interview with Stan Lee Dewey Cassell: How did you first meet Marie?

Stan Lee: I’m embarrassed to say this, but I have the worst memory in the world. You’re talking to a guy who can’t remember what he had for breakfast. I don’t remember how I first met her. It seems to me she was always there.

Cassell: Did John Severin come to Timely before Marie did?

Lee: I think so, but I wouldn’t swear to it on a witness stand.

I think I knew John first. And then I found out he had a sister who was so talented.

Sultan: Who figured out what should go in the MMMS kit?

Lee: To be very honest, it was mostly me. I pretty much decided. I had an assistant named Sol Brodsky and he probably had a lot to do with it, too, because he used to help me with whatever I was working on. Now, certainly, other people may have made suggestions, but they were usually busy doing their strips, and I was the one who was screwing around with all these odd things like the club.

Cassell: When she first came to you, was it doing coloring?

Lee: She started as a colorist, I think. And then I was surprised to find out she could draw.

Cassell: Did she work out of the office at that time?

Lee: I’m not sure if she was in the office or if she worked at home, freelance. I know there was a time later when she was in the office, when we had a lot of people in the office. But in the very beginning, I really can’t say.

Cassell: Rumor has it that when you started up the club, you got inundated with dollar bills in envelopes.

Lee: We had so many members and it became so popular, we didn’t know how to handle it. We weren’t set up to handle a big club. We didn’t have a big staff. You know, that club should have had a separate staff, new people that we hired to do nothing but run the club. But we didn’t. And our publisher at the time [Martin Goodman] wasn’t about to spend the money hiring new people just for a club. The club didn’t mean much to him. He didn’t have the same feeling about promotion and

Cassell: Marie was one of the few female artists at Marvel.

Lee: Most of the time, Marie was the only female there [in the creative team].

Cassell: Was that at all awkward?

Lee: No, not at all. Unless she thought it was awkward. It wasn’t awkward to me and it didn’t seem to be awkward to 59

publicity and relationship with the fans that I did. So, as the club got bigger and bigger, it became more a strain just keeping it going.

stories or what. It was always a mystery. Same with the X-Men, which after a while became less popular and then it became more popular again. The only ones that stayed up there, as far as I remember, were Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four.

Cassell: From around 1968 to 1972, Marie was doing cover designs for Marvel.

Lee: Right. She did quite a few. Basically, I had Jack Kirby laying out most of the covers, but Marie certainly did her share. It was another case where her terrific versatility paid off.

Cassell: Marie also did the Not Brand Echh series.

Lee: Oh yeah. She was great at that sort of thing.

Cassell: How did Not Brand Echh get started?

Lee: It was a whim of mine. I wanted to do a humor book and it occurred to me that if you were advertising a product and you wanted to compare it to another product, you called the other product, “Brand X.” And you’d say, “Brand X contains so many millimeters of fat and our product contains less than Brand X. Brand X always meant the other, worse product. We were having a funny feud with DC at the time and it occurred to me that if I called them, “Brand Echh”—I forget how I spelled it. It was either E-C-C-H or E-C-H-H, something like that—but it was the word like a disgusted sound. So, what I figured I would do was call the book, “Not Brand Echh.” This is different from any humorous DC book and we put in all sorts of MAD-type satirical cartoons and comics. And it was fun and the readers seemed to like it very much. Marie did a lot of work on those books, a lot of great work.

Sultan: When a lot of people think of Marie, they think of her rendition of the Hulk Lee: When Marie started doing the Hulk, I kind of liked the way she was doing it and I kept her on it. That was the one superhero strip that she became associated with, so to speak. She

Cassell: How did you find out that Marie had a knack for humor?

Lee: Probably I saw cartoons that she was putting up on the wall and drawing on the back of her pages and so forth.

Cassell: One of the other characters she was associated with was Doctor Strange.

Lee: Yeah, she did a few Doctor Stranges also. I can’t remember which or how many, but she did a lot of different strips. Mostly the Hulk and Doctor Strange, I remember. Whenever something was needed and she was around, it was, “Hey, Marie, will you help us out by doing this?”

Cassell: What was your impression of Marie’s personality?

Lee: She had the nicest personality. She was just a sweet woman, with a great sense of humor—in addition to her great talent. She was pleasant to be with, pleasant to talk to.

Wherever she was, she made that place a little more cheerful.

Cassell: What was your assessment of her artistic ability?

Lee: I thought she was incredibly talented and, as I mentioned, very versatile. She could do humor, she could do horror, she could do adventure, she could do cartoons. She could do almost anything you asked her to do and she did it all beautifully, like the true pro she was.

2002 drawing of The Inedible Bulk (from Not Brand Echh) by Marie. Courtesy of Mike Collins. was amazing because she could do anything. She did coloring (as we mentioned), she did penciling, she could ink. She could do humorous strips, she could do super-hero strips, she could do any type of strip you wanted. She was as versatile as her brother John. It was great having her around, because wherever you needed her, she could do it. Marie is a great talent.

Cassell: Did you have Christmas parties at Marvel?

Lee: Yeah, we did that occasionally and Marie was always the life of the party, whenever we had one.

Cassell: Are there any questions you wish you had asked her?

Lee: I never got around to asking her what she preferred to do, because she was so good at everything. I don’t know why I never asked her, but I’ve always wondered what she would have preferred, if she could have her pick of anything. I’m sorry I never asked her that.

Cassell: The Hulk comic book seemed to struggle in the beginning.

Lee: It started out good, then it got dropped, then it got canceled. Then, we brought it back and it did good again. Then it went up and then it went down. Very often, we never could figure out why, whether it was the choice of the artist or the 60

Cassell: I think it would be humor.

Lee: That’s what I would guess also. I agree with you. I think that would have been her answer.

Sultan: When did you start working in the office?

Romita: I didn’t start going into the office, more often than staying home, until January of ’66, so I was just coming in to turn in work and occasionally do corrections. The reason I probably met Marie in the late summer, early fall of ’65 is because every time I went in, Stan used to do his old routine.

Whoever was in the office would end up getting to correct somebody else’s artwork. Jack Kirby was in there one day, and that’s the first time I met Jack. I had close calls, I’d almost met him a couple times. But I walk in there and he’s doing a correction on a cover in pencil, and then Stan asked me to do a correction on a cover, and we were both sitting there talking. It was hysterical. My guess is she started sometime, like, August or September. And then Roy Thomas, I gathered, came on right around the same time, too.

Cassell: Any parting remarks about Marie?

Lee: It’s too bad there aren’t more people like Marie in the world. Wherever she went, she was cheerful and pleasant and she made people happy to be with her. When you see her or talk to her, give her my regards.

Sultan: And for those first few years when you were in the office, was Marie also a staple there?

WHEN YOU LIST THE talented people who helped define the look and feel of Marvel Comics, John Romita is near the top of the list. The most common image of the flagship character of Marvel, Spider-Man, is one drawn by Romita. The artwork of Romita has graced not only numerous comic books, but countless advertisements and promotional materials over the years.

If Stan Lee is the face of Marvel to the public, then John Romita has been its artist.

Aaron Sultan talks with John Romita about his recollections of Marvel Comics and Marie Severin.

Interview with John Romita Aaron Sultan: When did you first come in contact with Marie?

John Romita: Well, I had known John Severin, and what happened is, in July of ’65 I left DC. After almost quitting comics, I went over to Stan’s, and I was inking The Avengers, #23, I think, on Don Heck. And I was bringing the artwork in, and I don’t know if I just heard first that she was going to come on as a colorist and a production person, but I know it was July or August of ’65. And then I came in and started to pencil Daredevil, and I think I met her there. And she was strictly going to be a staff person doing coloring and production.

Photo of John Romita at the drawing board from issue #18 of FOOM.

Sultan: Were you aware of her work at EC? Romita: No. The only thing I ever remembered about the EC books was I was crazy about them, Jack Davis, and then Al Williamson. Al Williamson was funny. I thought he was an older guy. At the time, in the war books, he had done a couple of ancient history war stories, and I think he did a couple of Roman things, and I assumed he was an old illustrator.

And when I found out he was my age, I wanted to scream, because I was admiring his stuff for three or four years. I did not like the horror comics. They always turned me off. But I loved the Jack Davis and the John Severin stuff, and, of course, Williamson.

Romita: Oh, yeah. She came in every day. She was on staff. And then, shortly after that, John Verpoorten came on as production to relieve her from the board work, and then she could do the full-time coloring.

Sultan: So you remember her mostly as a colorist?

Romita: Well, just at first. Almost immediately she started doing cover sketches and started penciling, and I think she was Stan’s ace-in-the-hole there for a while. Verpoorten took over all the production and she was then free to do all sorts of stuff.

I don’t remember when she started penciling a full story, but I know she was doing cover sketches and things like that. At least, that’s my memory of it.

Sultan: You liked more the Two-Fisted Tales and the war comics?

Romita: Yeah. I remember I used to buy the war books just to see if Jack Davis was in them. I loved that inking style he had at the time. It killed me when he gave up regular penciling of comics, and became an advertising guy. It drove me nuts. I had no idea that Marie was working there, and I had never heard, because I was not paying attention to EC stuff.

Sultan: When she was doing cover sketches, was there a particular process that allowed the artist to follow the cover rough she would put together?

Romita: It depended on who it was. Some guys needed a sketch, and Stan wanted to have an idea of what an artist was 61

going to do. Most artists did their own sketches.

She probably did it for guys who weren’t getting it done or Stan didn’t like their approach on covers. It was different for everybody. In other words, I would do my own sketches, and Don Heck would do his own stuff, and Kirby would be doing stuff. So it depended on the individuals. And it was very loose. There was no real rigid formula or approach. Stan used to wing it every day.

Sultan: Let’s talk about Spider-Man for a minute. Looking back in history, here, I believe it’s issue #82 with the Spider-Man/Electro cover.

Romita: Yeah, she did the cover.

Sultan: So how did Marie and you get tangled up together with Spider-Man? Romita: Oh, Stan would drive us crazy. The problem with Stan was, he would ask me to do a Captain America cover, or ink a ten-page Hulk on Jack Kirby’s breakdowns, and that would leave a gap for a Spider-Man cover, and so he asked Marie to do it. So it was very mix-and-match. Stan was very erratic about that. I don’t even remember. Maybe I was sick or something and I wasn’t in the office. When I first started there, I didn’t have to stay in the office every day. But I couldn’t make a living at home. I couldn’t discipline myself. I had to come in to the office. But I told him, it was not like a nine-to-five job. I was being paid to do Spider-Man. Stan gave me a drawing table and a space up there with all the equipment for whenever I wanted to come in. He said, “I want you to come in whenever you want, and work home whenever you want.” What I told him was, if I pull an all-nighter at home, I don’t want to come in the next day. So it was very open to me. I used to go in, like, three times a week, and work at home two days, depending how much sleep I was getting. So that was another reason.

It was all going on behind my back, what was going on. But I remember, yeah, Marie was constantly a part of the rotation.

For instance, when I did the Rhino, I think it was my third or fourth cover. What Stan used to do is put a card with a name on it saying, “Next month, I want to have a character called the Rhino.” And I came up with a sketch, but I was not very sure— this shows you how valuable Marie was—I was not sure it was a good idea. I was saying, it looks hokey, like a kid’s Halloween costume with the mouth open and the face shows through.

And I said, “I’m not too sure about this.” And she looked it over, and she did a quick sketch, in about 30 seconds, of the Rhino charging full-speed into something, and immediately I had more faith in the idea. And, if it wasn’t for that, I probably would have never accepted the Rhino’s costume. I would have never gone with it. She’s the one that gave me faith in it. So, as I said, I was so uncertain, and so terrified by the fact that I was going to make Spider-Man fail. I was not thinking of making it a great success, I was just thinking not to fail. And she was encouraging. And she also had a way, if a guy got puffed up with himself and started to get cocky, she would deflate you.

And if you were slumping a little bit and feeling a little bit out of it, she would encourage you. She had a great way of helping out. She would do little sketches and she would do cartoons to lighten the load, and she used to put cartoons on the wall all the time. She was just an important cog in that whole wheel.

Those cartoons were so good for us. It relaxed us, it helped our morale, everything. It helped in a million ways.

Sultan: And so he was going to her just to get an idea of what kind of thing—.

Romita: Well, I don’t know how much of that went on, because my problem was I was so terrified. Because when I went on staff was when I started my first Spider-Man story, and I had tunnel vision because I was so worried. I didn’t want to mess up Spider-Man. And I really didn’t enjoy it at TOP “Headless first, because it was too Spider-Man With hard for me—I was trying Melon” cover to The to ghost Ditko, so it was Amazing Spider-Man not my natural style, and I #75 by John Romita. was very tense. So I wasn’t BOTTOM Cover of The paying a lot of attention. I Amazing Spider-Man was aware that Marie and #82 by Marie. Courtesy John Verpoorten were in Heritage Auctions. the bullpen with me, but I really was so concentrated on Spider-Man I wasn’t paying attention to a lot of other things. I tell you, Sol Brodsky was the guy that was handing out work and making sure they got it in on time, and he was the go-between between Stan and us, because Stan wasn’t coming in every day. Stan would stay home and write a couple of days a week. So Sol was really the guy in charge, and all I used to do is react to what he would ask. If he said [he] needed a cover, I would have to stop doing the pencil pages and do a cover, and that kind of stuff. So it was very disorganized.

Sultan: The fact that Marie was working there in-house, did that bring John Severin about at all in the late Sixties?

Romita: You know, I don’t know how long it was, because John had worked with Stan in the Forties, but I think Stan was always prompting her to call her brother and see if he had any time. So I don’t know how long it took before they started to work together, Marie and John Severin.

Sultan: She used to make little cartoons?

Romita: Oh, God. If you tripped on a carpet, in 30 seconds there would be a drawing of it.

Sultan: Really?

Romita: Yeah. And let me tell you, one of the things she did to keep us going and make us feel like a family, I remember when 62

equate. If he had put Marie Severin on it, that strip would have still been running. Her Muppets were alive on the page, and it made absolutely no sense at all for Henson to overlook that.

She should have done it. And her sense of humor, of course, was fantastic. When we did the humor books, she was the glue. She was absolutely amazing on those. You remember the CRAZY covers? We worked on a couple of sketches together.

I think one of my sketches got in there, but she did the most beautiful stuff. I mean, the characters that she came up with and her approach was just alive. I envied her ability to do lively people on paper. Nothing was too tight, and nothing was dull.

Larry Lieber was out with a bad back, when he came back she had four or five drawings right over his drawing table showing him with a back brace, with a board. In fact, she showed him on one of those, you know those boards you invert and you lay on it to help your spine? Well, she did about four variations of one of them. And she used to tear herself apart, so she was very brutal with herself. She did drawings of herself as a Powerful Katrinka kind of person. Do you remember the Powerful Katrinka?

Sultan: I’m not familiar with that.

Romita: That was a lady from the Toonerville Trolley, a comic strip from when I was a kid. This woman, just a townswoman, a farmer’s wife or something, was the strongest person in town, and if the trolley ever got off the track, Powerful Katrinka would come and put the trolley back on the track. And Marie drew herself, in my mind, like the Powerful Katrinka.

In other words, she put herself down. And she had a great cartoon. Larry comes back, he’s been out for about three or four weeks with a bad back. He comes back and here’s a shot of her walking down the hall and giving a nice, not a gentle, slap on the back to Larry, saying, “Welcome home.” She slaps him on the back and he goes flying into an empty room. I’m telling you, she was brutal with herself, but she could absolutely deflate anybody’s ego with a cartoon. And she did that constantly. And one of my biggest regrets in my life is that I don’t have a copy of every one of them. I only have a few. I have about a half a dozen drawings and a couple of birthday cards she did for me, which I treasure.

Sultan: Her style was really to bring personality alive on the page.

Romita: Yeah, I don’t know why they didn’t harness her power for MAD magazine. She would have been a tremendous asset for MAD. Sultan: You mentioned a couple of sketches you and Marie did for CRAZY. Romita: We did CRAZY magazine, which was our version of MAD. And boy, she took the ball and ran right down the field and knocked everybody down. I’m telling you, that book, whatever success it had, was based on Marie.

Sultan: Back to Spider-Man, I remember you telling me several years ago about one of the Spider-Man covers where you had his head buried in his hand [#75], and I remember you mentioning Marie. Could you tell that story again?

Romita: You know that cover, I’ve got Spider-Man walking with a reflection in a window behind him, and he’s got his head down in his hand. In other words, he’s got his head bowed over so you just see the top of his head. Well, as soon as I did that drawing, before it was even colored, she had a cartoon version of it. She took a copy of my cover and she colored the head orange and the rest of it normal, and she put a caption under the—“Headless Spider-Man With Melon.” In other words, like something on the wall of a modern museum. That was her name for the painting. “Headless Spider-Man With Melon.” And when I tell that to people at conventions, I say, “Every time I sign that book, that comes back to me.” Absolutely leveled my ego with that. Did you ever see that cover? Picture an orange Spider-Man head in his hand and you’ll see what it is. It’s a headless Spider-Man with a melon on it. And that’s exactly how she used to do it. And it’s a good thing I’m not thin-skinned. [laughs]

Sultan: Oh, I bet. It sounds like Marie was like the ultimate loving sister in the bullpen.

Romita: She was more than a loving sister. She was somebody to straighten you out if you were getting silly. She used to make fun of characters, too. I remember I did a couple of costumes that she would make fun of. Stan asked me to do a costume for Sub-Mariner, and I did this black costume for him where he looks like a waiter in a goofy restaurant, and she just destroyed it. She said that was the funniest thing she ever saw.

And, years later, when other people used it, and I remembered that Jim Lee recently has used it, and he told me he loved that costume. I said, “Wow! I thought it was the dumbest costume I ever did.” I respected her judgment.

Sultan: It may be a leap here, but it sounds like being around Bill Gaines all those years, she brought a little bit of MAD humor into the Marvel bullpen.

Romita: Oh, definitely. Let me tell you something. You know what she did with Not Brand Echh and things like that. She was a treasure. You know, she was doing Muppet drawings because we were doing some Muppet-connected stuff, and she did the most sensational Muppet stuff you ever saw. She could make them come to life, and she had a wild sense of humor. And the worst mistake anybody ever made was when Henson was going to do the Muppet daily newspaper strip, he didn’t hire Marie. He hired some kid, and the kid was absolutely inad-

Sultan: She clearly saw things.

Photo of Marie (center) and the Marvel Comics Bullpen from the 1971 article in Rolling Stone.

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Romita: Oh, God. She saw everything through her own focus, through her own mirror. She saw things that nobody else saw.

You know the story about her pinning a cigar to the wall after Jack left?

Sultan: How so?

Romita: Gil was a sitting duck because he would always come in with his normal expression on, and he would pontificate and theorize. He had a theory of comics, and he could talk for an hour about how comics were dead and we were all going to be out of work in a year. And you know that was going to leave him open for a target for her. She did some great Gil Kane cartoons, but I don’t have any copies of those. But she devastated him.

Sultan: No, tell me about it.

Romita: When Jack Kirby left, she took a cigar stub, ostensibly one that Jack had left, but it couldn’t have been. But she took it and put a pushpin through it, stuck it on the wall, and put, “Kirby’s Gone.” And she put a little curl of smoke on the paper in front of the cigar. But, yeah, that’s the kind of stuff she did.

She was like the leveler. She would level everything out just with her humor and actually, it had a point to it. There were a lot of needles in there, but generally, when they were so funny, it didn’t matter if there was a needle in there.

Sultan: How would she do it? Would she draw the cartoon and then pin it up, like, on a bulletin board where everybody could see?

Romita: Just tape it to a drawing table or a wall. One of the best things she did, and I don’t know if I’ve got the original, I think I’ve got a copy. She just would take a sheet of bond paper and quickly scribble something and then put some color in it. Herb Trimpe came on staff. He was a stat man at first. He came on to do Photostats. And he started to do sketches, and suddenly he was a fulltime artist. So he sat next to me. We had drawing tables. Larry Lieber would be in a lot. Herb Trimpe and I were next to each other. Marie would be on the other side of the room. So we were sometimes as many as five people in there, and when we had a second production man, Tony Mortellaro, we were five or six sometimes. So it was a pretty busy bullpen. Herb Trimpe and I would get into all sorts of debates. We would debate social things like old people—there was a guy whose philosophy was that old people should all be executed because they were taking up too much space in the world, and all that kind of stuff. He was always an extremist, and I was always trying to be middle-of-the-road. But what Marie Severin saw of our debates, because we used to go on sometimes for an hour, we’d both be working, and we’d both be shooting our mouths off talking about our different philosophies. And she did a drawing and pinned it to my drawing table. And she had two drawing tables, mine and Herb’s, unoccupied. My table had a cannonball, actually it was like a missile stuck in my drawing table, smoke coming up, arrows—because she thought Herb Trimpe was descended from American Indians, she was always kidding him, and so there were arrows, like my table and chair had been attacked by missiles and arrows. And on Herb Trimpe’s table were meatballs and spaghetti. In other words, I was Italian, so I was lobbing meatballs and spaghetti and all sorts of stuff at his table, so his table was full of hanging, dropping meatballs and spaghetti, and Trimpe had put missiles into my table.

Sultan: Did Stan see a lot of this humor by Marie?

Romita: Oh, I’m sure he did, but you know Stan. He barely slows down to see anything. And I don’t know if he ever had any problems with it. She used to kid Stan a lot, too, but I don’t think they ever got to any problems. They always got along.

Even Stan was not safe from her barbs. If she thought Stan had done something silly, she would say it. She was a good person to have around. You could not get off-center too far with her.

Sultan: Do you remember any other stories?

Romita: Nothing off-hand. She and John Verpoorten worked together for quite a while. They were working closer than I was. I know she used to kid Gil Kane all the time whenever he’d get in to the office.

Sultan: Do you remember if Marie had many interactions with Steve Ditko, since he was departing, I guess, around that time?

Romita: Well, she had a good relationship with Steve, and I envied her because I never made the time. I kept saying I was going to go to lunch with him or we’d get together and talk. He only came in occasionally after he left Spider-Man, and Marie was the only person he would talk to.

Sultan: Really?

1975 illustration by Marie for Man’s World, one of the men’s magazines published by Martin Goodman.

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Romita: Yeah. There was probably one editor that he spoke to, but I don’t remember who it was. And I kick myself for not having more time. I always thought, next time, I’ll see him next time, we’ll have lunch next time, but I never did. I would shake hands with him and say hi, but never had a chance to talk to him, and I really regret that. And she had a good relationship with him.

Sultan: That’s interesting. He must have felt comfortable with Marie.

Romita: Yeah, I think so. You know, she holds on to some people that didn’t fit in with Marvel. She always tried to placate them and relax them. I don’t know why Ditko had trouble with Stan. I think, socially and politically, they were opposites, but I think he thought Stan was too liberal. And Stan was more middle-of-the-road, a moderate. To Ditko, I guess, a moderate was an extreme. And Marie managed it. I think she sympathized with people that didn’t go along with all of Stan’s ideas, and she was sort of a rebel that way.

LEFT Photo of John Verpoorten from the 1975 Mighty Marvel Comic Convention program. RIGHT Photo of Gil Kane from the Marvelmania Bullpen Photo Set.

Sultan: That brings up another point. Marie was something of an anomaly in comics because she was a woman.

Romita: Yeah. And people were aware of that, and when she started penciling comics, it was quite a moment in history, because I know Ramona Fradon had done stuff at DC, but she went into syndicated work and it was sort of forgotten. And there were a couple of others, there were a couple of girls doing some nice stuff for Marvel. I know Mary Wilshire and another young lady, I can’t remember her name. There were two or three later on, after Marie had broken the line, but she definitely was a standout. She was not just somebody that would do small stuff. She could do major stuff, and she was a great storyteller, and she had a great feel for strong characters.

And I think some of the greatest stuff done was when she penciled and her brother inked on Kull. It was sensational. Her Hulk was a very strong, powerful character. And then, of course, she did The Cat, and I think she would have loved to have had a good run on The Cat, trying to get a female character that was really going to excel. But she was so versatile she could do so many things.

all my people had pressed clothes and clean, white collars and everything. She was always saying, “No, you’ve got to have more rugged people showing, and to put people on the street, you’ve got to have a street person wheeling a grocery cart or something.” And I never thought of those things. My cities were always brand new and all my people had pressed clothes, and she never let me forget it. [laughs] Sultan: When you were penciling Spider-Man, I think she was doing some of the coloring on Spider-Man, off and on.

Romita: Oh, yeah. I think Stan Goldberg was doing a lot of it, and she was doing whatever he didn’t do. Because she had a lot of duties on staff, a lot of covers and things like that. Yeah, she would color Spider-Man quite a few times.

Sultan: When she was coloring, is there anything special you remember that she did? For example, in Spider-Man, do you remember if she would come in with that element you were talking about, with the grime and the cracks in the sidewalk—.

Romita: I don’t know. She might have tried. But there was only so much you could do because the coloring was very primitive in those days. We were lucky to get the engraver to even follow our notes, and we were lulcky to have it in register most of the time, because we had some terrible printing at that time. The worst printing I ever saw was the beginning of my Spider-Man run. She and I started to crack down on the engravers and try to find ways to make it better. Yeah, I’m sure she had an effect on almost everything.

Sultan: Was she a go-to person, like you were, in the Seventies, fixing faces and things like that?

Romita: Oh, yeah. In fact, my first two Daredevils, #12 and #13, I was obviously not in the office, and I did a bunch of pirates in those two stories, and I guess I was making them too cleancut-looking. Stan wanted to make them a really swarthy group with knives in their teeth and patches over their eyes. So you can see a couple, quite a few of Marie Severin’s faces over mine on the Daredevils. I know what Stan was after all the time, and I tend to be a little bit too clean, too neat. That was another thing. She was always telling me that all of my buildings looked like they had just been built and all of my scenes, there was no dirt on the street, no matchbook covers and crushed cans. You know how streets are.

Sultan: Do you remember Marie’s work on Not Brand Echh?

Romita: Oh, she was the heart and soul of it.

Sultan: Even from the beginning?

Romita: I think so. And I think she plotted and co-plotted. I know Stu Schwartzberg, who had been our stat man, was a brilliant writer, and he was doing some very funny stuff for Not Brand Echh. And she was collaborating with him because he was in the office. They were working on it together. I believe she was more than important, I think she was the heart and soul of Not Brand Echh. And the same thing with CRAZY.

Sultan: Yeah, grimy.

Romita: Right! And she’d say, “You’ve got to put cracks in the sidewalk. You don’t put any cracks in the sidewalk.” And she made me aware of all that stuff. And I never made it. Just like 65

Sultan: Do you remember Christmas parties, things like that, in the bullpen?

Romita: Yeah, we would have parties. Sometimes even if it was somebody’s birthday. Because it was a small group, we were only about seven or eight people. I mean, it was Stan, and Sol Brodsky, Flo Steinberg, Marie, me, John Verpoorten. It was maybe eight or nine. So we started having little things at that time. The parties really came after Stan left, not because Stan stopped them, it’s just that there weren’t enough of us to make parties. We had bigger parties after Stan left. And, also, Marvel was always on a very low budget. But it didn’t happen while Marie and I were there with Sol Brodsky and Stan. It was too small an operation then.

Sultan: What about Marie and Jack Kirby? Did she ever reset his ego at all?

Romita: Oh, no. Actually, she would never kid with Jack Kirby.

She admired him too much. And if it came to a choice between who she would root for, she would root for Jack Kirby against Marvel. She was that kind of person. Let me tell you, whenever Jack Kirby’s stuff came in, we would all make copies. There weren’t even any Xeroxes then, that’s how prehistoric this is.

Xerox hadn’t been invented yet. We were doing thermofax, which was a terrible copying system. We had to feed the pages into the machine, and it had to go through the roller and come out, the whole page of art. So we would put Jack Kirby’s pages into this stupid machine which was heat-oriented, it was a thermofax, and there was a lot of heat. One time Larry Lieber put a Jack Kirby page in there and it stuck, and the page was burned in half. And Larry had to lightbox whatever was left and recreate the page. And he was dying because he thought he had committed a capital crime. But everybody in the office would make copies of Jack Kirby’s pages.

And I had for years a pile of these crazy tissue thermofaxes, and I had to get rid of them. They never came out really good, anyway. I was trying to save every pencil panel that I could, and a lot of other people, including Marie, were copying and keeping copies of Jack Kirby’s stuff, because we figured, if whatever he does is going to be the standard, then we might as well make a copy of it. So, no, he was absolutely revered, and we considered him our team captain and our leader.

He was our guy. He was the best guy on the team.

Sultan: Was there any memory you have of anything that Marie colored that just stands out?

Romita: There were a lot of them. I mean, almost every cover she did had a great impact. I’m sure that there must be a dozen covers that I should remember, but I’d gotten so used to having them all good.

Sultan: From a penciling standpoint, what do you think Marie’s signature character at Marvel was?

Romita: She did Doctor Strange for a while, didn’t she? She did a hell of a job on that. That was her tribute to Ditko, really.

Sultan: Oh, really?

Romita: I believe so. My fuzzy memory of it, anyway. My memory of it is that she was trying to do a Ditko approach. And she was that way, she was versatile enough that she could do the Hulk the way she thought maybe Buscema might do it, and she could do Doctor Strange the way Ditko would do. I would say Doctor Strange and the Marvel heroes (and villain) commission drawing by Hulk. And, of course, the Marie. Courtesy of Spencer Beck. landmark series was Kull.

Sultan: Would you say that he was a mentor to Marie?

Romita: You know, he only came in occasionally, and very seldom was spending any time in the bullpen. We would go out to lunch after a while, we would go to the Playboy Club or some other place and we would talk, but he didn’t stay very long in the office.

Except if he had to do a cover on the spur of the moment for Stan, and then he’d be busy and nobody’d be bothering him.

Yeah, I don’t remember a lot of interplay with Jack at the office. It may have happened before I got there, because I came there about three years late. One of my big regrets is that I didn’t leave DC in 1961. Between ’61 and ’65, those four years I absolutely was not a part of it. That I still, to this day, regret, because it would have been wonderful to have been in on the ground floor of that whole thing. And Marie Severin and I share that frustration.

Sultan: Right around when Kull came out, that was on the heels of Barry Smith’s Conan. Was there any interaction or influence between those two titles in terms of Marie?

Romita: Probably only because Conan had been a surprising success. But I don’t think there was any physical resemblance because she was doing it her own way. She was not trying to do a Barry Smith approach except for the decorative thrones and great scenic stuff that she did. But she and her brother did this dynamite thing which was really all their own. You can see Severin ink in every stroke.

Sultan: In the Seventies, when you became art director, was Marie working under you?

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stream. So Marie Severin took on my duties. She had been my Romita: You know, that whole art director thing was so crazy. assistant art director for about a year, because, whenever I got I was art director, really, without portfolio. In other words, I real busy, she would do covers and things like that. I was doing didn’t get any salary out of it. I was stepping in for Stan. What toy designs, characters, costume design, introducing new charhappened was, Stan had what we called an indoctrination. acters. And so she helped me out. And when I went into Special Whenever he got a new artist in, Stan would give him this whole Projects, she took on the duties that I did, because I couldn’t do approach thing about intensity, and action, and nothing mild, them. So what happened was, at the time [Jim] Shooter was in everything has to be exaggerated, like a silent film. And I had charge. Do you have any idea when Shooter started? gotten that from Stan in the Fifties. And when I came back in the Sixties, Stan started to travel, and he started to do interviews, Sultan: It was in ’77, the late Seventies? and all sorts of stuff, and he was very busy. So, when an artist Romita: Somewhere in there. Well, what happened was that came up, Stan would tell Sol Brodsky, “Listen, let John Romita he and she disagreed on too many things. She didn’t like his tell them what we like, and how we like to approach it.” And, style. She used to come in to me while I was in Special Projects for some reason, I was able to remember all the things that Stan and say, “We should not let an outsider tell us how to run this had told me, so I was giving them to the other artists. Then, business. Jim Shooter is a DC the next thing you know, writer and shouldn’t be doing I’m being asked to do cover this.” And I would tell her, sketches, and I’m being asked what could I do? I was out of to correct, and to critique the department. She was very people’s artwork. So I was art disappointed that I didn’t get director only in name, because together with her and make a nobody ever paid me for it, march on the capital. So what nobody ever hired me to do happened was that Shooter it. So Sol Brodsky would say, and she disagreed too much.

“All right, John, you’re sort of The first thing he did was, it our art director.” And a “sort was a petty thing. He started of art director” is what I was, calling her “head artist” for years. There was a time instead of art director. And after that, I think when Jack she was mad. She was mad left, and Stan was even busier, at me because she thought that I was sort of considered that I had said I don’t want the art director, and Stan was her to be called art director calling me art director, but because I was the art director.

I was never in the company Nothing could be further from records as art director. And the truth. I didn’t want to be later on, somewhere, like, ’72, art director, and I didn’t care Stan was battling for a raise who was called art director. from Marvel, and he called But she got the impression me in and said, “Listen, John. that I didn’t stand up for her.

I want you to understand.

I should have gone in and said I need to get some money to Shooter, “Oh, no. She’s got from Martin Goodman and to be called art director.” So the only way he’d go for it is Shooter liked to knock her if I put some other duties on down a peg, call her his head my plate.” So he took on the artist, and she was very upset. actual, physical assignment of Promotional advertisement for Marvel from And she had a right to be being the art director. He had Newsdealer magazine. Courtesy of Bob Beerbohm upset, because it was a petty been the art director all those (and Jon Cooke). thing for Shooter to do. And years. I mean, I never really she also put that in the frame superseded him. He told me where she thought, if she had been a man, that wouldn’t have what he wanted and I did it. So I was never really the art direchappened. And that was an unfortunate thing. I certainly wasn’t tor. So he took on the official title, and let me tell you, I still was around talking to Shooter because I was out of his department. doing everything I was doing before, but Stan was the official art But I was so out of it, and I couldn’t do anything about it. director. So what happened was, I went into Special Projects in the middle of the Seventies, and I was doing coloring books and I was out of the comic mainline for maybe two or three years, Title or no, as John Romita described it, Marie Severin had and everything is rather hazy in that time because I didn’t know a profound impact on the look and feel of Marvel comics and what was going on in the actual bullpen. I was on the same the disposition of the people that worked there. Let’s take a floor, but I was so busy doing this other department’s work, closer look at the various roles that Marie played at Marvel, even though Sol Brodsky and I were doing comics, we were beginning with her work in production and coloring. doing them out of the regular line, we were out of the main67

PRODuCTiOn AnD COlORinG DEPARTMEnTs popularity of Marvel comic books among college students and professors, with illustrations of Marvel heroes by Jack Kirby. The feature also included unique illustrations by Marie Severin for articles about “Super-Students” and “Super-Profs,” drawn like super-heroes, as well as a humorous anatomical depiction of a “Draft Reject.” Although the articles illustrated by Marie did not have anything to do with Marvel Comics, Esquire apparently asked Marvel to help illustrate them and Marie was tapped to do it. Her adept handling of the assignment reportedly earned her the penciling job on Strange Tales.

Former Marvel editor and writer, Roy Thomas, speculates on what may have led Marie to get the Esquire assignment,“Maybe somebody saw her art while they were there and hired her to do it, because I don’t think she went out looking for work like that. It was probably the Esquire reporter, maybe they were looking for somebody and asked about it.

Somebody would have mentioned Marie if they were looking for humor art for two reasons. One is, she was good at it; and, two, she could kind of be spared a little bit more. Stan wouldn’t have wanted them to go to Jack Kirby for something. It would have taken his time away from the main book, and at that time Marie still wasn’t doing anything like that, so she could be spared a little from her production work to do something like that, where Stan wouldn’t have liked Jack Kirby spending too much time on that, even for the publicity angle. Then again, they made a good choice when they got Marie to do it.”

The illustrations in the 1966 Esquire issue may represent Marie’s first published artwork upon returning to Marvel, but they were just the beginning of a long association with special projects.

Marie returned to the pages of Esquire in October 1969 to illustrate

THE POPULAR NOTION OF a Marvel “bullpen,” which the company went to great lengths to propagate in the Sixties and Seventies, was largely a myth. The majority of artists and many writers worked out of private studios or their own homes, and most of them worked on a freelance basis. The actual number of Marvel employees working in the office was limited, among other things, because of space constraints. The real bullpen was comprised primarily of editorial and production staff, including colorists. Marie Severin was one of the few who worked in the Marvel bullpen.

Production THE PRODUCTION DEPARTMENT OF a comic book publisher is responsible for handling the logistics associated with the production of the comic books, including corrections. Since most of the artists drawing the stories did not work in the office, it usually made it impractical to return the artwork to the original artist for corrections. In most cases, that would have resulted in a missed deadline to the printer. So, if corrections were required, the responsibility typically fell to the production department. For years, John Romita and John Verpoorten were key members of the production staff for Marvel, as was Marie.

Corrections to covers were fairly common. If the cover art did not precisely fit, a photostat copy would be made and the “stat” was then cropped or the artwork extended to fill in the available space or accommodate a comic book logo. Also, when an editor reviewed the artwork returned from an inker, there might be certain characters or whole panels that would need to be redrawn. In such cases, the goal of the production staff would be to mimic the style of the original artist.

Marie Severin was frequently called upon to make lastminute corrections to artwork to enable Marvel to meet their printing deadlines. Sometimes, the corrections are even more extreme. Occasionally, artwork would be damaged or lost in the mail and have to be recreated. It is fun to try to spot the instances in which an artist’s work was supplemented by Marie.

However, she was sufficiently adept at imitating the style of other artists; something easier said than done. One example is Incredible Hulk Annual #1, where she is thought to have redone the face of the Hulk on the famous Jim Steranko cover.

While working in the Marvel production department, Marie was also called upon to support several special projects. Esquire was a slick tabloid-size men’s magazine that featured articles about men’s fashion, celebrities, politics, sports, and fiction by classic and new writers. The September 1966 issue of Esquire featured a series of articles about the military draft (and how to avoid it) including a sample of the student draft deferment test.

Included in the feature were two articles about the growing

The Marvel Comics Bullpen celebrates Dave Cockrum’s birthday. (From left) Marie, Linda Orola, Steve Grant, Hellen Katz (back to camera), and Mark Gruenwald (behind Hellen). Copyright © 2012 Eliot R. Brown. Used With Permission.

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several articles about Joe Namath (which had nothing to do with Marvel Comics) as well as the cover to that issue. Marie’s talent for caricature and sense of humor shine through in the depiction of the legendary Jets quarterback standing atop the Empire State Building like King Kong, a girl in one hand (of course) and a football in the other. (For more information about Marie’s work on Special Projects, see the Humor section.)

Coloring COLORING IS ONE OF those aspects of comic books that we have a tendency to take for granted. But when you have seen a comic book that was well drawn, but poorly colored, you realize it can detract from the overall appeal of the art and even potentially impact sales, if the problem persists. With Marie’s exceptional background in coloring, garnered through her years at EC, it is no surprise that Marvel would want to take advantage of her talents in that regard. Throughout her tenure at Marvel, Marie colored a number of comics that she drew, such as Not Brand Echh, as well as many others she was not otherwise involved in, including the fantasy magazine Epic Illustrated. She had a keen understanding of not only what colors would look good, but also what would reproduce well. For a time, Marie even served as head of the coloring department at Marvel, providing guidance to the colorists and ensuring a measure of quality and consistency in the look and feel of Marvel comics.

Marie illustrates an article about “Super-Students” in the September 1966 issue of Esquire magazine. in real color, but you don’t know what the combination is going to look like, and I do. You can’t have those colors together on a cover, it’ll look hokey. I wouldn’t change it drastically, I would just change it so you could see what was going on. That was the whole purpose. But some editors think they wanted their wives, or they wanted to color it. Some of the artists colored it.

But then they realized it didn’t pay that much anyway, so why bother? A couple of bucks a page at the time. Holy mackerel. In the old days, they did the color up in Bristol, Connecticut. They’d send the book, and they’d do the coloring, and they wouldn’t see the color until the book came out. And they put a stop to that because they thought they had books that were winners and the wanted the stuff to look good and establish a real quality, and so that’s when they started being picky. So I was sticking my nose in, too, because that was my job. That’s okay.

MARIE TALKS BRIEFLY HERE about coloring at Marvel. (For more detailed discussions about coloring, see the interview with Marie in the Horror section and the interview with David Anthony Kraft in the Humor section.)

Interview with Marie Cassell: You were the head of the Marvel coloring department at one time, right?

Severin: Which meant nothing.

Cassell: [laughs] No raise came with that, huh?

Severin: No. And, also, it was just, “She’s supposed to know more about coloring than anybody, so give her the title so we can carry that in the book. ‘Marie Severin? It must be good.’”

Most of the time, I didn’t even see the stuff. It was a bunch of baloney. Now, some things they were really concerned about, like selling a character or something, they’d want me to have an input, because I’d always give them an honest opinion or fix it up better than it was because I know more than they did about color. I’d been doing it for twenty years or so. But those guys would want to do things, and I’d tell them, it looks great

Cassell: What do you think of comic book coloring today?

Severin: I think the color is much better today than it used to be, although I think it’s overdone now with this rendering, for heaven’s sakes. They have some pages I have seen—now, I haven’t seen a comic in a month or two, but sometimes they’d over-render. They’d have these fantastic skies. You’re reading the page, you’re finished with it in a minute. I mean, just have it look good, and if you want to look back at an action scene, it should look good, but they were coloring like it was going to hang in the Louvre, y’know?

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Isabella: Come on, we’re talking about Marie. She was a sweetheart in every way. Professional. Scary talented.

Funny with a little bit of the devil in her.

Cassell: Do you recall any antics at the office Marie was involved in or stories about her?

Isabella: I’ll tell you my favorite Marie story. I was editing Tales of the Zombie and there was a scene in a Simon Garth story drawn by Alfredo Alcala that pushed my “injury to the eye” fear button. An old woman was spying on someone through the eyes of a portrait and someone sticks swords into the painting and her eyes.

Even though the black-and-white magazines weren’t under the Comics Code, that was a personal editorial no-no for me. It wasn’t even an original scene; it was lifted from some British horror movie.

Anyway, I asked Marie to redraw two panels. In one, we would see the old woman’s reaction just before the swords—not shown—went into the portrait. Then we’d just see the swords hanging from the portrait’s eye holes.

Caricatures of Tony Isabella (left) and Scott Edelman from Marie made the fix, aping Alcala’s style to the stroke.

FOOM #8.

But then she loosely pasted a new panel over the panel with the old woman’s reaction. In this new panel, the swords were coming out of the old woman’s head with her Cassell: I don’t like the computer coloring nearly as well as when eyeballs stuck to them. It was both incredibly gross and incredit’s done by hand. ible funny.

Severin: Yes. It doesn’t have the life, I don’t think.

Cassell: Were you ever the subject of one of Marie’s infamous caricatures?

Isabella: A few. I think my favorite is an intro page in an issue of Giant-Size Chillers which showed me chained to a desk.

Cassell: So when they did reprints or annuals, did they use the same color guides, or would it be recolored?

Severin: Sometimes they would want it recolored because, in the old ones, the coloring was ugly, a lot of it. So they wanted more color. And that doesn’t mean that I recolored all of them.

Some of the artists, the editors, they wanted a good job, and wanted to be careful. And I usually would check out the stuff, but I really didn’t edit it or criticize the coloring unless it was really bad, because a lot of the editors wanted it the way it was. So they’d have it. If it was really bad for reproduction, I would say something, but most of the time it was okay.

Cassell: Did you and Marie ever interact socially? (For example, did you ever go out to lunch together?)

Isabella: We probably did, but probably with a group. My NYC memories aren’t as sharp as I would like. I was young, I was working long hours. Outside the offices, wide-eyed Ohio boy that I was, I dated several fascinating “big-city women.” I kept that social part of my life removed from the comics side.

Cassell: What was your favorite character that Marie drew (and why?)

Isabella: Sub-Mariner. I think she drew him as well as anyone on the Marvel crew and better than most.

Cassell: What do you most admire about Marie?

Isabella: Her talent, her sense of humor, her professionalism, and her unfailing niceness. I’m sure she got ticked off at people—maybe even me—but she seemed to deal with that through her cartoons and not let it get to her. If I could have drawn cartoons like that, I suspect I wouldn’t be so angry at facets of the comics industry today. No. Scratch that. I’d still be angry, but it wouldn’t get to me as much as it does.

ONE OF THE PEOPLE who worked with Marie at Marvel was writer Tony Isabella. Isabella enjoyed tremendous success at Marvel writing for titles like Ghost Rider, Black Goliath, and Marvel Chillers with Tigra. Here Isabella recounts some of his experiences working with Marie Severin.

Interview with Tony Isabella Dewey Cassell: When did you first meet Marie Severin?

Tony Isabella: Probably within the first few weeks of my coming to work at Marvel. I worked out of Sol Brodsky’s office instead of the main Bullpen area, so I didn’t have much contact with anyone who wasn’t working on the British weeklies.

A lot of people shared that admiration of Marie. When Stan Lee and Martin Goodman saw what a great job Marie did on the Esquire article, they put her to work drawing super-heroes at the earliest opportunity. Here, then, are some of the superheroes that Marie has drawn over the years for Marvel.

Cassell: How was she to work with?

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Some characters become very closely associated with the artist that drew them. So it was with the Master of the Mystic Arts, Doctor Strange. Steve Ditko and Stan Lee originated the character in 1963 in the pages of the split book Strange Tales, sharing the title initially with the Human Torch and later with Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.

stories in Tales to Astonish, these Doctor Strange stories illustrated by Marie were part of a 22-issue arc. Marie continued with Doctor Strange through issue #160 of Strange Tales, illustrating conflicts with Zom, a powerful being imprisoned by Eternity, the Living Tribunal, and finally Baron Mordo himself, former pupil of the Ancient One. As the Doctor Strange storyline progressed, so did Marie’s drawing. Marie is also credited with co-plotting these stories with writers Stan Lee and Roy Thomas.

One of the most captivating aspects of the Doctor Strange stories are the bizarre settings in which the stories take place, as well as the flourishing spells that are cast. The tenor was set by Ditko in the earliest appearances of Doctor Strange, and subsequent artists, including Marie, tried to do justice to the mystical mood of the stories. It is no wonder, though, that some fans thought Doctor Strange was on drugs (or that the stories represented some kind of hallucinogenic trip).

Marie’s last issue of Strange Tales was in 1967, but she returned briefly to the character in 1995 when she penciled two issues of Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme. In this short exchange, Marie talks about her experience with Doctor Strange.

By way of explanation, “split books” were comics in which two recurring characters appeared in separate stories in each issue, typically around ten pages each. It was a way of essentially combining two comic books into one. The need for split books arose in the 1960s when Marvel was limited by its distributor to eight titles a month. Split books during this time period included Tales to Astonish, with Sub-Mariner and the Hulk; Tales of Suspense, with Captain America and Iron Man; and Strange Tales, with Doctor Strange and Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. When Ditko left Strange Tales with issue #146, he left big shoes to fill. Bill Everett filled in for a half dozen issues, and then that challenge fell to Marie Severin.

Interview with Marie

DOCTOR sTRAnGE

Cassell: Did you replace Ditko, then, on Doctor Strange?

Severin: Yeah, they had to have somebody, and they said, “try it,” because it wasn’t a big… It wasn’t a Spider-Man, you know?

DOCTOR STEPHEN STRANGE WAS a gifted, but arrogant, surgeon who was in a car accident that left his hands with nerve damage. Unwilling to accept a role as a consultant, he sought a cure from every quarter. Strange traveled to Tibet to the palace of the Ancient One, but became frustrated when the mystic would not cure him. While there, though, Strange witnessed an attack on the Ancient One by his pupil Mordo.

Mordo prevented Strange from warning his master, which prompted Strange to decide to learn the mystic arts himself.

He became a disciple of the Ancient One and, ultimately, the Sorcerer Supreme.

In issue #153 of Strange Tales, Marie Severin penciled and inked Doctor Strange in battle against Umar and the Mindless Ones to free Clea, the love of his life, from a mystical prison.

The website www.comics.org notes that the first Doctor Strange story drawn by Marie was “much cruder than subsequent episodes; the roughness of the linework suggests she may have replaced Bill Everett very close to deadline.”

With the subsequent issue, Marie began to illustrate the Doctor Strange covers as well, which alternated with covers featuring Nick Fury. The story continues from the previous issue, with Strange getting help from Veritas, the “Embodiment of Truth Incarnate” to reach Umar’s castle. In the following issue, seeking help from the Ancient One, Strange takes the battle 2000 Commission with Umar to Earth. Unlike drawing of Doctor the one- or two-part Hulk Strange by Marie.

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ONE OF THE OTHER artists at Marvel who had a distinguished run illustrating Doctor Strange was Gene “The Dean” Colan. Colan followed Adkins as the artist for Doctor Strange with issue #172 of his solo title. Here, Colan talks briefly about Marie.

(Note: The brevity and choppiness of this interview is due to a technical problem that was not discovered until it was too late to remedy. Rest assured that, if it is not already clear, Colan was a big fan of Marie’s and had tremendous respect for her, both as an artist and a person.)

Photo of Gene Colan from the 1975 Mighty Marvel Comic Convention program.

Interview with Gene Colan Dewey Cassell: When you came back to work for Marvel in the mid-1960s, was Marie there?

Gene Colan: As far as I can remember. Marie worked Doctor Strange and his nemesis Baron Mordo in this page for EC also. That’s where Harvey Kurtzman [was editor]. from Strange Tales #160. Courtesy of Sean Clarke.

John was there. Bill Elder was there. Jack Davis was there. I tried to get into that circle … I literally [begged And they wanted somebody to try it, so I did, and I liked it. I Harvey for a chance] … I put my heart and soul into it. could bounce into anything, you know, and do it, say, 70% as [Note: Gene’s one and only EC story was called “Wake!” and well as the previous guy, and I could fill in on stuff because I appeared in Two-Fisted Tales #30 in 1952.] could juggle my technique a little bit. And I could tell stories. I know Roy appreciated that when he came along. He was fun to Cassell: Marie used to design a lot of the Marvel covers. Did she work with, too. design any of your covers?

Colan: Could have.

Cassell: So did you enjoy drawing Doctor Strange?

Severin: Yeah. But you had a free rein with these wacky backCassell: Did you enjoy working on the humor stuff like Not Brand grounds, y’know? You could do all this weird stuff. And I always Echh? put in to color my own stuff, so when I was drawing it, I was Colan: I loved it. I really did. thinking, “Ah, I’ll put that in and then that’ll be real wacky, with something crazy.” And I always tried to color my own stuff. I Cassell: What do you think of Marie’s artistic style? think it looked better.

Colan: A great cartoonist. I really admired her. She was a good artist, good attitude.

Most fans would agree that Marie rose to the challenge of Doctor Strange. Her original artwork from the series is prized by collectors. Marie was succeeded on the book by Dan Adkins, but she was not finished with drawing Marvel heroes.

Cassell: What did you think of Marie as a person?

Colan: She was always happy go lucky. Always with a joke.

Loved to laugh. I feel bad because I [lost touch with her]. She was strong technically. She had a wonderful sense of humor.

She was a wonderful person.

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Next to Spider-man, the Hulk may be the most widely recognized Marvel character, thanks in part to a successful television series starring Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno, as well as countless appearances in advertising. One of the Marvel Comics characters with which Marie is most closely associated is the Incredible Hulk.

output, the characters in the split books were each given their own titles, but continued the numbering from their most recent appearance. Consequently, the first issue of The Incredible Hulk was numbered 102. Marie continued to draw the Hulk in his solo book, but the full length stories were written by Gary Friedrich and inked

by Giacoia and George Tuska, with Stan credited as editor. Issue #102 continued the battle with the Asgardians, followed in subsequent issues by conflicts with the Space Parasite, the Rhino, and the Missing Link, interspersed with angst from Betty Ross, would-be love interest of Bruce Bannner, and attempts by her father, General Thunderbolt Ross, to destroy the Hulk. What the foes of the Hulk may have lacked in originality during this time period was made up for by the dramatic action sequences.

What was noteworthy about these issues was the appearance of a technique that Marie would employ repeatedly over the years to great effect—the transformation panel. Typically in a single long panel or series of connected horizontal panels, Marie would illustrate the transformation of a character from one state to another— in this case from Bruce Banner to the Hulk (or vice versa).

This technique conveyed, much more effectively than

THE inCREDiblE HulK AS THE STORY GOES, physicist Doctor Bruce Banner was testing a new gamma bomb for the military when a teenager named Rick Jones drove onto the testing grounds. Banner ran out to warn the youth and managed to get him to safety, but was caught in the blast of the gamma bomb himself. He awoke later to find that he had survived the explosion, but learned that now when he was agitated, he would transform into a huge, green creature nicknamed the “Hulk.” The Hulk felt animosity toward the military, who tried repeatedly to capture him, and he was often the victim of some super-villain who had plans to harness his strength, but the Hulk was generally harmless to others and often came to their aid. A sympathetic anti-hero.

Success did not come easily or quickly to the Incredible Hulk. The Hulk was actually the second new “super-hero” character introduced by Marvel Comics in the early 1960s, following the success of The Fantastic Four. The jade giant first appeared in The Incredible Hulk #1 in 1962, drawn by Jack Kirby, but the title only lasted six issues before being canceled due to disappointing sales. Lee still had high hopes for the character, though, and brought him back a year and a half later alongside Giant Man in issue # 59 of the split-book Tales to Astonish. This time, the Hulk fared better and he remained with the title, while Giant Man was replaced with the SubMariner in issue #70. The early appearances of the Hulk in Tales to Astonish were illustrated by Steve Ditko, who was later succeeded by Jack Kirby and then Gil Kane.

Marie began drawing the Hulk in 1967 with issue # 92 of Tales to Astonish. It was her second regular penciling assignment at Marvel, picking up where Kane left off.

The Hulk stories in Tales to Astonish were written by Stan Lee and included battles against the Silver Surfer, the High Evolutionary and his New Men, the Lord of the Lightning, the Sub-Mariner and Loki. Marie’s pencils in these Hulk stories were very detailed and faithfully inked by Frank Giacoia and Herb Trimpe, who would later become the primary artist on the Hulk himself. Marie also drew the covers for every other issue. (The covers alternated between lead characters on the split books.)

Issue #101 of Tales to Astonish would be its last. Freed from the distribution constraints that limited Marvel’s

Marie Severin splash page to Tales to Astonish #94 featuring the Hulk. Courtesy Heritage Auctions.

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Interview with Marie

separate, individual panels, the connection of the two aspects of the character, as well as the agony involved in the transformation.

Issue #106 marked a transition for the Hulk, as Marie did the breakdowns for Herb Trimpe to pencil. With the following issue, Trimpe assumed the regular penciling chores on the book. Marie continued to draw the covers through issue #108.

It is worth noting that one of Trimpe’s best inkers during his tenure with the Hulk was Marie’s brother John Severin. Marie returned to draw The Incredible Hulk Annual #1, featuring a tale of the Hulk with Black Bolt and the Inhumans. She also finished Trimpe’s layouts in issue #190 of The Incredible Hulk, and inked other artist’s pencils in a dozen issues in the late 1980s, beginning with #354. In addition, Marie did spot illustrations for text articles in the Rampaging Hulk black-and-white magazine. (See also the discussion about Sketch Cards in the section Home Again.)

Marie and Herb Trimpe made a great team. About his former partner on the Hulk, Trimpe said, “Marie is a treasure of experience and talent in this business—an icon and a cornerstone of the edifice we call comic books.”

The enduring popularity of the Hulk can be attributed in part to his inability to control his circumstances and the fact that so few people truly understand him, a condition that many people—especially youth—can easily relate to. Marie did an outstanding job of making the character both powerful and likable at the same time.

Marie talks briefly about her experience with the Incredible Hulk.

Cassell: So what about the Hulk? Did you enjoy drawing the Hulk?

Severin: Oh, yeah. That was fun. When I see the Hulk today, oh, they make him so nasty! I always thought of him as, he wrecked everything, but he really didn’t know what the heck he was doing. I thought, here goes the Hulk and bang, saves the [day], building comes down. Oh, my God. But it wasn’t hateful. One of the fans sent me a book that they made recently of classic heads of the Hulk. He is so mean-looking!

You have no sympathy for him whatsoever. I mean, maybe it’s salable, but my thinking of the original Hulk is like, just, “I didn’t mean that. Don’t make me mad.” But now it’s rip ‘em up, tear ‘em up. There’s no reasoning at all.

Cassell: Yeah, I’m like you, I don’t care much for the new Hulk.

Severin: No. It’s too vicious. But, listen, maybe today the kids want to see that. Who knows? I mean, it’s a lot more violent today than it was in the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies, boy. The world has gotten to be completely all soulless.

In a june 20, 2003 article in the Pulse section of the Home News Tribune, Marie tells writer Mark Voger how she envisioned the Hulk, “I rather liked him looking more hard, with less hair, almost like a monster’s. That’s how I evolved it. It’s the same sort of thing as ‘Frankenstein’—just pure frustration. I think the poor guy was so frustrated, because most of the time he didn’t know why he was such a mess. The monster thing always has appeal. ‘Frankenstein’ summed it up better than

LEFT Classic Marie Severin transformation panel from issue #106 of The Incredible Hulk.

RIGHT Unpublished version of the cover to Tales to Astonish #101 by Marie. Courtesy of Stephen Moore.

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LEFT Marie Severin caricature of Herb Trimpe surrounded by female admirers in the Marvel Bullpen.

RIGHT Photo of Trimpe from the Marvelmania Bullpen Photo Set. Courtesy of Jon B. Cooke. anything. But I don’t know if we identify with him or not. The kids identify more with Superman, with the handsome, muscle stuff, I think.”

Mark Evanier, who is interviewed later in the Fan Club section, notes, “One of Stan Lee’s modus operandi was, when it came time to move an artist off a strip, he’d bring the new guy as an inker, and have him ink the strip for a little while, and then he’d take over penciling it. And, of course, the way Johnny Craig inked Iron Man over Gene Colan, then took over penciling Iron Man, and the way Syd Shores was supposed to ink Jack Kirby on Captain America and was supposed to take over, but he probably wasn’t up to it. And Herb inked Marie on The Incredible Hulk, and ended up drawing the Hulk.”

and when I began working on the Hulk, I inked over Marie’s pencils. She’s a very funny lady, and we got along well from the start.

Cassell: What circumstances led you and Marie to work together on the Hulk (Tales to Astonish)?

Trimpe: The Hulk was on the verge of being published under his own title, and Marie was involved in other projects that didn’t allow the time to do a complete book. Stan asked if I was interested, as I was working every day in the bullpen at the time, doing mostly production work, as well as inking Westerns. I told him I was interested. It meant a steady gig, which was a better financial situation for me.

Cassell: Why do you think the Hulk is such a popular character?

Trimpe: I don’t know, especially now, as the Hulk is unrecognizable to me, and bares little resemblance to the KIrby/Lee concept. The Hulk was a pathetic creature, a side of Bruce Banner that manifested itself, sometimes when least expected, not necessarily a violent creature, and only becoming that when provoked or threatened. His greatest desire was to be left alone. I think during the years that Kirby, Marie, myself and Sal drew the character, Banner’s dual personality, the rational being and the out of control being , exists in all of us to one degree or another. I think readers recognizing and identifying with this dichotomy, made the Hulk a compelling character.

We saw a reflection of ourselves.

AS NOTED PREVIOUSLY, HERB Trimpe began working in production at Marvel Comics before becoming a regular artist. Trimpe drew a number of fan favorites during his tenure at Marvel, including Godzilla and G.I. Joe, but he is best remembered for his seminal work on The Incredible Hulk. In this interview, Trimpe talks about his impressions of fellow Hulk artist Marie Severin.

Interview with Herb Trimpe

Cassell: What other projects did you work on with Marie?

Trimpe: I inked work she penciled for Spoof and maybe Not Brand Echh, and I also inked work she did when penciling Doctor Strange.

Dewey Cassell: When did you first meet Marie?

Herb Trimpe: I started working for Marvel in 1966, so it was sometime very close to that, as she was on staff in the Marvel offices at the time. Probably in October of 1966.

Cassell: How would you compare Marie’s drawing style to some of the other artists you worked with?

Trimpe: Equally as competent if not not more so. She also has excellent versatility. As I said, she is extremely funny, and her cartoon work was always on the mark. Her range was broad,

Cassell: In what ways did you interact with Marie in your early days working at Marvel?

Trimpe: Well, she was drawing the Hulk in Tales to Astonish at the time, as well as coloring, and a bunch of other stuff, 75

LEFT 1997 commission of the Hulk in action by Marie.

RIGHT Page 3 from Tales to Astonish #96 by Marie Severin and Herb Trimpe. Courtesy of Stephen Moore. and easy to work with, as well as being professional. Marie was at the top of the list when it came to that.

going from that to the super-hero genre, including horror themes, westerns, science-fiction or anything in between.

There really isn’t anything she can’t do.

Cassell: Do you recall any stories about Marie?

Trimpe: Lots of stuff. Everyday. Her signature activity was drawing quick ink-brush sketches on newsprint and sticking them on the wall so all could see. Funny stuff targeted at choice events happening in the office. I was her primary target.

She drew dozens of cartoon of just about everyone, especially of me practically every time I opened my mouth. I’m no doubt exaggerating, but it seemed she hit on every ridiculous thing I said or did. Hilarious would be the word.

Cassell: Why do you suppose Marie got called on to do so many of the Marvel house ads and promotional material?

Trimpe: For exactly the reasons given in the previous question.

In addition, she was fast and on time. A very important quality in those days.

Cassell: Did you enjoy working in the Marvel offices with Marie (and the rest of the gang)?

Trimpe: Well, of course, it was a time that will never be repeated. It was a fun, loose, and creative time. Lots of interaction and playfulness. We weren’t doing anything “important” or “serious,” we were just having a good time.

Cassell: What do you most admire about Marie?

Trimpe: Guts. First, she was an anomaly among a male dominated business, and she matched everyone of them, blow for blow. Not that it was a competition. Nobody wants to admit it’s competition, but the truth is, the business was very competitive. Publishing in general was/is a very competitive field of endeavor. With tight deadlines and a pressing need to produce quality stuff in a very short period of time, not to mention personality conflicts, personal problems and all the other things that go along with everyday living, Marie excelled as a professional, as well as being a wonderful and amazing human being.

Cassell: How did Marie’s presence/involvement impact Marvel Comics?

Trimpe: First an foremost, we were a publishing company.

Outside the creative aspect, we were a money-making organization, and if that didn’t happen, all the fun and creativity would come to an end. Marie was an asset to toward that goal.

We all were, otherwise, we would have had no jobs. And, when working toward this end, it’s nice to have people who are fun 76

The third super-hero that Marie Severin illustrated for Marvel was Namor, the Sub-Mariner. By the time Marie started on the Sub-Mariner, she was hitting her artistic stride and had developed a distinctive style of drawing that was easily recognizable. Her artwork gave an air of nobility to the Prince of Atlantis.

The Sub-Mariner resurfaced (pun intended) in the pages of issue #4 of Fantastic Four in 1962. In 1965, he replaced Giant-Man in Tales to Astonish, appearing alongside the Incredible Hulk beginning with issue #70.

Gene Colan, drawing under the pen name “Adam Austin” drew the subsequent SubMariner stories, which were written by Stan Lee. Colan was replaced by Bill Everett and later Dan Adkins, although Colan continued to draw the Sub-Mariner covers for a while. The 100th issue of Tales to Astonish, which contained a single story featuring a battle royal between the two lead characters, Sub-Mariner and the Hulk, was illustrated by Marie Severin.

In 1968, the Sub-Mariner got his own title, which was drawn initially by John Buscema and written by Roy Thomas.

Marie Severin drew the ninth issue and then returned with issue #12 to begin a regular stint penciling the book. She started drawing the covers with issue #13. She remained the penciler with the book until issue #23, when it was taken over by Sal Buscema, although she still did an occasional cover. In addition to drawing the Sub-Mariner stories, Marie often colored them as well, which she preferred to do.

The time Marie spent on Sub-Mariner was marked by stories involving some classic Subby villains like Tiger Shark, Krang, Orka, Sting-Ray, and Dragon Man, as well as the original Human Torch, Doctor Strange, and Triton of the Inhumans.

The splash page of issue #19 offered a bonus for observant fans. Into the crowd surrounding an unconscious Sub-Mariner lying on the beach, Marie drew members of the Marvel Comics family, including Stan Lee, John Romita, Frank Giacoia, Herb Trimpe, Roy Thomas, Tony Mortellaro, John Verpoorten, Morrie Kuramoto, Larry Lieber, Gary Friedrich, Mike Esposito, Don Heck, Sol Brodsky, and Bill Everett, as well as Marie herself.

Marie offers some brief insight into her work on the Sub-Mariner.

sub - MARinER THE SUB-MARINER WAS created by Bill Everett and debuted in Marvel Comics #1, the first comic book produced by Timely Comics. The Sub-Mariner is the son of a human father and a princess of Atlantis, which imbued him with incredible strength and the power of flight, as well as the ability to breathe both air and under water. Like Captain America and the Human Torch, he fought the Axis powers throughout World War II, but his popularity waned in the years that followed.

Interview with Marie Cassell: What about the Sub-Mariner? Did you enjoy doing that one?

Severin: Yeah, I liked the Sub-Mariner. I came in after Gene Colan, who’s a hard number to follow, and Buscema had done it, too, so I felt like I was retarded. But I enjoyed it. They let me plot a lot of the stuff with the writer [Roy Thomas], which was fun. I never really had a script. I would work it out and put things in the margin.

Cassell: Did you have to get it approved?

Severin: When I started, when Stan had the time to do this, you would go in to Stan, you’d talk about a

Cover of Sub-Mariner #14 by Marie Severin and Frank Giacoia. Courtesy of David Siegel and Heritage Auctions.

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plot, and then you’d it work out, and you’d bring it in, a couple of pages, and make it a whole story. And then go over it with him. You had notes in the margins. And he might say, “Nah, I don’t like that, but I’ll just change the dialogue to something else, and take the costume off or put it on this panel, and have a long shot here, I think the page would look better with a long shot. If you had a talking heads page where everybody’s talking, and you had to have one, you had to shoot one [panel] from the ceiling down at people, another one from a chair or telephone up just to make the design of the page appealinglooking. Because if you’ve just got talking heads, it’s pretty boring. He was a pretty inventive guy.

Mooney: I was always impressed. I thought she was really an excellent penciler. She was easy to ink. It was all there. She didn’t over embellish or anything like that, but the penciling was very solid, very easy to work with. And of course, it was a little looser when we worked together on the Soulsearchers for Richard Howell. Generally, it was very solid. There was no problem wondering what she was trying to get across. It was very explicit. You knew what she wanted—the lights, the darks, the various things were very well delineated. I did a lot of inking over Marie’s stuff.

Cassell: I’m sure there were some people you worked with who had much looser pencils …

Mooney: Yeah, quite a few. In fact, a lot of times—and I can’t recall the name of each particular one—but I would be put on as a finalizer. In other words, I had to tighten up the pencils before I inked them. I can’t come up with any particular titles.

You know, you stop and think and the years I’ve been working, I worked with an awful lot of different people.

ANOTHER ARTIST WHO DREW the Sub-Mariner was “Gentleman” Jim Mooney. Mooney got his start at DC Comics drawing the flagship characters Batman and Superman. When he came to Marvel, he contributed to a variety of titles, though he is perhaps best known for his work on Spider-Man. Here, Jim Mooney talks fondly about working with Marie Severin at Marvel and Claypool Comics.

Cassell: Romita did that, right?

Mooney: Well, that’s one thing about John. That’s one of the reasons you notice in some of the credits, I’m credited as the illustrator. And sometimes with John Buscema. Let’s put it this way, both those guys were such damn good pencilers anyway that even when it was a little loose, it wasn’t too hard to tighten this up or add a shadow here. Primarily what my function was

Interview with Jim Mooney Dewey Cassell: When did you first start working for Marvel?

Jim Mooney: To give you the exact date would be a little bit difficult, but I had been under contract to DC for an untold number of years and things were getting a little rough there and having a few problems and I approached Stan. I said, “I’m getting a little fed up with things at DC and maybe they’re getting a little fed up with me. If anything comes up, let me know.” And Stan mentioned, “I could use you right now on Spider-Man. We could use somebody to finalize and ink it over John Romita.” It must have been the Sixties, wasn’t it?

Cassell: Yeah. Is that about the time you first ran into Marie?

Mooney: Very possibly, because of being in the office a little more often.

The first time I remember seeing her was in the office at Marvel.

Cassell: Did you work in the office at all or did you pretty much work from home?

Mooney: No, I’ve always been a freelancer. The only time I ever worked in an office was for Fiction House, back in the Forties.

Cassell: What was your impression of Marie’s pencil work?

ABOVE Photo of Jim Mooney.

RIGHT Page 6 from issue #23 of Sub-Mariner

by Marie Severin and Johnny Craig. Courtesy of Sean Clarke.

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Cassell: In fact, you also inked Ramona Fradon’s pencils on an issue of The Cat that never got published.

Mooney: Yeah, in fact I think I saw some copies of those pages I had done that were not published.

Ramona was very good, obviously.

Ramona is a really nice person. We have gotten together quite a few times at conventions and I liked her very much.

Cassell: Did you ever meet John Severin?

Mooney: Yeah, I did once, at one convention.

Cassell: When Marie was working in the office and you would see her there, did you ever have occasion to interact with her in the work setting?

Mooney: You know, the thing is that I spent so little time there as a freelancer. Most of the time, I did not spend much time in the office. I usually brought the stuff in, maybe talked with John Romita for a bit, and occasionally I would meet with Stan, but I really did not socialize much when I would come into the office. As I said, I would bring the stuff in and if there was any necessity to discuss it, I would do so, but then I would take a train back home to Connecticut.

2001 commission of Sub-Mariner by Marie.

was to tighten it up and possibly add a little bit more details as far as the lights and shadows were concerned, mainly the shadows of course.

Cassell: So, why on the Soulsearchers was it a little bit looser?

Mooney: I think probably she was just a little bit more relaxed in doing it. Possibly she just felt that type—the Soulsearchers was fanciful, fairy tale type stuff—it wasn’t exactly what you would call heavy duty stuff. I think she thought it was a little lighter and possibly she penciled accordingly, maybe not quite as tightly.

Cassell: Did you have story conferences with Stan?

Mooney: You know, it’s funny, not too many for some reason.

Stan and I were good friends for years. We got together socially a lot. He would come out to visit me when I had my place in Connecticut and even before that when I lived up in Woodstock, he used to come up to Woodstock to visit, but I really wasn’t in those conferences too much, I guess because of being a freelancer.

Cassell: When you were working with Marie, did you ever have need to collaborate about what you were planning to do?

Mooney: The only time that I really got together with Marie was at a few conventions. We would go to some of those big conventions and have breakfast together and we would go to the group get-togethers. Socially, occasionally at some of the conventions I had dinner and a few drinks with Marie.

Cassell: You worked on some of the same characters that Marie did, although not necessarily at the same time, like Sub-Mariner. When you would take over a book, if someone else had been penciling it or inking it and you were going to take it over, were you asked to maintain the same look and feel for the book or did you have the latitude to interpret it the way you wanted to?

Mooney: Most of the time, I really had no information or instructions to do it the way it had been done before. Stopping to think, most of the stuff that I did was on Spider-Man with Romita, and then later on I had Omega, Man-Thing and “Dial H for Hero” and those were all pretty much my own doing, my own interpretation.

Cassell: Did you find her to be a sociable person?

Mooney: Oh, yeah. She’s a sweetheart. She’s probably one of the nicest people to get along with socially, in every way. As I said, I think it was just a couple of conventions where we did have dinner and drinks together. That was when my wife was still here and we did a few more conventions, so consequently I can remember that very vividly.

Cassell: Any parting comments about Marie?

Mooney: Marie was one of my favorite people. She was one of the best artists in the business. Tell her I remember her fondly and give her my love.

Cassell: There were also some things you worked on with her that were a little more off the wall, like The Cat. You inked Marie’s pencils on that.

Mooney: Oh yeah. That’s right. Very nice. I remember that very well.

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One of the other heroes Marie illustrated for Marvel was the Cat. The Cat got off to a rocky start, but always seemed to land on her feet. The Cat is noteworthy not only for being a female hero, but one that Marie helped to create.

Severin: Yes, I remember saying, “My God, I drew this woman and Wally inked her like she’s wrapped in Saran Wrap.” His storytelling always had lovely inking, nice blacks and everything, but I didn’t have her that revealing. The boys loved his work, though. She was hot stuff.

Cassell: Did you have some influence over the design of the character?

Severin: At that time, Stan had the time that when you worked on something, you always checked it out with him. You had time to go in and have a little talk and get his opinion. They wanted her to look like a cat. The sash was my idea, I’m pretty sure. The sash was just for an element of flair, not having a tail. She had something on her feet so she could climb up buildings. That all made sense in the realm of the nonsense of comic books.

THE CAT NOTHING GETS MALE HORMONES raging faster than a curvaceous female feline in a bikini, as attested to by the enduring popularity of Marvel Comics’ Tigra the Were-Woman. So, who would imagine that the origins of Tigra lie with another hirsute heroine whose tales were woven for girls?

Comic books have often attempted to reflect the changes occurring in society. In the late 1960s, the dialogue, characters, and storyline of DC Comics’ Teen Titans reflected the hip culture prevalent at the time. By the early Seventies, the feminist movement was in full swing. In 1972, Gloria Steinem founded Ms. magazine. That same year, Marvel Comics launched several new comic books aimed at a female audience, including Night Nurse, Shanna the She-Devil and The Cat. Targeting female readership was not new to the comics industry, but by late 1972, the romance titles that had long been a mainstay had largely lost their appeal. What were lacking were relevant stories featuring a character with which girls could identify and admire. For all of the monumental growth in the super-hero genre, there remained a dearth of female heroes.

Enter Greer Grant Nelson. Greer was an attractive, intelligent, but insecure young woman who married an overbearing policeman who was later killed by a gunman. Left on her own, Greer volunteered for a university study with Doctor Joanne Tumolo. The study involved a series of treatments designed to heighten the innate capabilities of women, including a sixth sense of “women’s intuition.” Ironically, the study was being funded by a dominating male villain named Mal Donalbain, who had also created a cat suit as part of a secret plan to build a private “army of amazons.” Doctor Tumolo discovered the scheme and Greer donned the costume, confronting Donalbain, whose morbid fear of being touched proved his undoing.

According to former Marvel editor Roy Thomas, “The basic concept for the character, and the name (including ‘The Claws of the Cat’) was Stan’s.” Marvel stalwart Marie Severin was tapped to pencil the book, and she talked about the genesis of the character:

Cassell: How did you feel about women’s lib?

Severin: In my family, we all drew. I never knew that girls didn’t draw. We always had books at home and my parents were artistic people and they always gave us paper to draw on.

And you never drew on the other side. My father said that you should draw on one side only. It instilled in you that you were not scribbling. It was worth something.

Interview with Marie Cassell: I understand they deliberately put a team of women creators on The Cat …

Severin: Absolutely. They were hoping to capture female readers. After all, fifty percent of the population is female.

Splash page to The Cat #1 by Marie Severin and Wally Wood.

Cassell: I guess female inkers were hard to come by, though, because Wally Wood inked the origin story …

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A technique that marie used with the Cat, which she used in many other stories as well, is called “the floating head.” It is literally a disembodied head in the corner of a panel, typically used in a flashback sequence in which the character is narrating what has transpired previously in the story. The technique is used to recap key plot points from a prior issue or to fill in parts of the story (such as a character’s origin). Marie was certainly not the only artist to use this technique, but she used it to great effect in many of the comics she illustrated.

Marie also colored the first two issues of The Cat. Marie left the book after the second issue to become head of the Marvel coloring department, after which Paty Greer (later Cockrum) and Bill Everett took over the illustrating chores.

About the same time that the third issue of The Cat hit the newsstands, Greer made a guest appearance alongside your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man in issue eight of Marvel Team-Up. The move was undoubtedly meant to provide a boost to the fledgling super-heroine’s own title, but it was not enough. Issue four of The Cat would prove to be her last and she went out with a whimper, appearing in a short fifteen-page tale illustrated by three men (Jim Starlin, Alan Weiss, and Frank McLaughlin), accompanied by a reprint of a Marvel Girl story from X-Men.

first thing he let me write was a fill-in short western for Kid Colt Outlaw or something. I did all right. He thought it was okay. And then he let me write—I can’t remember the timeline, but I did an X-Men filler and also filled in when Jeannie Thomas, his wife at the time, was doing Night Nurse. Then Stan and Roy said, “We should do some woman super-hero character.”

They came up with the whole concept and then brought it to me. They decided to use women on the creative team—me and Marie and later Paty and later Ramona Fradon. I thought, “A cat? Oh, my God, how original. We’ll have a woman and we’ll call her Cat and she can be in catfights.” But I was just happy to have the chance to do it.

Cassell: Did they suggest the women’s lib tone to the stories?

Fite: No, I sort of came up with the first story. Once they had the design and what she would look like, I came up with the backstory and her name. That was sort of what they were aiming at, to have a strong female character. I guess she was widowed—that put her out on her own—plus she’d had all this adversity and “what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” That kind of stuff. Roy edited it, but I don’t remember him making any drastic changes, unless he wanted more fighting. I named the character, Doctor Tumolo, after my best friend from college. She’s so mad now. She’s quite an eminent psychotherapist, but she says, “If you Google my name, the Cat comes up!” [laughter] Pop culture, baby. It rules.

Cassell: I had heard that Marvel had this practice where they liked to see several pages of fight sequence in every story.

Fite: That’s true. That’s my recollection as well. The plots at Marvel were very sketchy. Sometimes, it would just be a page.

They do this and then they do that and then it would say, “Two or three pages of fighting.” That’s what the plot would say.

THE WRITER OF THE CAT stories was Linda Fite. Linda talked about how she got involved with Marvel Comics and Greer Nelson:

Cassell: My favorite issue is the one with the Owl. Fite: Oh yeah, I forgot about that one. Roy would come to me and say, “Have her fight this one next time” and I said, “Oh, sh*t, okay.” I think a couple of times, he said, “Here would be a good villain for her to fight.”

Interview with Linda Fite Dewey Cassell: How did you get started at Marvel?

Linda Fite: When I was in college, I made friends with this guy who was one of the first generation of hippies in the South. He ran this really cool club in Raleigh, North Carolina, called The Sidetrack. His name was John Peden and now he’s a photographer in New York City. We’d go down there to see him because his girlfriend went to my college. He was a Marvel Comics fan and he sort of turned me on to it. I started reading them in college and just loved them. I loved all that Stan Lee stuff and Jack Kirby stuff. When I was a senior, looking around for jobs, I had some interviews lined up in Manhattan. So, I wrote Marvel and said, “Hey, man, you should hire me. I’m good.” Flo Steinberg called me in my dorm and said, “You sound so wonderful. We can’t offer you a job, but when you come to New York, Stan would like to meet you.” So that’s how I got there. I took a job at Marvel, even though it paid substantially less than the job I was offered at a national magazine. I think it was Life or Look or one of those, but I was in love with comics. It was too cool to pass up.

Cassell: Marie illustrated the first couple of issues, but then she left the book. Any idea why?

Fite: I don’t know why she went off of it. Maybe she had another comic to draw. Paty only did the one issue and then they brought in three guys to do the fourth one. Then the Ramona Fradon job, I don’t even know if it got published.

Something with witches. I thought, “Hell, we might as well bring in the witches if we’re going to do this woman thing.”

Cassell: So why did the story in the fourth issue end up being only fifteen pages?

Fite: I have no idea. Is that the one that Starlin and Weiss did?

I got mad at them because they were putting all these notes in the margins. I was very passionate then, as far as my feminism goes. One of them wrote, “Next issue, the Cat gets an ovarian cyst.” I got so mad. I went to Stan and I finked on them and they got in trouble. But that’s when I was much more self-righteous. Not as wise as I am now.

Cassell: So, how did you get the assignment to do The Cat? Fite: I was hired as an editorial assistant/production assistant at Marvel. I answered fan mail, too, and helped out Flo. I kept bugging Roy, “C’mon, Roy, let me write. Gimme a shot.” The

Cassell: What else do you remember about the Cat? 81

to the title’s cancellation before the fifth issue of The Cat saw print. Ordinarily, that would mark the end of a super-hero, but we are talking about a cat, and this one would have at least three lives.

After a yearlong absence, Greer Nelson returned to Marvel Comics in 1974 in a book entitled Giant-Size Creatures, featuring Werewolf by Night.

In this story, written by Tony Isabella, Greer discovers that her mentor, Doctor Tumolo, is actually a member of an obscure race of cat people.

Cassell: Do you recall anything When Greer gets injured fightabout why the book got canceled? ing a HYDRA agent as the Cat, Was it just a sales thing? the good doctor offers to heal Fite: It was strictly sales. The stanher, but there is a catch. The dards were much higher then for cure will turn her into one of what would float a comic. If it was the cat people as well. With the under a certain number, they just acquiescence, “Life is precious, canned it. Did you know that Frank in any shape,” Greer consents Miller’s first mention in a Marvel and in the transformation, she comic was in a “Claws of the Cat” acquires fur, stripes, and claws letters page? Mind you, I didn’t The “floating head” of Greer Nelson like a tiger, as well as the aninotice at the time. Who knew who recaps her origin on page 10 of issue mal’s innate agility and senses.

Frank Miller was going to become? #2 of The Cat by Marie Severin and The result is the character we Someone pointed that out to me Jim Mooney. have come to know as Tigra. later. I can’t remember which issue Tony Isabella explains the it was, maybe number three. rationale for the transformation, “I liked the character. With supernatural heroes seemingly in favor with Marvel and its Cassell: How long did you end up working for Marvel? readers, I figured turning Greer into Tigra might give her a Fite: I was there, I guess, only about a year and a half in the second chance at comics success.” Isabella was right. After an office, but it was the most fun office anyone could ever hope appearance in the pages of one of Marvel’s black-and-white to work for. It was like those movie versions of those fun ad magazines, Monsters Unleashed #10, Tigra found a home in the agencies with the basketball hoops. It was freewheeling with pages of Marvel Chillers, starting with the third issue. While lots of talk, so much discussion, joking, and practical joking. her reign in Marvel Chillers was not much longer than her We would party together, and go out to eat at lunch, and it original tenure in The Cat, Greer went on to appear alongside was really wonderful. I left because they wouldn’t give me the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, the X-Men, and the Avengers. a big enough raise. I am a practical woman. It was kind of a She remains an active member of the Marvel Universe, includboy’s world. I got a full time job as an art director for a trade ing a 2002 solo mini-series. magazine.

But that was just her second life. When Greer Nelson joined the ranks of the cat people as Tigra, she left the cat suit Cassell: Did you enjoy working with Marie? behind, and who should happen along to don the costume but Fite: Oh, Marie is the bomb. She’s great. She used to make all Patsy Walker, of romance comics’ fame. Patsy dubbed herself these cartoons, all the time, about us. I wish someone would “Hellcat” and took up residence with the assembled in issue gather all the cartoons she did of the bullpen and put out a #144 of The Avengers. She, too, is still an active part of the book. They were so good—scathing and funny and spot-on. So Marvel mythos as a member of the Defenders. Anecdotally, talented.

“Hellcat” was a name considered for the original Greer Nelson character in 1972 and a working title in 1974 for the character that became Tigra.

As Linda suggested, a fifth issue of The Cat was written, A failed start out of the gate rarely results in a characpenciled and partially inked, but never published. Ironically, ter—much less two—that survives for over thirty years. Credit with this issue, Marvel was attempting to return to the goes to Marie Severin and Linda Fite for getting her off to a original premise of the book. Long-time DC penciler Ramona good start, and to Tony Isabella and Roy Thomas for seeing the Fradon was tapped to do the honors for Greer and Linda Fite potential in the heroic feline and saving her from the violin once again penned the tale. Ramona redesigned the characfactory. Beware the claws of the Cat, in any form. ter’s costume for the issue. Sadly, poor prior sales figures led Fite: Someone pointed out that it was a really stupid costume for someone trying to sneak around in the dark. I loved the humor in the comics that Stan did, so I couldn’t help but go there. You know, a lot of comic book writers take themselves very seriously, and some of the comics are very serious and wonderfully written and profound, and I don’t in any way take away from that, but I was of an era where it would crack you up. It was fun to get the double entendres and puns and wisecracks. I liked all that stuff.

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Marie and her brother John were perhaps not the obvious choice to illustrate the sword-and-sorcery tales of a barbarian named Kull, but the combination produced beautiful results. Fans agree that this is some of the best work ever done by the Severins, alone or together.

Brule the Spear Slayer. Kull’s first appearance was in a story called “The Shadow Kingdom,” published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1929. Howard wrote a total of twelve stories and one poem about Kull, most of which were published posthumously. He rewrote a Kull story that was rejected to serve as the first appearance of Conan.

A pair of artists who certainly made their mark in illustrating the characters of Robert E. Howard were Marie and John Severin. From their work on the early issues of Marvel Comics’ Kull the Conqueror, where Marie penciled and John inked the adventures of the Valusian king, the sister-brother team demonstrated an aptitude for rendering tales of Howard’s heroes and a synergy in working together that made their sword-and-sorcery art a thing to behold.

The fourth issue of the fanzine REH: Lone Star Fictioneer, published in 1976, featured an interview with John Severin, replete with his wry sense of humor and commitment to detail.

Excerpts from the interview follow, with the permission of the publisher, Arnie Fenner.

Kull When it comes to author Robert E. Howard, the character that comes first to mind is typically Conan. Howard wrote more books about Conan than any other character, and there have been numerous adaptations of Conan into film, comic books, and other media. However, Conan was not Robert E. Howard’s first barbarian. That honor belongs to Kull.

Kull was a barbarian from Atlantis who conquered the kingdom of Valusia. His frequent companion was a Pict named

REH: Lone Star Fictioneer Interview with John Severin LSF: Roy Thomas has mentioned that as a character, Kull was more often a “maiden in distress” type, while Brule was the hero who pulled his fat out of the fire. Do you agree?

JOHN: Kull was more impetuous, more inclined to have to be restrained by a Brule, or somebody. More of a brawler than a great thinker. He had a good mind, but he wasn’t a mental type—but he was a physical type, a man of action.

LSF: Do you think Kull would’ve been different if you had penciled and Marie had inked?

JOHN: Pretty much the same … we have the same way of thinking.

Basically.

LSF: You both seem to have the same approach to illustration.

JOHN: Well, amazingly, we had the same father. That really helps.

Considering that’s the only training we ever had, to speak of. I put in three months at an art school and said, “To hell with this, I gotta make some money.” The same was true of Marie.

Commission drawing of Kull by Marie from REH: Lone Star Fictioneer #2.

Copyright © 1975 The Nemedian Chronicles.

Used With Permission.

LSF: What I think was really great about Kull is that he changed clothes.

JOHN: I never really thought about him having a regular costume, because every time he showed up, he showed up in a different place. Wandering through a forest … at a celebration … going out to do battle … you’re going to be dressed differently all those times. The details make it more realistic.

LSF: One other detail point … I loved the scar.

JOHN: Because of that first battle, Kull had the scar. I never knew if Howard wrote about the scar in the stories, or whether my sister put it there. [At this point, John gestured to a scar on his 83

using the sea are always effective; seems to denote a feeling of pure adventure...

JOHN: That’s not the original drawing. That IS the original drawing. Let’s go into the details: they did a lot of things to this cover when they got it in the offices—they didn’t like the positions of the soldiers getting ready for battle—I’ll show you the original. The guys were waiting for impending disaster— getting ready to fight—there were no arrows in the sky, just the one on the deck. If an arrow’s coming toward you you cringe a little, hold up your shield. These guys [on the printed cover] are talking, adjusting their gear, etc. So they had Marie change it a bit; an arrow hits a guy here, one there …

own face.] I just looked in the mirror, and said, “How does that thing go?” and it ended up being on the other side of the face! [laughter] LSF: While you were working on Kull, did you draw characters different from the Howard descriptions?

JOHN: Howard said Brule was a Pict and I was told to make him like an Indian. He had to be an Indian and a Pict. And that’s why he turned out looking like he did. But if I had drawn him all on my own, he’d have come out a little different … a little more sinister.

LSF: Who designed the costumes and weaponry for the Kull comic?

Was it a collaboration?

JOHN: I’d have to say that 90% of the actual design was Marie’s idea. I’d do slight alterations on occasion, but it was basically all Marie’s.

LSF: You’ve said you spent more time inking Kull than, say, the Hulk. Was it because you were working with Marie, or …

JOHN: Nope. It’s because I don’t ink with a brush. What is there to ink on the Hulk? A pair of trousers. Now, Kull …

I had to check all my previous drawings to make sure the details were all the same. If he had six buttons at the beginning, he had to have six later—not two. Then there is the fact that there are all those damned things—the Red Slayers, for instance. I hated the idea of making each man’s uniform exactly alike because, first of all, it wasn’t that way, and it wasn’t as personal. Each man had his own personal differences—he was a Red Slayer, but he was different … each his own knife, his own way of wearing his belt. And that’s the reason it took me so long.

LSF: Did you both work on the covers or did you on occasion switch back and forth?

JOHN: I would sometimes get a sketch [from Marie] that I would turn into my own cover drawing. And I think once or twice she penciled the entire thing. I’m not sure; one way or the other, I always got a definite idea of what the hell to draw.

LSF: [Holding up the cover to Kull #5—a scene in which King Kull is standing on a ship’s deck with arrows flying about.] Illustrations 84

FACING PAGE Marie’s pencils on plate #7 from the 1977 Kull II portfolio.

ABOVE John Severin’s inks on plate #7 from the Kull II portfolio. longtime Robert E. Howard fan. About the series, he [Conway] had this to say: ‘After the first story, Roy pretty much left Marie Severin and I to our own devices. Marie was much more of a story collaborator on the Kull stories than any other artists I’ve worked with; a good portion of the pacing and structure of the adaptations was due to her. She and I would talk over the stories together, much as I did with most of the pencillers I worked with at Marvel, but she was a terrific storyteller in her own right.’”

Finn continues, “… [John Severin] put his best efforts into the art, but the real credit for getting so much of the stuff right goes to Marie and Gerry. It’s that interplay between the art and the words that really makes these stories come alive.”

In 1973, Goblin Graphix published a Kull portfolio of six plates, illustrated by John Severin. It was limited to a print run of 200 and the first plate was signed and numbered by John.

John was not enchanted with the results, feeling like they were little more than “big comic book panels.” (REH:LSF 1976, 44) Then in 1977, the Severins went on to create the Kull II portfolio, distributed by Middle Earth. The second Kull portfolio had seven plates, measuring 11 x 15 inches, plus a gorgeous cover, all with unique illustrations of the Valusian king in action.

The Severins started on Kull the Conqueror in 1971 with the second issue and remained through issue # 10. The Severin run on Kull included one of the first comic book appearances of the classic sorcerer villain, Thulsa Doom. As noted by Howard Zimmerman in issue # 14 of Marvel’s in-house fanzine, FOOM, the Severins’ style on Kull transformed the character into a regal ruler, more in common with Prince Valiant than Conan.

Marie went on to do a couple of covers and a pinup later in the Kull the Destroyer series. There was also a short-lived Marvel magazine in the mid-Seventies titled Kull and the Barbarians, the first issue of which featured a black-and-white reprint of the first Severin story from the Kull comic book.

In his introduction to volume 1 of The Chronicles of Kull published by Dark Horse in 2009, Howard scholar Mark Finn wrote about Marie Severin’s run on Kull, “No one connected with the Kull comics can quite remember why Andru and Wood weren’t to be the regular artists for the series, but their replacement, the sister-and-brother team of Marie and John Severin, was in fact an improvement. From the storytelling to the grounded, illustrative style and inks, their artwork was a high-water mark on the series and for Howard projects in general. Roy Thomas had, by this time, other irons in the fire, and so he handed the scripting reins off to Gerry Conway, a 85

Three of the plates and the cover were penciled by Marie and inked by John, the remaining plates were illustrated by John alone. John again signed and numbered the first plate in each set, which was limited to a print run of 1500. A Severin image of Kull was also used on the 7-11 Slurpee cup of the character in 1975.

The Severins’ association with REH was not ended, however. Marie and John had produced a short Kull filler piece with illustrations set to a REH poem that appeared as a backup feature in Conan the Barbarian # 10. In addition, John Severin (and Sal Buscema) inked John Buscema’s pencils in Conan # 25. Marie also inked and/or colored several of John Buscema’s stories in Conan and the later Kull series.

In 1987, John Severin illustrated a Marvel graphic novel titled Conan the Reaver, which was colored by Marie. Marie also provided two illustrations for the squarebound portfolio, Conan the Cruel, published by SQP Inc. in 1996, one depicting a young Conan and the other reflecting her unique sense of humor. John Severin even illustrated a Conan story for Dark Horse in 2005.

Comparisons between Kull and Conan comics were inevitable, especially with Marvel publishing them both. Barry Windsor Smith, who was illustrating Conan at the time, gave the barbarian tales a feel of fantasy, as opposed to the more realistic renderings of Marie and John on Kull. John preferred Kull, but had great respect for Barry’s work on Conan, commenting, “I look at Barry Smith’s pictures and I like ‘em.”

(REH:LSF 1976, 41) And while the Severins’ Kull reflected grace, John Buscema’s Conan was a manifestation of raw power and strength. Conan, the better known of the two REH heroes, outlasted his literary kinsman Kull, whose comic was finally canceled with issue # 29.

For her part, Marie enjoyed working on the REH characters with her brother. Years later, I sent Marie a copy of issue #10 of the EC fanzine Squa Tront, which contained an interview with John Severin. Marie sent me a postcard in thanks, bearing a caricature of herself (as Red Sonja, perhaps?) and brother John as Kull.

TOP Cover of Kull the Conqueror #9 by Marie and John Severin. BOTTOM RIGHT Cover of the Kull II portfolio by Marie and John Severin.

BOTTOM LEFT Postcard from Marie to the author featuring caricatures of Kull and the artist. Covers courtesy Heritage Auctions.

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Over the course of her many years with Marvel, Marie had occasion to draw a variety of heroes, if only for a short while. These characters are not ones you may normally associate with Marie, but she left her indelible mark on each of them.

OTHER CHARACTERs

a new Prowler, in stories written by Roger Stern, one of which she also plotted. She even inked an issue of The Amazing Spider-Man and Marvel Team-Up, and did covers for all three titles. And as you might imagine, she colored several Spider-Man stories over the years as well.

Iron Man Although George Tuska drew the grand majority of Iron Man stories for the first 100 issues of his solo title, there were brief periods of time in which Tuska was not available. One of those times came in early 1976, when Marie inked Herb Trimpe’s pencils on four issues of Iron Man. She also penciled a dozen Iron Man covers during the 1970s, including the first annual.

AnD COMiCs ADDITIONAL HEROES THAT MARIE drew at one time or another during her tenure with Marvel include Spider-Man and Iron Man, among others. She also contributed to some one-shot or short run comics, such as the Wizard of Oz.

Wizard of Oz In 1975, Marvel and DC teamed up for a joint publishing venture called MGM’s Marvelous Wizard of Oz. It was published in the same tabloid size and format as the Marvel Treasury Editions and featured an adaptation of the film, written by Roy Thomas and illustrated by John Buscema. There were several supporting articles as well, including “Who’s Who in MGM’s Oz,” which featured biographies of each of the six major stars from the film, with portraits illustrated by Marie Severin. The detail on the portraits is outstanding and the likenesses are superb. There is also a bit of irony in Marie illustrating the Wicked Witch of the West, given her EC experience.

Spider-Man When you think of the comic book characters illustrated by Marie Severin, Spider-Man probably isn’t the first one that comes to mind, but for a half dozen nonconsecutive issues starting in 1980 (including one annual), Marie was the penciler on Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man. Her style on the title was somewhat subdued, but that may have been because it was never meant to be a long-term assignment. Nonetheless, she did a very credible job of illustrating the web-slinger in battle against classic villains like the Vulture, Mysterio, and

LEFT Cover of Iron Man #25 by Marie Severin and Johnny Craig.

Courtesy Heritage Auctions.

RIGHT Cover of Marvel Tales #30 featuring SpiderMan by Marie Severin and Sal Buscema.

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Marie didn’t just illustrate the characters in the sequential stories. Regardless of her title, there is no denying the impact that Marie had in designing the covers of Marvel comic books.

Cassell: How did you keep track of all of the different covers?

Severin: I started hanging up the cover sketches over the previous covers. I had a whole six months of covers hanging on the wall, of all the books, and I would look at what was coming out this month. “Okay, let’s have a variety of that. Let’s change that.”

MARVEl COVER

Cassell: When you were doing the cover sketches, did you have anything to work from? Did you have the plot synopsis or any of the artwork?

Severin: Yeah, you did. Sometimes I got the script, sometimes I got Xerox pages of the pencils half done or the whole story, but usually they wanted to get the cover in the works before the thing was inked and lettered. I really tried—Stan wanted it that way—that you would basically have the same thing on the cover that was going on inside. I used to hate it as a kid when sometimes the cover had nothing to do with the story inside. We tried to be basically accurate.

PREliMs “MIRTHFUL” MARIE SEVERIN WORKED at Marvel Comics for many years, serving in a variety of roles, but in some respects, her greatest contribution to the Marvel Age of Comics was behind the scenes. For several years, from the late Sixties to early Seventies, Marie Severin designed virtually every cover that appeared on a Marvel comic book.

In this interview, Marie talks about her approach to designing the covers of Marvel comics.

Cassell: DC used to do that a lot. Their covers often had nothing to do with the story.

Severin: Well, remember that they were bigger than we were.

A lot of times, the stuff wasn’t even in production and you had to put a cover on, so you can’t blame them. They were

Interview with Marie Cassell: There was a point in time in which Stan Lee had you doing mock-ups of the covers that Marvel Comics was putting out. Why was that?

Severin: Well, if Sgt. Fury was going to be on a cover with a helicopter sequence or somebody jumping out of a helicopter, and unbeknownst to the editor or Stan, somebody else was writing a story about Daredevil or Spider-Man hanging off a helicopter, you could have two covers in the works and only discover it when they both came back and two of them might be about helicopters. They wanted to have a little more control on the design of the covers, so you wouldn’t have subject duplication.

Cassell: How did you get involved in designing the covers?

Severin: I was very fast with design and sketches and the individual artists didn’t have time to come in and do individual sketches. It was faster for Stan to say “no” to a design with somebody in the office doing them, rather than have the artist, say John Buscema, do a cover and Stan wouldn’t like the layout or he thought the layout was too close to something else or he wanted a different expression (which, of course, John wasn’t that annoying.) But I would have a variety because I knew what the rest of them looked like.

Preliminary cover to Sub-Mariner #31 by Marie. Courtesy of Ruben Espinosa.

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Cassell: When you put together an idea for the cover, whom did it go to for approval?

Severin: Stan, usually. Or the editors would do it, like Roy Thomas. Stan tried to, and succeeded in most cases, make sure he knew what was going to be printed. He might forget an hour later what you showed him, but when you showed him, his instincts were there.

trying to attract the readers to buy the book. Sometimes the story wasn’t even written and they had the cover done.

Cassell: The cover sketches were done on 8½” x 11” paper, frequently on the back of a piece of Marvel stationery. Why was that?

Severin: Probably it was a good size to send out to the guys and it had the address on it and everything so the guys would know where it came from.

Cassell: Did you design all of the Marvel covers?

Severin: For a certain length of time, I was doing most of them. You would have all this coming in and I was like a central point of it. I would file and Xerox it. At that time, we were pretty orderly with it and I would have a consensus of what the covers were. Not that my designs were always the best, but we would get it going. We had a starting point and a correction point. When my sketch was approved, they would send it out and the guy would do it and at least it would be roughly in the same design or subject matter that I had. John Romita, for instance, did his own. He was there, and he and Stan were doing Spider-Man, so I didn’t have to worry about Spider-Man.

Cassell: Some of the cover sketches were done in pen or marker, but others were done in ink and wash.

Severin: As I recall, depending if you wanted to show a graveyard or nighttime scene, you would use the wash on there so the guys would get the idea. They didn’t have to follow it if they didn’t want, but it gave them the atmosphere that Stan wanted at the time.

Some of the cover sketches were fairly simple, but others reflected a tremendous amount of detail. A few were even done in watercolor. Marie typically drew a “corner box” in the upper left and allowed space on the right margin for notes, which might be instructions to the artist or a brief explanation of the scene depicted on the cover.

Cassell: Who decided which artist would actually draw the cover?

LEFT Preliminary cover to Marvel Classics Comics #9 (Dracula) by Marie. RIGHT Preliminary cover to issue #108 of The Incredible Hulk by Marie. Courtesy of Ruben Espinosa and Stephen Moore, respectively.

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Severin: It wasn’t just at random. For the most part, Stan had preferences for certain artists to do certain characters.

Like, if it was Daredevil, whoever was on the book or Stan thought was good. If they weren’t available, you could get somebody else to do it.

Or, you know, he would have loved to have Kirby do them all.

Cassell: I noticed, for example, that your brother John frequently did western covers.

Severin: He drew horses so well. And also, he loved the cowboy bit.

His drawings of that era—battles and equipment Preliminary cover to Chamber of Darkness #7 by Marie (left) and published and guns—it just came so version by Bernie Wrightson. Courtesy of Heritage Auctions. naturally to him. He loved the scenes, the backgrounds so much. More than, I think, most artists in comics did. Other stuff, or that the sales were down and they were more speartists might put a modern gun in a guy’s hand, not realizing cific about what they were putting out there to get kids to it. John was very, very accurate. If he knew it was April 1876, he buy it, and I would have to do a number of covers, even if it had April 1876 backgrounds. John did not put just any old thing wasn’t a bestseller book. Then, sometimes, I would do one there. sketch and Stan would say, “Fine.” So it was your job. Even if you did twenty of them, that’s what you’re paid for.

Cassell: I also noticed that sometimes, when the finished cover was done, the artist might have kept the same general concept, Cassell: A lot of the cover sketches have issue numbers on them. but they might change the perspective, for example. Once the cover Did you always know which issue it was going to be? design was approved, did they still have some latitude?

Severin: I think we knew beforehand, but wanted to make Severin: Oh, sure. That was okay. As I said, I was fast, and I sure. I would pin these up on the wall and you wanted to could do up the idea and do the sketch, and then whoever the make sure you were doing the right issue. Also, when the editor decided to give it to, they interpret what they want. Stan artist would send it in, you had these vouchers that you put liked the idea of the design being basically under his control, the number on and you’d have all this trouble with bookkeepbut you could change the perspective or the background or ing if you didn’t put the right issue number on the voucher. whatever. Stan just liked to have an idea of what was going on.

Once in a while, very rarely, Stan would say, “Let’s use this Sometimes, the artist might bring the cover in and the editor for the next one and we’ll switch the stories.” So, you really might even forget about the sketch that I did. It was probably wanted the artist to be aware of where the heck it was going. not attached to the cover when it came back. If the editor or Stan didn’t like the finished cover, he would have them change Cassell: I also ran across a Captain America cover sketch that it. And I didn’t interfere. It wasn’t my place. was apparently never used.

Cassell: I noticed that you did a cover sketch, even if you were going to do the finished cover.

Severin: Well, I still had to get it approved.

Severin: That could have happened. A lot of times, covers were rejected or the story wasn’t that strong, so they switched to something else. Not every sketch that I did appeared. Or the stories had to be changed. A lot of times, Stan would say, “I don’t like the ending of this” and they’d fool around with it, so the cover would be junked.

Cassell: I noticed there was an issue of Tower of Shadows where you did three or four sketches for the same cover?

Severin: Sometimes, Stan would drive me crazy. It might have FACING PAGE FROM TOP LEFT Preliminary cover to Sgt. Fury and the Howling been that Stan was Commandos Annual #6 by Marie, along with the finished original art by John Severin and being picky about the published cover. Courtesy of Ruben Espinosa and Heritage Auctions, respectively.

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Cassell: When you were doing the cover sketches, did you know which artist was going to do the actual cover?

Severin: Sometimes, but I didn’t think about it. They tried to be consistent, but sometimes somebody was loaded down, so maybe the inside of the book was done by Herb Trimpe, but he didn’t have time to do the cover. Or Romita might be doing the cover and not have time to do a finished story. Romita did a lot of covers. He was very good at design, too.

Cassell: I ran across one of the cover prelims that has a note written at the top corner that says, “John, please have back by Monday. Sol.” Severin: Sol Brodsky.

Cassell: Did the artists ever comment on your cover sketches?

Severin: I remember I was so flattered. John Buscema said, “I don’t want to get your sketches. They’re so good. I can’t compete with that.” And I said, “You?” And he said, “Well, you’ve done the thinking and it’s right. There is nothing for me to do but render.” It took the fun out of the originality for him 91

and I could understand that. He would look at my sketch and really like it. And instead of putting his own energy into it, he was trying to copy what I did and he was not a copier. He said, “I like the ideas, but it’s hard for me. You’ve got it all down. I’m almost trying to duplicate.”

Cassell: That was a great compliment, coming from Buscema.

Severin: I was also flattered when Jack Kirby said, “Sometimes, I don’t like your sketches because I can’t get the flavor that you get.” And I said, “You? Do it your own way.” It’s true. That’s what happens with anybody, whether it’s the little guy in the production department—me— or Buscema, it’s still mentally intimidating because you know that idea has been approved, but you might not like the layout. Sometimes you would change it and Stan wouldn’t care. Other times, he would say, “No, I wanted to show the guy in the costume more, because they’re introducing that costume and I want to make sure it’s noticeable.”

Cassell: So why did you quit doing the cover sketches?

Severin: In the early days, when Stan had a hand in it, he had a lot more control of the situation and could still be creative. But by the time things were getting so big, there was such a volume of work, that Stan, Roy and all of the guys, they couldn’t be as specific as Stan was in the early days. But they tried to keep the quality of the book, the way it was selling, they didn’t want to lose that.

Cassell: It had become too big for one person to do?

Severin: Yeah. And as time went on, the company got really big. The [editors] knew what they were doing, and their books were successful.

Certain artists wanted to do their own sketches to have control, and if that’s what they wanted and they were useful to the company, they let them do it.

Cassell: The cover sketches you did are actually quite collectible.

Severin: I’ve been hearing that. Had I known, I would have Xeroxed them and sent the Xeroxes out. I didn’t know they were going to be worth anything.

Preliminary cover to Captain Savage #19 by Marie and published cover by John Severin.

Courtesy Heritage Auctions.

In 1976, John Buscema organized a Comic Book Artists Workshop where he taught aspiring comic creators the tricks of the trade. (The workshop led to the Fireside book and video, How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way.) Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, and Gil Kane all gave lectures to the 30 students. In keeping with her experience at Marvel, Marie Severin taught the class on “Covers.”

A significant number of the Severin Marvel cover sketches survived, dating from at least 1968 to 1972. During this time period, considered by some the heyday of Marvel, Marie exerted a tremendous amount of influence over the “look” of Marvel comics, which undoubtedly contributed to their success. Ironically, many collectors have commented that Marie’s designs were often superior to the finished covers.

Today, the Marvel cover sketches provide a wonderful insight into the creative talent of Marie Severin, and in many cases, a wistful look at what might have been.

Marie also penciled and/or inked many finished covers for Marvel comics over the years, especially those where she did the interior art, but also ones like Captain America, X-Men, Daredevil, Captain Marvel, and Iron Man, as well as horror comics like Tower of Shadows. She often served as a go-to person when it came to covers, filling in when covers were late, lost, or the interior artist could not do them. In fact, Marie was a remarkably versatile artist and contributed to the success of Marvel Comics in a variety of ways, including inking.

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There is a misconception that inking is nothing more than tracing over the pencils. Nothing could be further from the truth. Inking is a difficult task that requires a particular talent, evident from the fact that you can recognize when it is done badly. Some inkers tend to overpower the penciler, imposing their own style on the art, but the best inkers are able to make it appear seamless, enhancing the work of the penciler and leaving it better than it was before. There are some things that pencils cannot adequately convey, which is why the skill is sometimes referred to as “embellishment.” And over the years, Marie did quite a bit of inking.

their own pencils, but production schedules meant it was often not an option. Marie inked her own pencils for stories in Strange Tales, Not Brand Echh, and Muppet Babies.

Another situation in which Marie served as an inker was to finish artwork for which the penciler only did the layouts. With the “Marvel method” of comic book production, the writer only provides a synopsis and the penciler actually determines the pacing of the story. In this case, an artist may have had a tight deadline or been working on multiple books, so they simply did the layout and Marie did the detailed drawing. One example of this situation would be The Incredible Hulk #190, where Marie finished the art over Herb Trimpe’s layouts.

And finally, when there was a new or less experienced penciler on a book, Marie might be called in to provide the inking. In this case, she probably did more “polishing” than when working with seasoned pencilers, to ensure the story was consistent with Marvel standards. Marie often inked the first issues of titles, to set the tone of the book and provide an example for other inkers to follow. Examples of Marie inking a newer penciler would be in later issues of Mighty Mouse.

The same was true of covers. Whatever the circumstances, Marie brought to inking the same sensibility that she did when penciling. Many pencils by a variety of artists were improved with the inking of Marie Severin.

inKinG THERE ARE SEVERAL CIRCUMSTANCES in which Marie was called on to ink a comic book story or cover. Of course, in some cases, Marie inked her own pencils. The advantage in this approach is that the artist can ensure that the finished product looks the way they envisioned it. Many artists preferred to ink

JOE SINNOTT IS ONE of the best inkers in the business. For years, he embellished the pencils of Jack Kirby on Fantastic Four, producing what is considered by some the very best run of comics in history. In this short interview, Joe talks about working with Marie and his impressions of her.

Interview with Joe Sinnott Dewey Cassell: Do you recall working together with Marie on any projects (comics, promotional stuff, advertising, etc.)?

Joe Sinnott: I sure do—we did the complete story of Sub-Mariner #13 along with the cover, plus the cover of #15. I also inked Marie’s work on many other covers: She Hulk #7, X-Men #52 and #67, three Daredevil covers #61, 65 and 70, and five Captain America covers #124, 127, 128, 130 and 131. I also recreated the cover of Fantastic Four #57 for a Christie’s Auction that Marie

Photo of Joe Sinnott and Marie at the 2000 All-Time Classic Con at the Westchester County Center in White Plains, NY. Courtesy of Joe and Mark Sinnott.

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colored for me. I had done the pencil and inks and no one but Marie could have colored it better!

Cassell: Do you recall any stories about Marie?

Sinnott: Being that I worked at home and hardly ever went into the office, I missed out on seeing Marie for over 20 years, I did speak with her on the phone from time to time and spent alot of time with her at comic conventions. I never met anyone who was more humorous, outgoing and enthusiastic as Marie.

Cassell: What do you think about Marie, both as an artist and as a person?

Sinnott: They didn’t call her “Merry Marie” for nothing—everyone loved her! As an artist, Marie was as versatile as anyone. Her caricatures and humor drawings are among the finest in the business. I always remember Marie smiling all the time—she was the life of the party and we all enjoyed being around her.

The feeling was mutual—Marie was a big fan of Joe Sinnott as well, and had great respect for him as a person and an artist. Just when you think Marie has done everything she possibly could have related to comics and heroes, she goes and surprises you. By working for DC.

ABOVE Covers to Daredevil #65 (top) and Captain America #124 by Marie Severin and Joe Sinnott. Courtesy Heritage Auctions. RIGHT Splash page to Iron Man #85 penciled by Herb Trimpe and inked by Marie.

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Holy Toledo, Batman! Marie Severin working for DC Comics?! Yes, Robin, it’s true. There was a time in which “Mirthful” Marie went to work for Brand Echh.

she colored most of the stories and covers in the 66 issue series. The comic book outlasted the cartoon series, which went off the air in 2000.

Under the imprint “Factoid Books,” DC published a series of illustrated books for older readers with the title “The Big Book of...” Each one featured a series of short “true” pieces loosely centered around a particular theme. For example, there was The Big Book of Bad, with topics ranging from McCarthyism to Mike Tyson, to which Marie contributed a two-page piece called “Practice, Practice, Practice.” She also illustrated ones for The Big Book of Losers, The Big Book of Scandal, and The Big Book of the Weird Wild West, among others.

In 2002, DC published 9-11: The Word’s Finest Comic Book Writers And Artists Tell Stories To Remember, a 228-page book designed to help raise money for a different group of heroes, the victims of the attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C. Creators who donated their time to the project included Neal Adams, Will Eisner, Sergio Aragones, and Marie Severin.

Marie illustrated a four page piece written by Stan Lee called “The Sleeping Giant.”

One of the DC comics that Marie contributed to was Batman Black and White, an interesting experiment at the time in telling compelling super-hero stories without the color.

The story Marie illustrated was published in issue #2 in 2002.

It was written by Ty Templeton and Marie penciled and inked the tale, which was entitled, “Batsman: Swarming Scourge of the Underworld.” Mark Chiarello, who was an editor at DC at the time, explains how it came to pass, “When I heard that, after thirty years, Marvel wasn’t renewing Marie’s exclusive contract, I jumped at the chance to work with her. I called her out of the blue, and because we had a lot of mutual friends who used to work in the Marvel Bullpen, I was able to talk her into coloring some of our kids books (I believe the title was Superman Adventures). She did an awesome job, but being a rabid fan of her drawing too, I asked her to draw a Batman Black and White story for me. I mentioned to her how much I had LOVED the Muppet Babies comics that she had drawn in the Eighties, and that I’d kill to have her draw a Batman B&W story for me. Since Marie is one of the funniest people on the planet, I teamed her up with another of the funniest people on the planet, Ty Templeton for the Batman 8-pager. I remember screwing up my courage and asking Marie to draw it in her ‘Not Brand Echh’ style. Man, when she sent in those original pages, me, Joey Cavalieri, and Mike Carlin sat around just astounded. It was just hilarious, charming, gorgeous stuff!”

During this time period, Marie also did some art for Claypool Comics, penciling or inking issues of Soulsearchers and Company as well as Elvira, working with Jim Mooney, Dave Cockrum, and Richard Howell.

DC COMiCs IT WAS THE LATE 1990s and Hell had frozen over. Okay, not really. But Marie had essentially retired from Marvel and was rarely doing any work for them anymore. And an opportunity arose to do some work for the other guys, providing a chance to contribute to some interesting comics.

Beginning in late 1996, Marie began coloring the comic book Superman Adventures, which was based on the Warner Brothers television cartoon series. Over the next six years,

Marie certainly contributed, in many different ways, to the legacy of heroes in comics. She set a high standard and an example that many would endeavor to follow, especially women. So, it’s only fitting that we allow some female friends of Marie to pay tribute to “The First Lady of Comics.”

2002 Splash page from the “Batsman” story

by Marie that appeared in DC Comics’ Batman Black and White #2 95

“Mme. Curie” epilogue drawn by Marie for the 2003 book Dignifying Science

by Jim Ottaviani. Courtesy of Jim Ottaviani 96

5 The First Lady of Comics Marie severin did not set out to blaze any trails. She did what came naturally—drawing—and enjoyed the fact that she could make a living at it. For the most part, she has indicated she did not encounter major obstacles along the way, in spite of being a woman in a predominately male industry. She did not necessarily think of herself as a feminist (although she did illustrate the cover of the November 1973 issue of Ms. magazine.) Intentional or otherwise, though, Marie paved the way for other women to enter the field and have the respect once afforded almost exclusively to men. She demonstrated that anyone could have a successful career in comics, if one had the talent and perseverance.

is certainly not the only one. In this section, we hear from several friends and colleagues of Marie, all women, who have also enjoyed great success in the field of comics. Their experiences with Marie are alike in some ways and different in others, but they have one thing in common—a genuine affection for Marie Severin. Here, then, are interviews with Ramona Fradon, Trina Robbins, Flo Steinberg, and Linda Fite, and commentary by Irene Vartanoff, friends all to the first lady of comics.

ONE OF THE FRIENDS Marie met later in life was another well respected female artist, Ramona Fradon. Fradon began her career in 1950 and worked extensively for DC Comics.

She is best known for illustrating Aquaman and co-creating the character Metamorpho.

She later took over the Brenda Starr newspaper strip from Dale Messick. Fradon talks about Marie, the things they have in common, and the times they have shared.

She has served as an ambassador of sorts and a wonderful role model. She participated in a panel on “the role of women in comics” at the 1974 Comic Art Convention in New York, along with Flo Steinberg, Linda Fite, Jean Thomas, and Irene Vartanoff. She also participated in the Women of Comics Symposium at the 2006 Toronto Comic Con. In addition, her work was featured in the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art exhibition of women comic-book artists in 2006.

Marie was also a champion of how women are portrayed in comics. In a July 20, 1974 article in the Long Island Press, Marie told reporter Mark Finston, “In the ‘40s and ‘50s the usual heroine was simple … she got weak at the knees at the handsomeness of the hero, no matter how capable she was in other matters. But men were never simpy at the sight of beautiful women. The only exceptions to that were the sons of villains. Today it’s more realistic. Women get sore at their husbands, and the girl friends of the super-heroes tell them off.

Some comic book women now are even bullies!” When asked about the future, Marie exhibited remarkable foresight, “In 10 years women won’t be simpy at all. They’ll run for senator, be heads of firms. You might even begin to have ugly ladies with super powers. You now have ugly men with super powers … some of them are gross!”

When you think of women in comics, Marie Severin may be the first one who comes to mind, but thanks to her example, she

Interview with Ramona Fradon Dewey Cassell: When and where did you first meet Marie?

Ramona Fradon: Well, it’s funny. When I started drawing comics back in ’62 or something, everybody would ask me, do I know Marie Severin? You know, because I was a woman, and she was the only other woman in the business. And, of course, I hadn’t met her and had no idea who she was. And I didn’t even know that she drew. I thought she was just in the bullpen or something over at Marvel. Over the years people kept asking me that, and I’d never met her. And then finally, when I’d been out of comics for years, I went to a convention, I think it was in Westchester somewhere, and met Marie for the first time. And, you know, I just thought she was wonderful.

Cassell: You two do seem to get along very well. Did you hit it off from the first?

Fradon: Yes, we did. We amused each other a lot. And, of course, we loved chatting about the guys and the super-heroes and all that.

Cassell: Other than drawing, are there other things that you share in common with Marie?

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Fradon: Well, she was a Republican and I was a Democrat. [laughs] So we’d send each other horrible pictures of Bush or Clinton or whatever. I figure it was mostly our senses of humor that drew us together, because we really laughed a lot. One year we went out to San Diego together and roomed, she brought a friend of hers, and we had a great time. I remember riding around in rickshaws out there and just really having fun. I was always amazed when I sat next to her at the conventions at how easily she drew. She would draw the Hulk or whatever, the thing that everybody was asking her to draw, she could just whip 1975 political illustration by Marie for one of Martin Goodman’s men’s magazines. it out in maybe three, four minutes. It was a perfect tainly did. And I think Marie was the same kind of a person. She drawing. Her mind was so inventive. Marie is really a bright was very conventional in a lot of ways, and yet she was in an person. I mean, she’s got a quick mind, and it’s very creative. occupation that was anything but conventional for a woman.

Cassell: I think that’s a trait that you have, as well.

Cassell: Did you face any hardships, yourself, in what was a maleFradon: I don’t think so. I don’t think that I have the quickdominated industry? ness that Marie has, and I don’t have the facility. I mean, she Fradon: I don’t think so. I mean, I have no idea what the men draws just effortlessly, and I struggle to draw. Without an were making compared to what I was getting. I never knew eraser at a convention I couldn’t get through, y’know? There’s anything like that. But, no, it seems to me that everybody was a difference. Also, Marie is so gregarious. She’s just wonderjust looking for somebody who could do the drawing, and they fully friendly. For a person who’s sort of a hermit, she’s an didn’t care if it was a woman or a man. extremely gregarious hermit, if there is such a thing.

Cassell: It’s true. So when you all were trading political jibes back and fourth, were these drawings of political characters?

Fradon: I sent her a Ronald Reagan coloring book, and she sent me some horrible thing with Clinton and Hillary. I can’t remember what it was. But we were always making trash about each other’s politics. And then we had such fun with Trina that time we did a sleepover and Trina recorded it, and we drank wine, and it was just so funny, but it was so incoherent that we had to practically edit the whole thing from the beginning to make it the least bit readable. But I was kidding Marie because Trina is such a Women’s Libber, and that’s the last thing, I think, that Marie is. Although unconsciously she may be, you know. She certainly was a trailblazer and just struck out on her own, she had a career.

Cassell: And there were some other women, like Lily Renee and a few other ones, who started out in the Golden Age, drawing.

Fradon: Well, I can’t emphasize enough how little I know about the business, and the people in it, and what was being done. So I have no idea if there were other women. I know later on there were some women that I admired a lot. I went to an exhibit that Trina set up at the Cartoon Museum downtown, Women Cartoonists, and I was really blown away by some of the work that they had done in the past, and were doing now. And it wasn’t for the big comic houses, it was either books that they published, or things that they published at other publishers. But I really admire the things that they do. Very creative. But also not super-hero stuff. It’s a whole different feel.

Cassell: I think both of you were trailblazers in that regard.

Fradon: Yeah, and I think we were both unconscious about it. I mean, I was never into the Women’s movement until long after it had happened. I didn’t see any point in it because I was already working, but most of the women I knew were housewives, and they were very frustrated, and they wanted to do more. But I just didn’t relate to that at the time. Later on I cer-

Cassell: I think one of the nice things about publishing now is there are a lot more avenues today to get things published.

Fradon: I guess so. People can self-publish, and with the computer they can do all kinds of things. And the graphic novels. I think you’re right. So women I think are doing wonderful work, they’re just not getting the blockbuster movies and the superhero acclaim that the men are getting.

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LEFT Photo of Ramona Fradon.RIGHT Sketches of alternative designs for a new Cat costume by Ramona Fradon. Photo by Luigi Novi Cassell: Marie had mentioned that when she was working at Marvel, for example, especially in the early days, the only two women in the office were her and the secretary. She said that she never felt any ostracism or anything, but, by the same token, the guys didn’t necessarily socialize with her, either.

Fradon: Yeah. That makes sense.

the brushes, and all that stuff. It was very familiar. And then I always drew. I used to doodle cartoon-like drawings. I drew horses a lot. So when I was in school I became known as one of the kids who are “the artist” in school. When I look back on the things that I drew, it’s embarrassing. And then my father wanted me to be an artist, so I was sort of steered in that direction and didn’t bother to study when I was in school. But when it came time to choose between colleges and art school, it was pretty decided ahead of time. I don’t think I could have gotten into a college.

Cassell: Did you find that to be the case, as well?

Fradon: Well, I wasn’t around. I mean, I would come in once a month and go over a job, and then usually I’d go out to lunch with George Kashdan or sometimes Bob Haney, but that’s all.

I didn’t know anyone. And, of course, I used to go out with Joe Orlando and drink martinis together after work. I mean, that was fun, but I wouldn’t know if I would have hung out with the guys or not. It’s hard to say.

Cassell: You ended up doing comic strips, though, which you had enjoyed reading.

Fradon: Yeah, that’s right. I did Brenda Starr and it was culture and fashions, at least when Dale was doing it. She had Brenda in an elegant dress or an outfit every day. We needed to keep up on the fashions, and she was very proud that she had anticipated a lot of the fashion trends with Brenda. But I just wasn’t interested in that. It was so ironic that I ended up drawing that strip, and yet there I was.

Cassell: Did you read comics at all?

Fradon: No. I never had read them, until I went out and read them before I tried to get a job. I went out and for about two weeks I read comic books. I’d read the newspaper strips when I was a kid. I loved them. When I decided I’d try doing this, I somehow knew what was required, and I could draw, and that stuff that I adored from years ago.

Cassell: Do you come from an artistic family like Marie’s?

Fradon: My father was a commercial lettering man, and my mother had wanted to be an artist, but when she got married she gave it up. So she had us going to art classes in Chicago at the Art Institute at the age of four or something. I still remember drawing from statues in the musty basement of the institute there. So we were exposed from the beginning to art, and to the trappings of art, like the drawing board, and the ink, and

Cassell: We’ve talked about this before, but you actually penciled a couple of issues for Marvel.

Fradon: Yes, I did. I did The Cat right at the last issue, but they killed it, so that issue never came out. And then I did a Fantastic Four, and that’s all I did. Then I went back to DC. Cassell: Did you enjoy doing the Fantastic Four story?

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drawing. You can see the difference in that picture that we did together, any kind of clutter in the drawing was because Marie kept adding things. And that’s the way her mind is, it’s like a cornucopia of invention.

Fradon: Boy, that was hard to do. But at least I had a script for that. When I went back—I had been out of the business for about seven years taking care of my daughter, who was little then, when Roy Thomas called me and asked me if I would like to do that, it was out of the blue. So I go in there to Marvel, which is like Chaos City. It was the most chaotic environment I’ve ever seen. And Roy hands me this paragraph and then he wanted me to go home and draw a 17-page story based on that synopsis [for The Cat]. And I said, “What on Earth?” I had no idea what I was doing, and my mind was wandering. I’d go off the plot. It was just hard to produce it, and so the next time they gave me a script, when it was Fantastic Four, and I found that more congenial. But I still think I was really rusty, and I didn’t feel that it was going to work out over at Marvel. I talked to Roy about that recently and he denied that they weren’t going to hire me again, but I definitely had that feeling that my days were numbered over there. That’s when I ran over to DC to draw with Joe Orlando, doing the mysteries, and I loved that.

Cassell: Did you pencil that cover and she inked it?

Fradon: She did the layout, and then I just drew in stuff wherever there was any room. I managed to squeeze Aquaman and whatever that thing was, a starfish or something, a shark, I don’t remember what it was. And a few fish, and an octopus, and that was it. But, you know, her thing was exuberant and overflowing all the time. That’s the way her drawing was. And it was fine, because she would get a lot of gags in, sight gags, and she would tell a story, almost, in one drawing.

Cassell: You both worked on humor comics. She did Not Brand Echh and all that, and you did PLOP!. Do you think women artists have a different perspective when it comes to humor?

Fradon: Maybe if they were writing it they would, but if you’re drawing it from a man’s script, that’s what you’re doing. I can’t tell. I never loved humor, and so I don’t know. I do know that’s the way I really like to draw. I would much rather draw a comic than try to be a realistic artist because I just can’t. It doesn’t come out that way. I just did a thing, a Radioactive Man, and I enjoyed it more than I should tell you. If I’d been doing that kind of thing during my career, I think I might have been happy in the business. But it just didn’t work out that way.

Cassell: When you did those couple of jobs for Marvel, it sounds like you went in to the office. Did you happen to see Marie while you were there?

Fradon: I may very well have passed her, but there was so much paper, and coffee cups, and trash lying everywhere, she might have been underneath some of it and I just missed her going past. She does remember some woman going up there at some point. No, we didn’t see each other, though. I’m sorry I didn’t know her earlier. We could have had a lot of years of fun together.

Cassell: I know you drew a lot of mystery or horror comics for DC. Fradon: They were fun because they were very exaggerated, and Joe Orlando liked to have a little humor in his gruesome

Cassell: What is your impression of Marie’s artistic style?

Fradon: I think it’s a generic style. It’s not an individual kind of an inspired style, but it’s extremely confident, and her layout and designs are wonderful. I think she has a real ability for doing dynamic layouts. And I think I’m just the opposite. I think I have a distinctive style, but I’m not as good at designing a page and laying out a scene as she is.

Cassell: I’ve seen some of your work where I thought the layouts were just wonderful.

Fradon: Well, if they were it was a mistake. [laughter] I never mastered that. Joe Orlando used to give me some pointers at layouts, and they were like principles of illustration design kind of thing, which I had never learned. I mean, I just didn’t know about foregrounds, and backgrounds, and placing blacks, and doing all that stuff. I think Marie, whether it was instinctive or whether she learned it, she really could do it.

Cassell: Are there some ways in which your style and Marie’s are similar?

Fradon: I don’t think so. No, because we did a cover together for Alter Ego #16. It was Aquaman and Sub-Mariner, and they were attacking a submarine that had Roy Thomas in it. [laughs] I loved the idea. I think that was Marie’s idea. It was really funny. But the difference is that my drawing is very simple. I like to keep everything really simple, and patterns where you can really see what’s going on, and Marie’s drawing is exactly the opposite. She puts everything into it. So, I don’t think there’s any similarity at all between the way we approach a 100

anything else. And because they worked up at Marvel together.

Cassell: You’ve been to several conventions with Marie. What sort of things did you do together?

Fradon: Well, we drank a lot at the end of the day. Those were the usual things you do in San Diego in the evening. We’d go out to dinner.

We didn’t do anything memorable, but it was just fun. Everything we did was fun. And this friend that she brought was just a riot. She was a very funny, droll character.

Cassell: Has Marie ever been to visit you at your home?

Fradon: No. She never got out here. I never went to her place, either. We always said we were going to do it, and we never did it. She used to go to Vermont or somewhere and she would always say, “Well, we’re going to stop in and see you,” and then we never got around to it. We just met at conventions.

Cassell: Well, that’s a good place to meet.

Fradon: Yeah, it was a lot of fun. And when we sat together we would talk all the time. I used to enjoy listening to her carry on making conversation with the fans. And they would just come up by the drove. Marie was very popular in the business.

Cassell: Can you think of any funny stories or anecdotes about the times that you’ve spent around Marie?

Fradon: It was just all laughs. I remember one time we went to a convention in Whtie Plains.

I had been out in the area where Marie lives, and near her there’s this place that makes the best pies in the world. I can’t remember FACING PAGE Cover of Alter Ego #16 by Marie Severin and the name of it, but I’d like to be able to say it Ramona Fradon. ABOVE Splash page to the unpublished fifth issue of so people can rush over there and buy pies, The Cat by Ramona Fradon and Jim Mooney. they’re so good. But, anyway, this time I asked Marie to bring me a strawberry-rhubarb pie.

So she brought it, and it happened to be, like, 120 degrees that stories, I think probably to pacify the Code or something. So day, and we put it in the trunk of my car. You can imagine what that worked out fine for me, because I could exaggerate as happened to it. It began to move. I’d really been expecting pie, much as I wanted to. And Metamorpho is somewhat that way, and I had been just drooling to eat it, and it was absolutely the characters were so bizarre. And Plastic Man, too. Those ruined by the time I got it out. So it was very funny. were the three things that I enjoyed doing. The rest I just hated doing. I don’t relate to having superpowers, necessarily.

Cassell: What did you like about San Diego?

I mean, not the way they’re presented in the comics. They feel Fradon: Breakfast at the Marriott. That’s really basically why so formulaic, and the characters were so uninteresting. They I go out to San Diego, just to get that breakfast there. Marie weren’t even characters, they were costumes with powers, so knew everybody, and I just knew a few people, so they would that just didn’t interest me. I struggled to do them, but it was just come up to her constantly. She was the center of attenmeaningless to me, whereas I gather it’s really a subject to tion, there. But she was always up to the task of being sociable, fascination for a lot of men. performing, and being jolly, even though a lot of the time she didn’t feel that way. She just was that way.

Cassell: Have you ever met Marie’s brother John?

Fradon: No, I never did. I know he was a big influence on Cassell: What would you say is the thing that you most admire Marie. He was the drawer and he was her older brother, and about Marie? she learned from probably being around him as much as 101

Ramona Fradon continues to attend comic book conventions and does commissions for fans. And once upon a time, Ramona and Marie got together for a slumber party with Trina Robbins.

Fradon: Well, oddly enough, I would think it’s her intelligence, that quick mind that she has. I really admired that.

Cassell: You’re right, she’s a very bright lady.

Fradon: She’s so bright that I think her thoughts go so fast that sometimes she can’t keep up with them and she sounds incoherent, but it’s not because she is, it’s because there’s so much going on in her mind at once that it doesn’t always come out clear. But she also had a tremendous knowledge of the business. I mean, she knew it from every angle, and she was able to talk about it really intelligently.

Again, I’m comparing her to myself, and whereas I knew nothing about it. But, on the other hand, she would kid me because I was into a lot of esoteric stuff, and Marie is a good Catholic, and so a lot of the things I would talk about, she would kid me about it, you know? We had a different orientation.

TRINA ROBBINS IS A writer and artist whose first work appeared in fanzines in the 1950s.

She is best known for her work in underground comics, and for creating the original Vampirella costume. She has been a staunch advocate of women in comics for years, and is author of several books, including Women and the Comics. In this interview, Robbins talks about how she first met Marie and the friendship that followed.

Interview with Trina Robbins Dewey Cassell: When and how did you first meet Marie?

Trina Robbins: It was either at Marvel Comics or it was at a party. Roy and his then wife Jean—or maybe it was Archie Goodwin and his wife—used to give these parties once a month for comics people, and Flo Steinberg brought me. She brought me to the first one, and after that I was welcome to come to any of them.

And I think that Marie was at one of those parties that I was introduced to her. Either that or I met her later, at Marvel Comics.

Cassell: It’s great that you got to be such good friends in spite of the differences.

Fradon: Oh, yeah. And it never became a matter of Cassell: About what time period were they doing TOP Photo of George Tuska with contention at all. We would the parties?

Marie Severin. BOTTOM Photo of just tease each other. I don’t Robbins: We’re talking about the Sixties, ’67.

Trina Robbins from the 1992 Famous think I ever teased her about ’68, really. You know, maybe I met her first at Comic Book Creators card set. Photo being Catholic or anything, a convention in 1969. That’s a possibility, too, courtesy of Dorothy Tuska. because I wouldn’t do that, the more I think about it. Because I remember but the old-time Catholics the summer of ’69 was my first comics conwho were born Catholic do more teasing about their religion vention, and we had a comics panel, and they asked me about than other people do, so I didn’t have to tease her. being a woman in comics, and the only other woman I could think of was Marie Severin.

Cassell: So are there any things about Marie that I should have asked you?

Cassell: What was your first impression of Marie?

Fradon: I don’t know. I never even knew about Marie’s love Robbins: She’s always been quite friendly and that was the life. I didn’t know anything like that about Marie. I don’t know way she was to me. I mean, you just like her immediately. if anybody does, because she was so private. All I know is she had a crush on George Tuska.

Cassell: Did you hit it off from the first?

Robbins: Absolutely, we get along really well.

Cassell: He was a handsome guy.

Fradon: She used to talk about how handsome he is. That’s Cassell: Were you familiar with her artwork prior to meeting her? about all I know. But I think you probably know everything I Robbins: Well, actually, that just suddenly brought someknow or can say about Marie. thing up. Actually, the first time I met Marie, she didn’t even 102

real fan of the EC horror and fantasy, but never have been a super-hero fan.

remember, and, in fact, I didn’t know who she was. And that was when I was 15 and a MAD comic fan. And, along with my friends David and Marty, the three of us were MAD comics fans, we went to visit the EC offices. And she was sitting there doing the coloring on “Ping Pong.” And I didn’t know she was Marie Severin, or who Marie Severin was at the time, and she generally doesn’t remember this teenage girl fan who showed up with the teenage boy fans. But that was really the first time I met her.

Cassell: In what ways would you say that your artistic style is similar to Marie’s?

Robbins: I don’t know if it is. We’re talking about something at least 15 years ago. My style was always very influenced by the older comics that I was a fan of. My style was really weird in that it’s very retro, and, really, nobody draws like that anymore. I mean, the original artists of that period did. But you look at today’s Indie art, nobody draws in that style anymore.

Cassell: Oh, wow. So what did they do? Did they give you a tour of the offices?

Robbins: It was very nice of them. Firstly, Bill Gaines was really lovely. He took us around, he talked to us, he listened to us, he showed us things. He was very nice. I mean, when you think of it, these three teenage fans show up completely unannounced, said, “Hi, we’re MAD fans. Can we talk to you?” I mean, you couldn’t do that today. You’d have to make appointments, you’d have to go through the receptionist. You know what it would be like.

Cassell: Did you also come from an artistic family?

Robbins: Not really. I came from an intellectual family. My father wrote, my mother was a teacher.

Cassell: What kind of hardships did you face as a female artist in the industry?

Robbins: Well, you know that I started in the undergrounds, where I was absolutely not accepted in the beginning in the undergrounds. I’m talking about the late Sixties and early Seventies.

Cassell: That’s true. Plus, they wouldn’t show you around, I suspect. Bill must have been especially surprised from the standpoint that it was very early in MAD’s inception.

Robbins: Yes. It was MAD comics, it wasn’t the magazine yet.

Cassell: It’s interesting when you talk to Marie, or her contemporaries like Ramona, they don’t talk about having faced a lot of hardships.

Robbins: Well, Ramona actually, quite amazingly, got accepted immediately. But Marie had hardships, she just doesn’t talk about it. She puts on this nice happy face, but, let’s face it, her earliest years in comics were spent going to the library for research for the guys, and erasing pencil lines, and cleaning things up. I mean, in the beginning, she just was an assistant.

She did all those little things. It wasn’t until about 1966 that she finally got to draw a comic.

Cassell: That’s great. So what’s your impression about Marie’s artistic style?

Robbins: Oh, she’s a terrific artist! She can draw anything.

Cassell: Do you think that there’s anything she draws particularly well?

Robbins: Well, you know, she’s great at humor, and she loves humor, and I think it shows. I think that probably her humor is the best.

Cassell: It’s funny you should say that, but Ramona said exactly the same thing.

Robbins: You see?

Cassell: That’s true. She talked about even then that sometimes the guys would get a little raunchy in the office and kind of forget she was there.

Robbins: Every woman cartoonist of that period that I have spoken to says the same thing. Lily Renee said that. She worked at Fiction House in the Forties, and she says that they were always making sexual innuendos, and that she just hated it. And I know Ramona Fradon says that, too.

Cassell: She didn’t particularly enjoy drawing Super Friends or Aquaman or anything like that, she loved the humor, and actually she loved doing the horror comics.

Robbins: Oh, I can see that.

Horror’s more interesting than super-heroes. I mean, I was a

Cover of Comic Book Artist #10, which features “The Great Women Cartoonists’ Slumber Party of 1999!” with Trina Robbins, Ramona Fradon and Marie.

Cassell: Why do you suppose she likes humor so much?

Robbins: I really think that women, even including someone like Marie and also Ramona Fradon, who can draw super-heroes, I don’t think they’re crazy about drawing super-heroes, even if they can.

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Robbins: Oh, we got along fabulously. I love both of those women.

Cassell: So why did Lily Renee stick with it?

Robbins: Well, she stuck with it because it was work, and she needed work, and it was drawing, and she was really good at it, and she liked it.

Cassell: Do you know any funny stories or anecdotes about Marie?

Robbins: I do remember… When did Spider-Woman come out? It was ’74, am I right?

Cassell: Ramona told me something about a sleepover?

Robbins: Oh, yes! The women cartoonists slumber party. I don’t have the magazine in front of me, I did it for one of the TwoMorrows books.

Cassell: I think so, yeah.

Robbins: Because my daughter was four, and I took her to Marvel Comics with me. That was just a great experience anyway, because Stan Lee was so terrific. I mean, I knew what Casey was interested in and I said, “My daughter has something to ask you.” And she said, “Why aren’t there any women superheroes?” And he said, “Well, actually, now we have something for you.” And he gave her issue #1 of Spider-Woman, which was so sweet of him. And, after that, Marie and I and Casey went to lunch, and Marie had, I don’t know, a highball or Manhattan or whatever it is those New York people drink. I don’t. But she got Casey a Shirley Temple, and Casey was so thrilled and so delighted because it was like a “big person’s drink.” I’ve never forgotten that, it was so sweet of her.

Cassell: Comic Book Artist #10.

Robbins: Yeah. Actually, it was an apartment that belonged to Ramona’s friend, who was away for the weekend in the summertime, so we used that apartment. We all got together, me and Ramona and Marie, and we basically had a slumber party.

I even brought nail polish because that’s a traditional slumber party thing is to do your nails. And I taped the whole thing. It was this great interview. It was absolutely wonderful. That’s one of the things I’m the proudest of doing. See, none of the guys could have done that.

Cassell: Ramona remembered something about there having been some drinking involved, as well.

Robbins: Oh, we had wine. The magazine was paying. We all went out to dinner on the magazine, and we had some very good wine on the magazine.

Cassell: What would you say that you admire most about Marie?

Robbins: I must admit she does put on this great face. She is so jolly, and so lovely, and everyone loves her. And I’m not like that, and a lot of people don’t like me, because I’m the big, nasty one who complained about the treatment of women in comics. Marie doesn’t do that.

Cassell: That’s great. Sounds like the three of you got along really well.

Cassell: Although, as you said, you have a sense, after you get to know Marie, that sometimes when she’s putting on that face that there’s more going on behind there.

Robbins: Oh, I know that, and I know she’s a feminist, too.

Cassell: It’s funny, she describes herself that way, and yet she also appreciates the fact that, in many respects, you do a much better job of carrying that torch.

ABOVE Caricature of Flo Steinberg

by Marie. RIGHT Photo of Flo Steinberg, “gal Friday” to Stan Lee, at her desk in the Marvel offices.

Courtesy of Flo Steinberg 104

Robbins: Oh, that’s really nice of her.

Cassell: It’s sound like, in many respects, she was sort of a role model.

Robbins: Oh, yes.

Marie colored some of the stories Trina Robbins wrote and drew for Misty, one of the titles from the Star Comics imprint of Marvel. In 2011, Trina’s artwork was featured in the show “Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women” at the Koffler Gallery in Toronto, Canada. A mutual friend of Trina and Marie’s from Marvel Comics was Flo Steinberg.

“FABULOUS” FLO STEINBERG IS one of those delightful people who, if you are very lucky, will cross your path one day. She was there at the beginning of Marvel Comics, greeting visitors, opening the fan mail, and being a “gal Friday” to Stan “The Man” Lee. As luck would have it, when Marie came to Marvel, she and Flo became fast friends, kindred spirits in the midst of the “boys club.” In this interview, Flo recalls the early days of Marvel Comics and working with her friend Marie Severin.

Interview with Flo Steinberg Independent publication Big Apple Comix #1, produced by Flo Steinberg and featuring contributions by several Marvel artists and staffers, including Marie.

Dewey Cassell: When did you first go to work for Marvel?

Flo Steinberg: I went to work for Marvel in March of 1963, way back. I was born, raised and educated in Massachusetts, then came to New York and went job hunting. The jobs were mostly for “gal Friday,” which is what they called secretaries who couldn’t take shorthand.

Cassell: I thought it was interesting how the letters pages were reproduced at original art size and then shrunk down like everything else was to be printed.

Steinberg: Well, that was just the way they did it. I think they did that with the ads, too, those funny little ads that were in the books back then. Huge Photostat machines did all this work. Everything was so bulky and heavy, different from now. But Marie came on, and I think, before she started doing artwork, she did art corrections and production work. She was just great; we bonded, and we would go to lunch together. It was a great working experience.

Cassell: And so did you work directly for Stan?

Steinberg: Yes. Very directly. It was just me and him in the office in ’63.

Cassell: Oh, really?

Steinberg: Yes. We were part of Magazine Management, Martin Goodman’s magazine business. There were movie magazines, and men’s-type magazines like Stag and Man’s World, things like that. And what else? They did romance magazines and crossword-puzzle ones. We were a very teeny-weeny little thing. Stan was in one little cubicle, and then me. At that time, we were just putting out a small amount of books. Stan did everything. I did the mail and the secretarial stuff, but Stan really did it all. And then, after a year or two, we moved to a bigger place; that’s when Stan hired Sol Brodsky to manage things. Then, in no particular order, all of a sudden in the bullpen were, in a separate room, Marie and Morrie Kuramoto.

There were taborets, desks, and drawing boards so the artists could fix things that Stan wanted. It was before computers, you know, so even things like letters pages were typed out and typeset by an outside company; they had to be pasted down on boards. It was just all different from today.

Cassell: So what kind of places did you go to lunch?

Steinberg: Well, when I was there, we were in three different buildings, all around Madison and 60th Street. Which is funny, because now around Madison and 60th Street is very fancy with all these designer shops and very elegant people buying expensive things. You know, everything changes. Sometimes, we would just go get a sandwich from a deli and come back.

Stan never went to lunch. He would just have me get him a sandwich and eat it at his desk while he worked. But Marie and I would go out—there were restaurants that are no longer around anymore. There was a chain called Schrafft’s that had, like, ladies lunches—you would get your little chicken 105

pot pies, or salads, or tuna fish sandwiches on white bread. And occasionally, if we weren’t working in the afternoon, we would have a cocktail. [laughs] That’s what people did, they had cocktails. The artists, when they would bring their work in (they mostly worked at home) were just so happy to be out. They would go out to lunch and maybe have drinks. It was like a social event to them. There were all these little cafes, and they would have lunch specials. One would serve popovers, which were great.

I had never seen them before. Popovers, these big rolls with air inside. All these cutesy little things. So we would eat, and walk around the area. It was all pretty cool. At the time, it was my first job in the city. It was very exciting.

down and get their work; everyone had great excuses. [laughter]

Marie Severin drew this caricature of Flo Steinberg on Marvel stationery after Flo refused to buy more push pins for the Bullpen. Courtesy of Flo Steinberg.

Cassell: Now, were you about Marie’s age, or younger?

Steinberg: Oh, a little younger. But in our office situation, your age didn’t really matter. Everybody was treated as a peer. It was never younger/ older or anything like that. Marie had had a lot of experience.

She had worked at EC and at the Federal Reserve Bank. She could do anything. Whatever Stan wanted. She could do any art correction. Then, I guess, eventually she started doing the comic books, the artwork itself. I forget in what order it was, but I remember well her Doctor Strange stuff.

Cassell: Like what? What were some of the great excuses?

Steinberg: I think Bill Everett once said that his kids’ hamsters ate the pages. Then someone else was always leaving them on the subway or something.

I remember once when we couldn’t get ahold of Don Heck. He was on vacation or something, out on Fire Island. We sent people there just to find out what he was up to. People mostly respected deadlines, so it was unusual when they didn’t meet them. It was their paycheck. The earlier the work was in, the sooner you’d be paid. It was all done by hand. You’d make little vouchers, give them to the bookkeeping department. It’s all different now.

Cassell: What was it like working in the office in the Sixties?

Steinberg: Of course, everyone was young then, or younger, so we had all this stamina. There was a big blackout in the Sixties, I remember we all just stood around. Marie was there then; we just watched the lights go out all over the city. And then—in ’63 (I don’t recall if she was there yet, she may have been doing freelance) when JFK was assassinated, we all just heard about it from someone’s car radio. We didn’t have radios or televisions in the office. There was a lot of stuff going on in the Sixties.

Cassell: She did the Hulk, too.

Steinberg: Yes! She did the Hulk. I don’t know when King Kull or the Conan-type stuff started. She may have done something with her brother.

Cassell: I ran across some stickers the other day—.

Steinberg: You mean the MMMS stickers?

Cassell: It looked like Marie might have been involved in helping to draw some of those things that were used in the fan clubs.

Steinberg: Oh, absolutely, because she drew so fast. Yeah! She probably did all the ads and posters. She could do anything.

Cassell: That was Kull.

Steinberg: Wasn’t that beautiful? That was so beautiful.

Cassell: Speaking of Johns, was John Romita in the office back then?

Steinberg: Yes, he came toward the end of my stay, when we moved to the third place. Stan made him the art director because before that time Stan was everything. He was the writer, the editor, the art director. He did everything. He even addressed the envelopes to the Comics Code. He just did all that stuff. And always cheerfully. I don’t remember tension in the office or anything like people arguing. Everybody just did their job. And if artists were late with their work, which was not as often as it happens now, we would have to run them

Cassell: These stickers I ran across recently look like that she had done them, as well, and they were from, I think, 1966.

Steinberg: Okay. I’m sure she did, because that was the type of stuff she did. She worked hard. And everybody admired everybody else’s work. It was so different. No back-fighting, no petty jealousies or anything.

Cassell: In the early Sixties, when you started, you and Marie would have probably been the only women in the office, right?

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it anymore? The artists didn’t ask for it back. It was like throwing out a script. People considered the comic book [important], that’s what they would show when they went on interviews.

“This is what I wrote, this is what I drew.” We threw out tons of artwork. There were all these things about all the Kirby art that people thought Marvel was holding onto, but we just used to toss it. [laughter] And feel good there was a clean shelf to fill up again. Everyone was glad the books were selling and doing well, but I don’t think anyone knew what it would become.

God, I can’t even believe it sometimes. [laughs] But I was lucky and grateful when, in the Nineties, when I was between jobs, I was able to go back to Marvel as a proofreader. I’m not computer-literate or anything, so I’m the only one there without a computer. [laughter] I guess they need proofreaders to catch the stuff spellcheck doesn’t.

Steinberg: Only in the comics department. There were a lot of women in the whole Magazine Management company doing different things, romance magazines, movie magazines.

In our own little office we were the only women, but we were in a huge place that had lots of other people. We had great people at Magazine Management, including Mario Puzo, the Godfather guy.

Cassell: Right.

Steinberg: He worked there. He was an editor of the men’s magazines before he hit it big. He once tried to write a comic, then came back and told Stan, “It’s too hard. I’m gonna stick with novels.” [laughter] I’m paraphrasing, I don’t know exactly what he said. Another editor was Bruce Jay Friedman. He wrote plays and books. He was very big around here then. I think he wrote The Steambath, which was made into a movie. All the other editors in all the other magazines were all writing books and doing other things; this was their money job.

Cassell: I’ve heard stories about how Marie would sometimes draw caricatures of people in the office.

Steinberg: Yes, she did. I don’t know if you saw it—there were some in a Comic Book Artist (#18) that Jon Cooke did. I didn’t Cassell: So it sounds like you all felt like a part of the bigger even know about it before it came out. That had a couple of Magazine Management company.

Marie things. She did funny characters for everybody in the Steinberg: We were. Of course, they all thought we were a office. But they were on this very lightweight brown paper little odd because we were doing comic books. Sometimes they that just fell apart. I have would come by and just peek some, but if I take them out, in and just sort of laugh, pieces start falling out, so I because at the time, maybe Splash page to the story “The Man Without can’t even take them to be people didn’t think comic A City” by Stu Schwartzberg and Marie Severin Xeroxed or anything. books were real magazines. for Big Apple Comix #1.

But everyone was always Cassell: I don’t blame you. nice to us all. We would go Steinberg: Once a year I to lunch with other girls in look at them. She did some the company, too. It was wonderful ones of me compretty congenial. plaining about all the work in the office and just funny Cassell: In 1964, 1965, as they little things. She was very were introducing the Fantastic good at picking up on the Four and Spider-Man, and humor in everything. She these characters would just saw the big picture, what take off like gangbusters, did was important and what you have any sort of sense wasn’t important. It was that you were onto something great working with her. Even special? after I left Marvel, we stayed Steinberg: Well, it was friends for the longest time. special in that they were She lived in Brooklyn. I great characters and the would go out there, and she books were selling, but would come in. We’d also nobody had any idea it see her wonderful friend would become such a Jean Davenport, who she’s phenomenon. I didn’t know. so lucky to have. But then The books came out, and, in she moved out to Long fact, sometimes—this makes Island and that’s too far for people cringe, practically me. [laughs] I don’t drive, cry—when the shelves got and it’s just too hard on the too crowded with artwork railroad and everything. and scripts—each issue If someone had a car and had its own little shelf for wanted to drive out, that artwork and scripts—we would be great. I talk to her would just throw them out. regularly and it’s always I mean, the artwork was pleasant. considered like, who needed 107

LEFT TO RIGHT 2001 Photo of Linda Fite from “The National” Convention in New York City. Photo of John Tartaglione, Marie, Joe Sinnott, Flo Steinberg, and Dick Ayers from the 1995 Pope John Paul II Convention in New York City. FACING PAGE Photo of John Buscema.

Group photo courtesy of Flo Steinberg.

Cassell: Did you all ever have Christmas office parties?

Steinberg: We did. Not huge things. Maybe it was a Christmas lunch or something; we would go to a restaurant. But we didn’t really socialize. You know, it was a job. We loved each other and everything, but we really didn’t socialize after work or anything. Except with Marie, we were girlfriends, but I remember once, when Sol Brodsky’s son was bar-mitzvahed, we all got ourselves out to Brooklyn. Most of the guys had families, so they would go home. I got a little friendly with Morrie Kuramoto because his daughter, Sherry, would come visit every summer. But we didn’t hang out. Everyone went back to wherever they lived. I don’t even remember the guys going out after work to bars or anything.

Steinberg: No. I just don’t enjoy the crowds. But it was nice to be asked.

Cassell: As you said, I know a lot of the artists worked from home, anyway.

Steinberg: They always enjoyed coming in for lunch. That was fun for them. Sometimes people say, “Oh, you must be great friends with Stan. Do you talk to Stan?” I say, “Oh, no.”

I used to go to conventions, sometimes. A few years ago one here in New York somehow got all the old-timers on a panel.

We chatted a little, and that was fun. You know, he’s a great guy. He’s 89, someone said. But I don’t go to them anymore.

The last one I went to was just too mobbed and too hard to get around. And I don’t really know that many people anymore. Actually, what was nice, this year, for the first time, I was invited to go to San Diego. They must be having an old peoples’ thing or something. [laughs] Or it’s an anniversary— it’s always the anniversary of something.

Big Apple Comix

Cassell: Do you recall anything else about Marie?

Steinberg: She always had that wonderful sense of humor, and would make these wonderful quips. We would come to work, and, of course, then you got all dressed up for work.

You wore heels and dresses and everything. It was still an early Sixties mentality. Marie was always so good with the new people. When Roy came, and Denny O’Neil came, she was always helpful to them. Denny came in once wearing a button that said “legalize pot”—you know, it was the Sixties.

“Oh,” Stan said, “You can’t wear that around here. That’s drugs!” We would get letters where people thought Doctor Strange was on drugs! You’d think, “What are they talking about?” [laughs]

IN 1975, FLO STEINBERG edited and published a one-shot “adults only” comic book called Big Apple Comix. It featured a color cover and black-and-white interior stories about New York City by artists like Neal Adams, Wally Wood, Al Williamson, Herb Trimpe, and Marie Severin. It was independently published and fellow Marvel staffers Linda Fite, John Verpoorten, and Michele Brand helped produce and color it.

It is clear that a wonderful sense of humor is another thing Marie has in common with her friends like Flo Steinberg. Flo continues to work for Marvel Comics part-time as a proofreader. And someone who fondly recalls both Marie and Flo, and shares their sense of humor, is Linda Fite.

This continues, at a later date, the interview with former Marvel staffer Linda Fite, begun in the Heroes section on the Cat. Here, Linda talks about the fun of working at Marvel with her friend Marie Severin.

Cassell: So are you going to go?

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Interview with Linda Fite

they’d all be asked to make corrections, sometimes, on other people’s art. But she’d fix things, or she might be working on coloring. She was a really good colorist. Or she’d be training a new colorist.

Cassell: We already talked about the Cat, so I’m curious to hear anything else you might have to relate about working with Marie?

Fite: Well, I was only in the office itself for a year-and-a-half, but it was great to have Marie there because, as a professional woman, she was a good… Oh, I don’t know, I wouldn’t say “antidote,” but she was the good leavening force in the bullpen. Which was never too raunchy. God bless those guys, they were never a real raunchy type. Every now and then Tony Mortellaro had to be toned down, but most of those guys were gentlemen. But they were guys, so it was great to have Marie there. She’s funny as all get out, and always a little bit evil, in a good way. [laughs] Wicked Marie. But after I left the office, we still kept in touch, because it’s a very small community, especially that particular bullpen community. And when Herb and I would go to comic conventions, which we didn’t do very much just because it was a bother, but we’d always hook up with Marie and either have a meal or have some laughs and chat. She’s just such a good egg, in, like I said, a wicked way.

You know, she talks a lot of good sh*t. [laughs]

Cassell: Oh, really? So she helped train the new ones?

Fite: Yeah, she did, oftentimes, because she really had it down, y’know? She was always very good with colorists. These girls, mostly girls, would come in, and she would help them. But, yeah, she was doing Doctor Strange, then. I don’t think she was doing the Hulk yet. I can’t remember when that happened.

Cassell: Doctor Strange was first, and then Hulk.

Fite: Right, Doctor Strange. And just cracking wise. The thing I love about art that’s so great is, unlike writing, you can talk while you do it. [laughs] And listen to music. So there were lots of conversations, and Gary Friedrich would come in, and she’d give him sh*t, or vice versa. It was just great fun.

Cassell: Did you all ever go out to lunch together?

Fite: Oh, we all used to go out to lunch quite often. Either in the whole bunch, oftentimes, or in twos and threes, or we’d order in. I remember there was a good Chinese restaurant nearby. We’d all go there sometimes. There would be eight or nine of us at the table.

Cassell: So when you were at Marvel, what role were you playing with the company?

Fite: I was what they called an editorial/production assistant, so I read through things, proofread things, helped with the letters from fans. I wrote some of those Bullpen Bulletins. And I would actually proofread a lot of pages. I did a lot of that.

And at least at one office, when we weren’t with Magazine Management anymore, I sort of acted as the “front man.” I would greet visitors, whoever came up.

Cassell: That sounds like fun.

Fite: It was! The golden years. It really was genuinely fun. And everyone got along. There was really no problem between people that I was aware of.

Cassell: I’ve heard so many other people say exactly the same thing, that everybody in the office seemed to get along really well.

Fite: They did. And they were professionals, and it was a business. It was about deadlines, and getting work done, and doing it well, and doing it with alacrity and professionalism. And goofing off and having fun. [laughs]

Cassell: When was that?

Fite: That must have been about 1969, maybe, I don’t know.

Anyway, back to Marie. Just bon vivant, good-natured. She seemed to really like Herb and me, and get along with us, and she used to draw these hilarious cartoons all the time, in the office. It was like a running commentary on whatever was going down. Whenever someone would pull some sh*t, she would draw an appropriate cartoon.

Like, one time I put a big cupcake in [John] Verpoorten’s face, and she drew a cartoon of that. That kind of thing.

Cassell: Do you remember any particular things that Marie might have done around the office, practical jokes?

Fite: Mostly, when something would go on, she wouldn’t be talking much, and the next thing you know there would be this scathingly accurate cartoon, because she’d just knock it out, with her brush, on a piece of regular, letter-sized paper that came out of the copy machine. I mean, she must have turned out two a day, every day. I think Herb has a couple of them. I found one.

Because Herb had this reputation, he talked so much, and girls would come hang around him. [laughs] And she has one of him leaping through the desert dressed like the Sheik

Cassell: When you were working at Marvel as an editorial/production assistant, what was Marie doing at the time?

Fite: She was doing art. She was in the room with Herb, and Tony, and John Romita, and a couple of other guys in there.

Cassell: So she was probably drawing Sub-Mariner at that time, or Hulk.

Fite: Yeah, she was just sitting there at the table, drawing. And 109

of Arabia. But like that, lots and lots of them. And everyone got nailed, sooner or later, and often. She was so gifted at it. I mean, her humor. She and Stu Schwartzberg were just both so hilarious.

Cassell: You mentioned that you and Marie did see each other at conventions. Did she seem to enjoy them?

Fite: Yeah! She was not a curmudgeon in the least. She was cool about it, very professional, again. And she was more on top of things than Herb and I were. “What are you doing, Marie?”

“Well, you see, you make these little things, and then you can sign them,” and she helped us streamline the operation. It was good. Yeah, she liked them.

Cassell: Do you recall her working on things like advertising material, or anything like that?

Fite: I think she did do some of those advertising things, and I remember, she would get offers that she just couldn’t handle because she had enough going on. She didn’t get a lot of those, but she had contacts though.

Cassell: On the other hand, she could be a very private person.

Fite: Yes. Absolutely. I heard she had a crush on John Buscema, big time. [laughs]

Cassell: Contacts from where?

Fite: Magazines, other print media.

Cassell: Oh, really? You’re kidding!

Fite: No, that’s what I heard back in the Seventies, that she had a huge crush on him, but she kept her mouth shut. That’s what I heard. [laughs]

Cassell: Oh, really?

Fite: Yeah. Because I think one of the things that she was first offered that she passed on to Herb was an illustrated version of Gloria Steinem’s biography in Esquire magazine. Marie was offered that first, but she just didn’t have time. She was up against deadlines. So she used to do stuff like that. She got a lot of little ad jobs like that, and also journalism jobs. And Marvel was cool about it. They didn’t care, as long as it didn’t impact their deadlines. She was quick, and she was good, and she had a very good eye for doing caricatures.

Linda Fite went on to be copy editor of the largest daily newspaper in the Hudson Valley. She mentioned another friend of Marie, who actually started out as a fan, Irene Vartanoff.

Cassell: Did you ever see her get upset or angry about anything?

Fite: Well, I wouldn’t say upset, but, like I said, she’s a Brooklynite, right? So she’s got “attitude, y’know?” She wasn’t restrained or chickensh*t. She was always interesting, always smart, always clever, and good to hang around with. Not boring. [laughs] Cassell: Marie certainly had a very successful career in comics. Do you think that made a difference from the standpoint of women working in the field?

Fite: I don’t know. It sure didn’t hurt. How much it helps, I can’t say. You know, Margaret Thatcher was the prime minister of Great Britain, but Hillary Clinton didn’t stand a snowball’s chance of getting there [to the White House]. I don’t know how much of a pathfinder she was, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to have someone showing that it can be done.

Marie Severin sketch of herself, Herb Trimpe and Linda Fite at the Ramapo Convention in 1996.

Courtesy of Linda Fite.

Cassell: That’s a great point. So is there anything else I should have thought to ask you?

Fite: No, because I didn’t hang out with Marie much once I moved up here. We just saw her maybe once or twice a year, at most, and it was always brief, three or four hours at a time.

I wish I had been in more touch with her. Irene goes down to see her pretty regularly, Irene [Vartanoff] and Scott [Edelman].

A bunch of us women in comics got together up here in the Hudson Valley last summer, and we signed a birthday card and sent it to Marie. That was nice. It’s a funny little community, women in comics in that generation.

ANOTHER FORMER MARVEL STAFFER who has fond memories of working with Marie Severin is Irene Vartanoff. Before joining the staff at Marvel, Vartanoff was a dedicated fan, writing numerous letters to the Marvel bullpen. She is a great example of someone who was able to follow the way paved by Marie, and who became her good friend. Irene shares her wonderful recollections of Marie in the following commentary.

Cassell: Who was at the gathering?

Fite: Janice Chiang, Elaine Lee, Michelle Wrightson. Louise Simonson came up.

I FIRST MET MARIE on my first day at work at Marvel, April 15, 1974. I had seen her at conventions. But I do not remember anything in particular about her from them except that she

Comments from Irene Vartanoff

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Chinese restaurant downstairs, the Lotus Eaters (it fronted on 56th street) or at other places. Usually, we’d go in groups. You get a better table in New York if you have at least three people.

At that time, Marvel was not hierarchical, and fraternizing with an older lady or with the newest fan to turn staffer did not seem political or worthy of note. We just all went out and had fun. Marie and I remain friends to this day.

My favorite Marie art was always her caricatures. She had a genius for getting down the most obvious physical characteristics, and then exaggerating them to create an instant likeness that also poked (usually) gentle fun. So the stories she did for Not Brand Echh or the occasional illos for other zines and office caricatures were what I liked the most.

I just saw her last weekend and she was her usual fun self.

We had a ball. She likes Carvel. I hope this helps flesh out the picture of a swell gal who also was dripping with talent.

seemed like a nice middle-aged lady.

For the first couple of months I worked at Marvel, she was in the same editorial bullpen room I was in. It seemed like everybody not doing actual paste-ups or art corrections on the color comics was there. Even the guy who typeset the letter columns. At one point at least seven people were crammed in that room. Finally, some other space was made available and the people not doing editorial functions were moved out.

Eventually, Marie had an office of her own. She also at one time had a coloring room that she ran. We all were moved around the place a lot, and since this was pre-cubicle times, Marvel was constantly tearing down or putting up new walls to create different office spaces. Which is part of why it’s hard to remember where Marie was at any given time.

Marie was always pleasant to work with. And goofy. She would say silly things and make people laugh. Since I like to do the same, we got on well.

A Marie antic: As my birthday approached that first year, I guess I talked way too much about it. Compensating for not

Vartanoff and her husband Scott Edelman, former Marvel writer and current editor of SCI FI Magazine, remain close friends with Marie and visit her regularly.

LEFT Photo of Marie and Irene Vartanoff. RIGHT Photo of Marie and Scott Edelman. Courtesy of Irene Vartanoff and Scott Edelman.

Dignifying Science IN 2003, MARIE CONTRIBUTED to a book written by Jim Ottaviani and published by G.T. Labs called Dignifying Science: Stories About Women Scientists. The book featured true stories about famous female scientists, illustrated in comic book form by female artists. The covers by Ramona Fradon and Mary Fleener were printed in color and the interior was black-andwhite. Marie Severin drew the story about Marie Curie, in a detailed and illustrative style, which served as the prologue and epilogue for the book.

being at home, or whatever. Obviously, being a bit immature.

On the day, I arrived to find that Marie had taken a stack of business cards and written silly happy birthday sayings on them, and stuck them all over. I found them on my desk. My chair. In other obvious places in the office. And in each stall in the ladies room. I got the message. Enough with the “Me, me me. It’s my birthday.” routine. But what a hoot. And she got her point across in a such a funny, kindly manner. Classy lady.

Marie did a cartoon of Chris Claremont, me, and David Anthony Kraft as gangsters. I was holding a machine gun. (I’ve got the original, but it’s under glass and probably won’t scan well.) I think it was published in FOOM. And of course she did a parting card, as she almost always did. (Paty took over that chore eventually.) A very kind, beautifully rendered drawing of me as the Queen of Hearts. When she liked people, the drawings weren’t really caricatures.

I went to lunch with Marie many times, often at the

The success of women in comics like Ramona Fradon, Trina Robbins, Flo Steinberg, Linda Fite, and Irene Vartanoff is a great tribute to the pioneering efforts of Marie Severin. And a trait that they all admired in Marie was her sense of humor. So, it is only fitting that having delved into the Home, Horror, and Heroes associated with Marie, that we turn our attention to her Humor.

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1976 Splash page from Doc Savage #4 story “Ghost Pirates From The Beyond”

by Marie Severin and Tony DeZuniga. Courtesy Heritage Auctions.

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COLOR Gallery

Color 1994 Doctor Strange commission by Marie. Courtesy of Jerry Boyd.

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FACING PAGE Marie illustrated this piece in honor of her brother’s tribute dinner at the 1998 San Diego Comic Con. ABOVE Caricatures from correspondence between Marie and her friends Eleanor Hezel and Jean Davenport. Courtesy of Eleanor Hezel and Jean Davenport.

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TOP 2004 illustration of the EC gang at lunch in the early 1950s.

BOTTOM 1950s painting of Marie by Johnny Craig. Courtesy of Bill Leach

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TOP LEFT 1972 hand colored and numbered print of the cover to EC Comics’ Haunt of Fear #18 by Marie. TOP RIGHT 1952 Marie Severin color guide to the story “The Rug” from Shock SuspenStories #1. BOTTOM LEFT 1954 Marie Severin color guide to the story “Beauty Rest” from Vault of Horror #35. The last panel shows her use of a “knockout,” coloring all of the foreground characters in one color. BOTTOM RIGHT Color guide to the cover of Frontline Combat #15, painted

by Marie in 1977 for the Russ Cochran reprints. Courtesy Heritage Auctions.

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Cover of The Incredible Hulk #105 by Marie Severin and Frank Giacoia. Courtesy of Glen Brunswick.

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TOP LEFT Preliminary cover design to Kull the Conqueror #10 by Marie. TOP RIGHT The published cover to Kull the Conqueror #10 by Marie, inked

by John Severin.

BOTTOM LEFT Color guide to the splash page of Iron Man #160. BOTTOM RIGHT Original art to the splash page of Iron Man #160. The note from Marie in the margin indicates “S. Ditko refused to illustrate a drunk hero.”

Courtesy of Mike Burkey (www.romitaman.com)

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TOP 1997 Stan Lee tribute painting by Marie, Not Brand Echh style, for issue #1258 of Comics Buyers Guide.

BOTTOM 1966 Iron Man sticker strip illustrated by Marie.

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TOP LEFT The Tin Man by Marie from the 1975 joint Marvel and DC treasury edition MGM’s Marvelous Wizard of Oz. TOP RIGHT Brule the Spear-slayer, Pict friend of Kull, rendered by Marie.

BOTTOM LEFT 1981 ink and wash illustration by Marie from HULK magazine #25. BOTTOM RIGHT 2005 commission of George Washington, illustrated by Marie. Courtesy of Heritage Auctions and Steven Gettis.

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TOP LEFT, LEFT Color guide and original art (top right) to the cover of a Brazilian comic book, Super X #30, featuring the Sub-Mariner and the Hulk, rendered by Marie. BOTTOM LEFT Hand colored print of the cover to CRAZY #3 by Marie. BOTTOM RIGHT Color guide to the cover of Kull the Destroyer #19 by Marie. Courtesy of Stephen Moore, Bill Leach, and Mike Collins, respectively.

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TOP LEFT Cover of the October 1969 issue of Esquire magazine featuring Joe Namath, illustrated by Marie. TOP RIGHT Cover of November 1973 issue of Ms. magazine

by Marie. CENTER “The World’s Smallest Comic Book”— Marvel Mini-Book covers illustrated by Marie. Courtesy Heritage Auctions. BOTTOM LEFT Marvel Mini-Book wrapper. Courtesy Heritage Auctions.

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Cover to issue #4 of Where Monsters Dwell by Marie Severin and Tom Palmer. Courtesy of Heritage Auctions.

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TOP LEFT Cover of Marvel Madhouse #1, UK reprints of Not Brand Echh. TOP RIGHT Pin-up from issue #7 of Howard the Duck magazine by Marie. BOTTOM LEFT 2004 commission drawing of Marie being “saved” by Daredevil. Courtesy of Craig Rogers. BOTTOM RIGHT Marie Severin cover to FOOM #6 featuring the Avengers’ butler, Jarvis, at work.

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TOP Two-page spread featuring Jubilee in a Sentinel factory from the 1993 Random House Pictureback book X-Men: Night of the Sentinels painted by Marie. BOTTOM LEFT Crystar the Crystal Warrior, a new original Marvel hero created in 1983 appeared in comics, coloring books, and Remco toys. BOTTOM RIGHT Page from Historical Comics’ Epic Battles of the Civil War Volume 1: First Bull Run colored by Marie.

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TOP LEFT Marvel Bullpen Christmas card drawn by Marie. TOP RIGHT Invitation to Jean Davenport’s 80th birthday party, drawn by Marie. Courtesy of Jean Davenport. BOTTOM LEFT Marie Severin Hulk cover to issue #2 of the fanzine Ragnarok. BOTTOM RIGHT Herb Trimpe drawing of the Hulk and Wolverine, inked and colored by Marie, her last work. Courtesy of Jeff Harnett.

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Splash page to issue #2 of Not Brand Echh by Marie. Courtesy of Zaddick Longenbach.

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6 Humor A good sense of humor will serve you well in a variety of circumstances. It can diffuse a tense situation, break the ice with a new group of people, and brighten a dreary day. It is a talent that only a few truly possess (although that doesn’t stop the rest of us from trying.) Marie Severin, though, is not only an exceptional artist, but a gifted humorist as well. And that talent is one she readily shared with friends and fans, as is evident in much of her art.

When you ask anyone about Marie Severin—peers, friends or fans—they may tell you they loved her work on the Hulk or they admired her contributions to EC or that her version of Kull is their favorite. But they will almost invariably add, “And she has a great sense of humor.” It is that remarkable gift of humor that leaves the greatest impression on the people whose lives she touches, regardless of their age or gender.

Humor comes most naturally to Marie, so it is only natural that when she is drawing for fun, humor is the form it is most likely to take. And she has had a lot of fun over the years.

In the early days of Marvel Comics, editor Stan Lee gave each of the creators—writers, artists, letterers, etc.—a nickname (or in some cases, more than one), including himself. It was Stan “The Man” Lee (or occasionally “Smilin’” Stan Lee.) Sometimes they reflected a predominant characteristic of the person (or the exact opposite), but the chief requirement was that they should be alliterative or rhyme. The effect was to encourage reader recognition of, and identification with, the Marvel creators. Bullpen nicknames included “Rascally” Roy Thomas, “Jazzy” John Romita (or John “Ring-A-Ding” Romita), “Joltin’” Joe Sinnott, Jack “King” Kirby, “Happy” Herb Trimpe, and last but not least, “Mirthful” Marie Severin. Given that the Marvel offices were covered with caricatures by Marie, the latter is easily understood.

In this section, we examine a variety of ways in which Marie’s humor has manifested itself in her work, beginning with the humor comic books that she helped create and continuing through her work on special projects, including advertising, promotions, fan clubs, and comics targeted at young children. Finally, we’ll take a look at those infamous caricatures that Marie has drawn over the years. So enjoy the sharp wit (and sharp pencil) of the humor of Marie Severin.

During the time period in which Marvel Comics was gaining steam, it was common to find product advertisements on television and in magazines where they referred to the competition as “Brand X,” rather than the actual product name, presumably to avoid any litigation from competitors. And, of course, “Brand X” always proved to be inferior. Marvel decided to apply the same logic to comic books, with a touch of humor thrown in.

nOT bRAnD ECHH

IN ISSUE #95 OF Alter Ego magazine, editor Roy Thomas notes that in 1965, Stan began to refer to the competitors of Marvel as “Brand Echh.” It was used in the context of warning fans not to be lured away by the imitations being offered by the unnamed competitors. Stan was clearly using the “Brand X” approach common in advertising (and perhaps a borrowed word from MAD magazine, which spelled it “Ecch.”) Fan reaction to the use of the term “Brand Echh” was mixed, although Stan was quick to point out that it did not refer to any one competitor, but was rather a generic term for all of them.

Then one day in 1967, Stan out went to lunch with Roy Thomas and Gary Friedrich. Roy and Gary pitched the idea to Stan of creating a humor comic book along the lines of the original MAD, with parodies of the competition. Stan liked the idea, but suggested poking fun at their own Marvel characters instead. That self-deprecating humor would prove to be the secret of their success (although the competition’s characters did not escape their rapier wit). As for the title, it was originally going to be called Brand Echh, as evident in the August 1967 Bullpen Bulletin page in which Stan announced the new humor comic, as well as the indicia in the first four issues. However, readers referred to it as Not Brand Echh from the beginning and it stuck.

Not Brand Echh got off to a great start. Who would have thought that artists like Jack Kirby, reknowned for his larger than life action heroes, would do such a great job drawing humor comics? It was almost as if, while drawing the Fantastic Four battling the Silver Surfer, Jack had seen the humor in it and been champing at the bit to let it out. (It was Kirby who first drew the book’s mascot, Forbush-Man.) Part of what made the Not Brand Echh stories so amusing was that they often 129

Some of the best stories Marie had in Not Brand Echh featured “The Aging Spidey-Man,” “The Inedible Bulk,” and “Prince No-More, the Sunk Mariner,” which is probably not surprising since Marie had drawn the latter two characters in their own super-hero comics. Other favorites by Marie from Not Brand Echh include the “Super-Hero Greeting Cards,” “How to be a Comic Book Artist,” and “Drawing Lessons.”

Without explanation, Not Brand Echh was canceled after thirteen issues, though such decisions were typically made based on sales (or lack thereof.) As of this writing, the series has not yet been collected into a Marvel Masterworks or Essentials volume, although individual stories have been reprinted. The Daredevil and Inhumans Masterworks volumes both included Not Brand Echh parodies. (See also the upcoming section on the CRAZY! comic book.)

There was also a foreign edition of Not Brand Echh, repackaged and printed magazine-sized in the UK under the title Marvel Madhouse. The debut issue featured the cover and stories (though not in the same order) from Not Brand Echh #3, perhaps because it was an “origins” issue, along with “The Fastest Gums In The West” story by Marie from Not Brand Echh #1. It also included a new three-page humor story by Tim Quinn and Dick Howett. Subsequent issues combined stories and covers from various issues of Not Brand Echh. Later issues of Marvel Madhouse included reprints from Howard the Duck comics and CRAZY magazine as well.

Not Brand Echh was a high-water mark in humor for Marvel Comics, but it was certainly not the last time that they would tickle our funny bone. With a Marie Severin on staff, you’ve just got to find a vehicle for that sense of humor.

Cover of Not Brand Echh #8 by Marie.

Courtesy of Zaddick Longenbach. directly paralleled the “serious” stories published in Marvel super-hero comics, and occasionally employed the same artists to draw them.

Marie was a key contributor to Not Brand Echh from the beginning. She was a great caricaturist and loved to fill the stories with little signs and hidden messages, like Bill Elder was famous for doing in the original MAD comics. She often worked with writer Roy Thomas on the story plots. In fact, Marie actually wrote some of the stories she illustrated in later issues, such as the “Super-Hero Daydreams.” Her brother John also illustrated a parody of a Sgt. Fury story in the first issue.

In addition, Marie penciled most of the covers for Not Brand Echh, starting with issue #2. There is an interesting story about the cover for that issue. Marie apparently intended that Spidey-Man would have a smile, with white teeth showing, but the colorist just colored it like the rest of his mask. (Note the pattern of the webbing over his mouth, compared with the rest of the mask.) Justification for why Marie preferred to do her own coloring.

Marie clearly enjoyed her tenure on Not Brand Echh. In an April 14, 1996 article in the Asbury Park Press Sunday, Marie told staff writer Mark Voger, “I love whimsy. Stan would just let me go, pretty much. I don’t think he could control me. A lot of the stuff was mine. I had a ball.”

ROY THOMAS HAS HAD a prolific and distinguished career in comics. He was a writer and editor at Marvel, ultimately taking over for Stan Lee. He is particularly remembered for his exceptional work on Conan, as well as Not Brand Echh. Today, he is editor of the award-winning magazine Alter Ego. What follows is an interview with Thomas about the art and humor of Marie Severin.

Interview with Roy Thomas Dewey Cassell: When you first started at Marvel, was Marie already there?

Roy Thomas: Oh, yes. She was one of the few people who was.

Cassell: Was she doing production-type work at the time?

Thomas: Yes, production. She wasn’t doing any [art]work. She did some coloring, I think, but of course Stan Goldberg was the main colorist, but I think she was already doing some.

Cassell: So, moving ahead to later in the 1960s. I know you talked in the article that you did in Alter Ego #95 about how you guys came up with the idea for Not Brand Echh, but what prompted you to get Marie involved with that?

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much I wrote down. I guess I must have written down some things somewhere, but I wouldn’t swear to it. Marie’s just one of these people you just sort of talk over the idea with her, and then she drew it, she added a lot of gags as she went.

Whether she was working with me, or Stan, or whoever.

Thomas: I’m trying to remember, was she already doing the Hulk by then?

Cassell: Yes, Hulk, Doctor Strange…

Thomas: Doctor Strange, the Hulk, she’d already been doing some things. But, of course, we’d always seen her humor work. She did a lot of office cartoons. And there was always a cartoony aspect of her work. That made her one of the logical choices to do it, along with the fact we were having a lot of artists who did the regular series do their stuff, like Kirby and Colan and others, and Marie was drawing some, so why not her, too? But we thought of her as somebody who really was, and could be, more of a humor artist than most of the other guys were, naturally.

Cassell: That was one of the things I was going to ask you. A lot of her Not Brand Echh work had these little signs and sayings in the background. Was that her doing?

Thomas: Well, not all. It was a natural thing. The thing is that I think all of us had some of that, because, I mean, Stan had written parody humor back in the Fifties at the time when MAD was fresh and new, and Gary and I were big fans of the MAD color comic. And Marie, of course, had worked on that material. She’d colored it. So it was just a natural thing to do.

I think that people like Marie and I, and maybe Gary, but certainly Marie and I were more in tune to do that kind of thing than Stan or the other artists were. We thought in those terms I think a lot more strongly than most of the other artists.

Cassell: I wondered if you deliberately put her on the parodies of the Hulk because that’s what she’d been drawing?

Thomas: Well, I don’t remember any particular conscious thought process. Once we thought of the book, I think she was just an inevitability from the beginning. Maybe Jack was going to do the Fantastic Four, and somebody else was going to do a strip they were particularly identified with, but Marie was somebody who was going to be tossed on almost anything, so I don’t remember any real discussion that led her to do the rest.

I don’t recall how it came about. It just seemed like a natural.

There was never any question about it. She was the only artist, really, who was thought of in terms of that was her natural thing, until Tom Sutton walked in a week later.

Cassell: The two of you seemed to work well together when you teamed up on something.

Thomas: We did. Some of my favorite things of the entire run, although the Silver Surfer thing at the end was pretty good, but it was probably the Superman takeoff. But there were several others, the takeoff on the Sub-Mariner, Hulk, Kull, which we’d also done the serious version of, which I thought was a kick in the head. And then actually, she did two of my favorite parodies of all time for SPOOF just a little later, the Dark Shadows parody and the parody of Tarzan. Which, without saying so, we made it sort of like a sequel to the two MAD parodies that her brother had drawn. It sort of, in a sense, picked up where they left off. I mean, it was intended as the third one of those, and, of course, John Severin ended up inking it.

Cassell: When you wrote the stories for Not Brand Echh, did you use a different approach, or did you still use the “Marvel Method?”

Thomas: It was the Marvel Method. In fact, probably even less so, because, I don’t know, with Marie, I’m not sure how

LEFT Photo of Roy Thomas from the 1992 Famous Comic Book Creators card set. RIGHT “The Mighty Sore battles the Inedible Bulk” 1996 commission by Marie.Courtesy of Jim McPherson.

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Marie was probably the most important artist in it in terms of dependability and just plain pure humor. But a lot of it was endemic in the fact that we were parodying the characters we did ourselves, and we did it halfway decently and people rather liked it. Until, I don’t know if DC did anything to it, because suddenly, the Superman issue was the first one that we somehow had sales problems with. But then I think it really didn’t work out, any more than it did with Silver Surfer, in the long run, to make it an extra-sized book. It just didn’t quite work. I don’t exactly know why that was done with either of them, really. Stan just really wanted to do it with Silver Surfer, and he had this idea to do a double-sized book with the humor. I guess he thought people would buy it, but I think it actually hurt the book to go to double-size. It wasn’t the difficulty of turning it out, it’s just, it cost twice as much money, and people would end up buying a couple of small comics instead. So I think that really was the kiss of death, even though I love those issues.

Cassell: What would you say that Marie brought to Marvel? What difference did having Marie at Marvel make?

Thomas: Well, I think sometimes she helped us from taking

Cassell: What about those things that she would do for Not Brand Echh that were sort of one-offs, like the “Drawing Lessons,” or “How to be a Comic Book Artist”?

Thomas: I don’t remember how she did those. Sometimes I think she probably just started doing it, and sometimes she may have mentioned to us that she’d like to do this or that.

Maybe sometimes Stan might have suggested something, or I might have suggested something. But I think, in most cases, those were probably ideas that she had and just felt like playing around, and we just kind of gave her carte blanche, especially once it became the big, double-sized comic, then we had room for various things, so if she wanted to toss in something like that, there wasn’t any kind of problem. I mean, writing, per se, wasn’t her strong suit, but she had a nice turn of phrase. She had a lot of devilish ideas.

Cassell: I think she was actually credited as the writer on some of those, like the “Sha-Marvey” thing.

Thomas: She was. We figured why bother have somebody else write that page. All we would have done is maybe cleaned it up a little bit, or edited it a little bit. We may have even changed

a line or two, but basically we just let LEFT 1997 commission of “Stuporman” and friends from Not Brand Echh those go that way, and it had her style.

by Marie. RIGHT Super-hero Greeting Card from Not Brand Echh #9 by If Stan was going over every line and so Marie. Courtesy of Dave Braunstein and Jim McPherson, respectively. forth, he’d have probably done more to it, but at the rate we were turning out ourselves, and taking things, a little too seriously. When things material, and the way that book ate up material, we were very were a little bit tense or whatever, sometimes she drew some happy to have her doing a few things. So she had something strange cartoon that, whether it was well-intentioned or biting, resembling carte blanche over these little things, so as long as it would always give us a laugh, and I think it cheered us up. You she didn’t do something the Comics Code was going to hate, need somebody, there always has to be a class clown, and Marie we were okay. was sort of that, in a way. At the same time, we respected her drawing. Maybe she wasn’t going to be a Jack Kirby or a John Cassell: Do you think it’s fair to say that Marie’s talent for Buscema or whatever, but she told good stories, she had a lot of drawing humor was part of the key to success for Not Brand Echh? drama, and the Sub-Mariner and Hulk that she did were quite Thomas: In the early days, yes, but, of course, there were successful. She could have continued with that, but I don’t think a lot of them. We also had guys like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby Marie was really that terribly interested in a long stay as a comic doing parodies of the comics they actually did. But I think 132

artist. I think she was in some ways happier to kind of drift back to coloring after a time. So she drew, but I don’t think she cared that much whether she had a regular book or not.

Cassell: I think to coloring, special projects, and other things.

Thomas: And covers. She did many covers, and cover layouts, and things of this sort. But I just don’t think it made that much difference to her. If it had, I think she was good enough she could have continued to draw a regular book, had she really wanted to. I think she just was very happy to go off.

She did it for a couple of years, and did it quite well, and then somehow or other, when she wasn’t doing it anymore, I don’t think she cared.

Cassell: Was there anything else I should have asked you about Marie?

Thomas: You know the story of how she got her first assignment drawing serious comics?

Cassell: What’s the story?

TOP Unpublished page intended for the “Knock Furious, Agent of SHEESH” story in Not Brand Echh #8.BOTTOM Page 3 from “The Fastest Gums in the West” story in Not Brand Echh #1 by Marie. Courtesy of Heritage Auctions.

Thomas: Well, there’s this ad with the Hulk and Doctor Doom that appears in one of the books, and as it’s printed, it has some drawings laid out by Kirby and, I guess, finished up by Mike Esposito, at least as far as the Hulk, and the Doctor Doom figure is by Marie. But Marie had just been playing around and did this cartoon, even wrote it, basically, and most of her writing stayed, with a little editing from Stan in the printed ad. I think it was for the MMMS and the t-shirts and all that kind of thing. And she drew and wrote this cartoon with Doctor Doom and the Hulk, and it was fairly good. And Stan finally, at the last minute, decided he wanted the Hulk to look a little more like he did in the comic, so he changed him and left Doctor Doom, as I said. But I think it was that page. There may have been something else, too, but it was a page like that Martin Goodman saw that made him tell Stan, “She should be drawing some of the comics,” and that’s when, I think, Stan decided to have her a try out. So really, Martin Goodman was the one who kind of spotted her and everything. I think it must have been that ad. I’m not quite sure what he saw in that particular ad, but I know that that was the thing I always thought that was her first published Marvel work. And, as I said, half of that ends up being stat from a Hulk story pasted in, but the other half was Marie, and it sort of led to better things for her.

Roy would continue to be involved in the humorous undertakings at Marvel. And it wasn’t long before they decided to try it again.

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Humorous comic books can take a variety of forms, from parody to satire to single panel gags.

The success of MAD magazine proved there was a market for it. So, although Not Brand Echh only lasted a couple of years, it is not entirely a surprise that Marvel would try its hand again at being funny in the funny pages.

SPOOF, and that it would be more of a general parody mag, not a super-hero one. But we were trying to branch out in that period.”

Adding to the mystery is a two-year gap between the publication of the first and second issues of SPOOF, for reasons lost to time. (Marvel would likely not have had the sales figures on the first issue in time to cancel—or postpone—the second.)

SPOOF was a departure from the format of Not Brand Echh, typically featuring parodies of movies and television shows, along with the occasional satire on popular culture. In that respect, it bore some resemblance to MAD magazine. When asked if the resemblance was intentional, Thomas replied, “Only in a vague way. I suppose it was hoped it would attract some of the same audience.”

Marvel’s humor comics used many of the same writers and artists that graced their super-hero books. Thomas indicates the creators “were asked if they’d like to do such a story,” and several took them up on the opportunity for a change of pace.

The primary artist for SPOOF was Marie Severin, who brought to the stories the same wry sense of humor and gift for caricature that had made Not Brand Echh a favorite of fans.

Marie also penciled the covers for SPOOF. Of Marie, Thomas notes, “she was an excellent humor and parody artist.” Marvel Comics writer Marv Wolfman, who also penned several stories for SPOOF, concurs. “Marie was the absolute best humor/satire and otherwise great artist Marvel had.”

Roy teamed up with Marie and her brother John on one of the finest stories of the series, “Tarz an’ the Apes,” in issue #2. In the lampoon of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ tale, Thomas pays homage to the artistic siblings when a character that was fired from his job says, “Hey! Don’t I get Severin’s pay?”

Another Marie Severin story from the second issue of SPOOF, plotted by Roy Thomas and written by Marv Wolfman, was a parody of the movie, Tales From The Crypt. As for the source material, Wolfman notes, “I had seen the film and, of course, had known all the original stories from the comics.”

The story was rife with irony, in that Marie was called upon to pencil a comic book satire of a motion picture that was based on the comic book she originally colored for EC. Among the television shows parodied in SPOOF were the cult classic Dark Shadows, as well as the long-running medical drama, Marcus Welby M.D., both also illustrated by Severin.

The “spoofs” of the television shows tended to be based on an amalgamation of the series, rather than a specific episode.

SPOOF was certainly not a chore for Wolfman, who said, “I loved it. I really enjoyed writing them.” Although the typical approach at the time was the “Marvel method” of writing synopses, rather than full scripts, Wolfman adapted his style as necessary for the genre. “I went back and forth depending

sPOOf AnD ARRGH! THE BEST PLACE TO start, in this case, would be at the end. The end of Not Brand Echh, that is. Lasting only thirteen issues, it nonetheless set a new standard for self-deprecating humor in comic books, poking fun at the best of Marvel’s super-heroes as well as the Distinguished Competition. It was a critical success, but presumably lagging sales led to cancellation of the book in mid-1969.

So why then, only a year later, did Marvel launch a new humor title called SPOOF? Former Marvel Comics editor and writer Roy Thomas says, “I’ve never known. Stan just announced one day he wanted to start a new mag called

LEFT Splash page from the “Tarz an’ The Apes!” story written by Roy Thomas and illustrated by Marie and John Severin for SPOOF #2.FACING PACE: TOP LEFT Published cover of SPOOF #1 by Marie. BOTTOM RIGHT Original cover art to ARRGH! #1 by Marie.

Courtesy of Mike Burkey (www.romitaman.com).

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of the new venture. “ARRGH! was intended to follow up Not Brand Echh and SPOOF, and to be more of a horror-parody rather than a super-hero or generic one like the previous too mags. I was proud of the title I’d dreamed up, and knew we could run some reprints from the 1950s CRAZY, WILD, and RIOT (which we had to, because I wasn’t given a budget for full new art each issue).”

ARRGH! was, as Roy described in the first issue, a “genre parody—stories that are simply take-offs of the whole wide spectrum of so-called horror tales, rather than one exact story.” The format led to inevitable comparisons with another horror/humor comic book published by DC Comics called PLOP!.

ARRGH! benefited from the artistic talents of the likes of Tom Sutton, Alfredo Alcala, and Mike Sekowsky, all of whom were experienced at rendering horror stories. For whatever reason, though, Marie Severin was not a major contributor to ARRGH!.

Unfortunately, ARRGH! was also canceled after five issues.

Thomas cites several contributing factors to the title’s demise.

“I was never able to give ARRGH! my full attention... and again, had to use reprints. When I didn’t write the stories myself, I didn’t have anybody much to fall back on.”

Asked if he enjoyed writing humor stories, Roy Thomas replied, “Very much so, though I lost money doing them because they took twice as long (at least) as the hero stories, and humor didn’t come easily to me... though I was proud of some (not all) of what I did, [like] “Darn Shadows” and “Tarz an’ the Apes” in SPOOF.” The departure of ARRGH! left behind a void in parody humor comics, but the genre was alive and well in the blackand-white magazine format. And Marie would once again find an outlet for her wonderful sense of humor in the pages of CRAZY magazine. on who the artist was and how much free time I had. Humor requires complete scripts but my plots were very, very tight.”

One of Wolfman’s stories for SPOOF, also penciled by Marie, was titled “What if … Celebrities Ran For President?” and it featured John Wayne as one of the candidates, years before another western film actor would enter the White House. Irony or premonition?

Sadly, SPOOF only lasted five issues before being canceled in mid-1973. Earlier that same year, Marvel launched a comic book titled CRAZY!, that featured reprints of classic Not Brand Echh stories. CRAZY! ran for just three issues, ceasing publication one month after SPOOF. The cover to issue #2 of CRAZY! was reprinted from Not Brand Echh #6, but the other two covers were originals by Marie Severin. However, although the comic book ended, the name lived on. Later that same year, Marvel launched a black-and-white humor magazine titled CRAZY, intended to be a direct competitor of MAD. Asked why they reused the name, Thomas said simply, “’Cause it was a good name.” Indeed, Marvel’s prior incarnation, Timely Comics, published a short-lived humor comic book in the mid-1950s called—you guessed it—CRAZY. The magazine proved to be the most successful version of the title, running 94 issues. (More about CRAZY magazine in the next chapter.)

Then, eighteen months after the demise of the comic books SPOOF and CRAZY!, Marvel decided to try their hand at humor comics once again with a new book entitled ARRGH!.

Roy Thomas, who served as its editor, explains the genesis 135

Although none could be categorized as a resounding success—at least financially—the experiments with Not Brand Echh, SPOOF, and ARRGH! demonstrated that Marvel possessed the talent, in both writers and artists, to produce a respectable humor publication. With the growth in their new black-and-white magazine line, Marvel decided to try a humor magazine to compete directly with MAD.

Marv Wolfman, who is also credited with creating the first mascot for the magazine, Irving Nebbish, designed to provide an identity to the magazine like Alfred E. Neuman did for MAD. CRAZY afforded Marie an opportunity to flex her humor muscles again. Marie provided the art for features like “The Walnuts,” the parody of the long running television show “The Waltons,” and “Jawbones!,” the parody of the blockbuster movie JAWS. She also drew the satire, “CRAZY’s Ultimate Game Show” (a.k.a. The Funeral Game) featuring a host that looked like Zacherley. In addition, she did numerous supporting features for CRAZY, particularly parodies of print and television advertisements, such as Virginia Slims cigarettes and Charmin bathroom tissue.

Marvel produced numerous CRAZY “Super Specials,” although in most cases they were numbered along with the regular issues. Issue #58, one of the “Super Specials,” included a reprint of the first issue of the 1973 CRAZY! comic book (which was itself a reprint of Not Brand Echh.)

CRAzY MAGAzinE The first issue of CRAZY magazine, published in October 1973, sported a painted cover by MAD alumnus Frank Kelly Freas, which made it clear that Marvel was taking on all competitors, including SICK, CRACKED, and National Lampoon, as well as MAD. Artists contributing to the new magazine included veterans like Vaughn Bode, Mike Ploog, Herb Trimpe, Basil Wolverton, and Marie Severin. The debut issue included parodies of Kung Fu and The Poseidon Adventure, as well as recurring features like “The History of Moosekind” and fumetti starring Marvel staffers.

Subsequent issues parodied High Plains Drifter, James Bond, Westworld, and The Exorcist, among other movies and television shows. The first ten issues of CRAZY magazine were edited by

Marie was a regular contributor to CRAZY magazine throughout its 94 issue run. In some issues, she was also cred-

FROM LEFT Original art and published page from parody of Virginia Slims advertisement by Marie that appeared in issue #1 of CRAZY magazine.

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ited as the Art Director. Perhaps her greatest contribution to the magazine, though, was a recurring feature called “Teen Hulk.” Created by Marie and writer Larry Hama, “Teen Hulk” began in issue #60 of CRAZY. As the origin goes, “Due to prolonged exposure to a demented dentist’s gamma ray cavity decoder,” the nerdy teenager Chester Weems finds himself transformed into “Teen Hulk.”

The feature was a great example of the self-deprecating humor that Marie and Marvel did so well in Not Brand Echh, and it was a fan favorite element of CRAZY. CRAZY magazine ran for over ten years, outlasting more than one of its competitors (although not MAD, which remains in publication to this day.) The artwork of Marie Severin undoubtedly contributed to the success the magazine achieved. The irony is that her brother John was equally instrumental in the success of another humor magazine, CRACKED. For almost forty years, John Severin was the “house artist” of CRACKED, often illustrating multiple features in each issue and virtually every cover. It seems that a sense of humor does indeed run in the family.

What The? Like nature, though, humor abhors a vacuum. So, in 1988, Marvel launched a new humor title in comic book format called What The?. It was similar to Not Brand Echh in that it lampooned Marvel characters, and Marie Severin penciled and/or inked stories in at least a half dozen of the 26 total issues.

TOP LEFT Marie Severin parody of Charmin tissue television advertisement from CRAZY #7. TOP RIGHT Splash page of “Casper the Friendly Ghost” satire from CRAZY #8 written by Marv Wolfman and drawn

by Marie Severin. This story won a Shazan Award from the Academy of Comic Book Arts in 1974 for “Best Humor Story.” BOTTOM LEFT Opening page of “The Walnuts,” a parody by Marie of the long-running television show, The Waltons, from CRAZY #3. Courtesy of Heritage Auctions.

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Have you ever wondered where those advertisements featuring Marvel characters come from? Or the promotional comics for Kool-Aid or the Dallas Cowboys? Or how about the Spider-Man and Hulk toilet paper? (No joke.) Thanks to her versatile artistic ability and being in the office and on staff, Marie Severin was frequently chosen to illustrate a variety of special projects for Marvel Comics.

House Ads

The term “house ad” refers to an advertisement for the company that is publishing the comic book or magazine. Literally, an advertisement for the “house,” in this case Marvel.

One type of house ad consisted of advertisements for upcoming issues of comics and magazines. Another type of house ad involved advertising for fan clubs like the Merry Marvel Marching Society or FOOM (both of which are covered in a later chapter.) An additional type of house ad solicited subscribers for the comics and magazines.

House ads often used reproductions of existing art, which were typically assembled by someone working in the production department using photostats of the original art from the comics or merchandise. The other type of house ad used new artwork, created specifically for the advertisement, designed to grab the readers attention and entice them to purchase the product.

Sometimes the line between house ads and commercial advertisements was a little gray. Marvel was involved in ventures like the Superhero Catalog, which in turn advertised in Marvel Comics. The same was true of Mego and other companies that licensed the Marvel characters. Marie and other Marvel staffers often did the artwork for those advertisements as well.

As Marvel Comics grew, they began using more original material in their house ads. As the trend shifted, the call increasingly came to Marie to provide the art, which often had a humorous slant. Some examples of the house ads she created for Marvel include:

sPECiAl PROjECTs THE EXAMPLES OF MARIE’S artwork at Marvel go well beyond the comics themselves. Continuing a practice established with the Esquire magazine articles (see previous section on Heroes), Marie was frequently assigned the task of putting together house ads, promotional material, and other special projects for Marvel. Marie played this role both while still drawing the monthly comics and later as part of the Marvel department that handled special projects. What follows are a sampling of the many special projects Marie was involved in at Marvel.

• In an advertisement for the record album “Reflections of a Rock Super-Hero,” a collection of rock and roll songs about Spider-Man, Marie drew the image of Stan Lee. • In the advertisement for Spider-Man, Hulk and Captain America Halloween costumes, Marie drew the kids in the foreground that are wearing the costumes.

• A New Years subscription ad featuring the Hulk wearing a diaper and 1984 sash.

• A house ad for CRAZY magazine featuring the Inedible Bulk smashing through a wall.

Someone also had to write the copy for the house ads, whether they used new art or not. Former Marvel staffer Scott Edelman wrote many of the house ads that appeared in the mid-1970s, several of which were illustrated by Marie Severin.

Promotional Material With the increasing recognition and popularity of Marvel Comics characters, it is not a surprise that they would capital-

House advertisement for the record album “Reflections of a Rock Super-Hero” from the mid1970s. The image of Stan Lee by Marie was later reused in the second series of Marvel Value Stamps.

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“A Lesson to be Learned,” which appeared in November 1981 Marvel titles.

• Stickers. In 1966, a series of small strips of stickers were produced that could be purchased in bubble gum machines. Some of the sticker strips were scenes from a miniature story starring characters like Iron Man. Other stickers were puzzle pieces that could be combined to form a single image of Thor or the Hulk. The images for several of these stickers were drawn by Marie Severin.

• Marvel Mini Books. Produced in 1966, these were billed as the “world’s smallest comic books.” And, in fact, each one did contain a complete, if a bit campy, illustrated story. There were six different books starring SpiderMan, Thor, the Hulk, Sgt. Fury, Captain America, and Millie the Model. (Each one was printed with covers in multiple colors.) Marie Severin contributed art to at least the Spider-Man mini book, if not others as well.

• The Adventures of Kool-Aid Man. A 1983 promotional comic book featuring the mascot of the flavored drink mix. Story colored by Marie Severin.

• Marvel Value Stamp featuring Stan Lee. Starting in 1974, Marvel began including “stamps” on the letters pages of Marvel comics featuring different Marvel characters, which could be cut out and taped into a stamp book.

The second series of stamps were puzzle pieces that could be taped into a stamp book to form a complete image. Stamp #100 from the second series featured the image of Stan Lee from the house ad for the Spider-Man record album. (See House Ads above.)

ize on opportunities to use them in promotional material for themselves and for other companies. Promotions using Marvel characters could translate into greater sales. In some cases, the characters were licensed to other companies to use in their promotions. In other cases, Marvel actually produced the promotional material for the other company. In both cases, Marvel typically used staff artists like John Romita and Marie Severin to support such endeavors.

Promotional material took a variety of forms and Marie produced artwork for many of them. Some examples of the promotional material that Marie did for Marvel include: • Spider-Man and The Dallas Cowboys in “Danger in Dallas.”

This promotional comic book was produced in 1983 as an advertising supplement for the Dallas Times Herald, featuring plot and layouts by Marie Severin. She also did the cover and coloring for another 1983 Dallas Times Herald supplement, Spider-Man in “Christmas in Dallas,” which was published under the banner “The Marvel Newspaper Network.”

• Hostess advertisement. During the mid-1970s, Hostess contracted with Marvel and other comic book companies to produce a series of advertisements featuring comic book characters in often humorous situations involving Hostess products. Marvel artists Gene Colan, George Tuska, and others drew ads for Hostess. It seems likely that Marie did as well, but there were no credits provided on the artwork, so it is uncertain which one(s) she might have done. It is thought she may have played a role in the Hostess cup cakes ad featuring the Thing in

TOP LEFT 1984 New Years Marvel Comics subscription advertisement featuring a diaper clad Hulk by Marie.

BOTTOM RIGHT Toilet paper featuring a complete story with Spider-Man and the Hulk produced by Oh Dawn! Inc. in 1979, attributed in part to Marie.

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• Spider-Man and Hulk Toilet Paper. In 1979, Oh Dawn! Incorporated produced a roll of toilet paper featuring a complete six-page story, “The Gamma Gambit” starring Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk. (The story was printed in blue ink and repeated every 8 sheets or so.) The story is credited to Jim Salicrup and Michael Higgins. It is uncertain what role Higgins played, since he was a writer and artist, but it appears certain that Marie at least inked the story.

• Star Team in Raiders of the Black Nebula. Digest-sized promotional comic book produced in 1977 for Ideal Toy Corporation. Colors by Marie Severin.

• One of the rarest of collectibles is a prototype set of “stamps,” similar to the Marvel Value Stamps, but made in 1964. A set of 36 stamps was drawn on a single sheet of paper (which a collector later separated into individual stamps.) Characters included not only the typical Spider-Man, Hulk, and the members of the Fantastic Four, but less typical ones like Bucky, Tony Stark, Ka-Zar, and even Stan Lee. The set is attributed to Marie Severin.

• Marie is also credited with illustrating several of the Christmas cards that Marvel Comics sent to employees, business associates, and select fans.

Among them was the 1971 card, which featured a host of characters along with Stan’s signature (signed by Flo Steinberg) and a caricature of Stan advertising the ill-fated 1972 Carnegie Hall appearance.

This is just a small sampling of the myriad promotional items Marie illustrated for Marvel, but she was not the only artist who contributed to such promotional material. Jack Kirby and John Romita both produced artwork for a plethora of Marvel promotional items themselves. But almost from the start, it was recognized that Marie had a gift for bringing the characters of Marvel to life in a variety of ways.

Marvel Books In the 1980s, Marvel launched an imprint called Marvel Books to produce storybooks, coloring books, and activity books targeted primarily at younger readers.

The books included in this line fell into three categories:

TOP Cover of 1983 promotional comic book Spider-Man and the Dallas Cowboys in “Danger in Dallas” produced as an advertising supplement to the Dallas Times Herald newspaper.

BOTTOM Prototype set of stamps made in 1964 attributed to Marie.

Courtesy of Comic Link (www.comiclink.com).

• Licensed characters—Marvel licensed the use of Advanced Dungeon and Dragons, the role playing game from TSR, Incorporated. Several storybooks were produced in 6.5 x 5 inch format with titles like The Treasure of Time. Marie Severin illustrated several of these stories, which were written by David Anthony Kraft.

• Marvel super-hero characters—Marvel produced a series of “Big Looker” storybooks featuring traditional Marvel super-hero characters, such as Spider-Man in The Big Top Mystery and the Fantastic Four in The Island of Danger. The books were 8 inches square and targeted at younger readers, written by David Anthony Kraft. Marie Severin drew the illustrations for the books, which were then painted by Earl Norem. Marvel Books also produced activity books featuring characters like the X-Men with puzzles, games, etc.

• New original Marvel characters—Marvel created a new hero in 1983 called “Crystar, the Crystal Warrior.” Crystar appeared both in comics and in the Marvel Books line. His origin story for Marvel Books was told by David Anthony Kraft, Alan Kupperberg, and Marie Severin. There were also Crystar coloring and activity books published by Marvel Books. In addition, Remco introduced a line of action figures featuring the characters from Crystar. (The action figures were released before the books, leading to a misconception that the comics were based on the action figures.)

In the 1990s, Marvel published a series of books through Random House, Incorporated, based on the X-Men, which were appearing in a syndicated 140

animated television series. Like the “Big Looker” books in the earlier Marvel Books line, the Random House “Pictureback” books were 8 inches square and several featured the artwork of Marie Severin.

Marie also helped out with the Marvel UK imprint, which published comics that included reprinted material from the U.S., as well as some new material. Beginning in 1976, Marvel launched Captain Britain, a weekly magazine-sized comic that featured original stories with a new character created especially for the UK market, which were colored by Marie Severin.

The magazine also included some U.S. reprints, as well as free inserts, such as “Captain Britain’s Boomerang.” It lasted 39 issues before being combined into the Marvel UK’s Super Spider-Man reprint title.

Through the merchandising, promotions, and children’s books, Marvel was able to reach an ever expanding audience. The idea was simple—encourage fans to carry their love of comics into other arenas and at the same time, entice non-fans who are exposed to the products to check out the comics, too.

And the artwork that was used to set that idea in motion was often that of Marie Severin. David Anthony Kraft sheds some additional light on the Marvel special projects he and Marie were involved in during his interview in the following chapter on Fan Clubs.

TOP Page from 1993 Random House Pictureback book X-Men: Enter the X-Men, illustrated by Marie.

BOTTOM 1971 Season’s Greetings from the Marvel Bullpen courtesy of Marie. Note the plug for the illfated Carnegie Hall appearance by Stan.

Courtesy of Lynch Hymn.

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The idea of fans clubs is not new, even for comic books. There was a Superman fan club dating from the early 1940s. And, of course, there was the EC Fan-Addict Club in the 1950s. But few companies have had as much success with fan clubs as Marvel Comics.

Merry Marvel Marching Society (MMMS)

When the fan mail began to pour in for the new super-hero titles that Marvel launched in the early 1960s, Stan got the idea of creating a fan club. Stan’s former “gal Friday,” Flo Steinberg, was there at the time and remembers how it happened, “It was Stan’s idea. We were so surprised when all the fan mail started coming in, mostly for the super-heroes. All these people were writing in, not just kids, but college kids, and people in the Army. Grown-ups. It was just so strange. Stan was always thinking; he said, ‘Let’s start a fan club.’ So he devised all that stuff. He made a script of what we would say on the record. I remember we made copies of them for everybody, then went to a recording studio and stood around a big microphone and said our lines. It was considered very high-tech because some of the people weren’t there. They spoke on the phone, and everyone was amazed that you could talk on the phone and be recorded. Stan did that. I guess he did the little songs, too. I don’t think I was there for [that one].

Maybe by that time they had hired PR people or merchandising people. But the first one was all Stan. I think they got a little membership card and a certificate. Then, it was amazing, the dollar bills started coming in. We would even go in on weekends to open up these envelopes. Hundreds and hundreds of single dollar bills! We had to type the name and address on the labels. We used carbon paper, which is gone now, so you would have a copy of it. We sent these little packages out. That was a busy time, just trying to count all these dollar bills! [laughter] It was fun.”

For their one dollar investment, members of the Merry Marvel Marching Society received a MMMS membership kit. The first version of the kit included a welcome letter from the Marvel Bullpen, a membership card, a membership button (which said “I Belong to the Merry Marvel Marching Society”), a scratch pad, a vinyl record with the “Voices of Marvel,” and “stickers” (which didn’t

fAn Clubs AnD fAnzinEs Fan Clubs Fan clubs are a great way of promoting interest in your product and encouraging people to buy more of it. Comic book fan clubs serve the same purpose. They give members a sense of having the inside track, of being privy to information others do not have, of having a special connection to the company and the characters they love. Over the years, Marie was involved in a number of fan clubs. This was undoubtedly due in part to being a staff person who worked in the office, but it likely also stemmed from her overwhelming generosity and her wonderful sense of humor, which manifest itself in much of what she did for the comic book fan clubs.

EC Fan-Addict Club EC created its own fan club in 1953, the “EC Fan-Addict Club,” which included a membership card and certificate, a cloth patch and a bronze pin, all for the paltry sum of 25 cents (later raised to 50 cents to cover increased costs.)

The artwork on the membership certificate is a compilation of images from various EC comics, but it was likely colored by EC’s resident colorist, Marie Severin.

Years later, an EC Fan Addict Convention was held in New York.

The 1972 convention program, entitled “EC Lives!,” featured comments from fellow EC alumni on each of the EC staffers, accompanied by caricatures of them that Marie did for the 1953 EC Christmas party.

ABOVE “Scream Along With Marvel” record sleeve from the second version of the Merry Marvel Marching Society membership kit, conducting Hulk attributed to Marie. Courtesy Heritage Auctions.

Marvel had no less than three fan clubs between 1964 and 1978, each with their own personality, and all taking advantage of the artistic talent of Marie Severin.

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LEFT Marvelmania masthead featuring the Hulk rendered by Marie.

BELOW Photo of Marie at her drawing board from the Marvelmania Bullpen Photo Set. actually stick). The second version of the kit was similar, but included a different record entitled “Scream Along With Marvel,” a sheet of new “stickers,” a pencil, and a new membership button which said “Make Mine Marvel” along with images of a dozen Marvel characters.

Marie is one of the staffers on the “Voices of Marvel” recording, and she is credited with drawing the illustration of the Hulk for the sleeve of the second record. When asked what else she contributed to the fan club, Marie said, “I know I did the seal,” referring to the “E Pluribus Marvel” seal that appears on the letter from the Bullpen as well as the MMMS stationery, which was available separately. She indicated she probably designed the border for the stationery as well. The MMMS newsletters sent to members likely also contained artwork by Marie.

The MMMS fan club lasted until 1969, spawning a variety of related merchandise, from posters to T-shirts.

A sweatshirt bearing an image of the Hulk pulling a toy, which says “Here Comes the Incredible Hulk” on the front and “There Goes the Incredible Hulk” on the back, is also likely the work of Marie.

One of the noteworthy things about Marvelmania was the abundance of merchandise that was offered through the catalog.

In addition to posters, they advertised pinback buttons featuring characters like the Silver Surfer and the Hulk, as well as stationery kits and plastic figurines. They also made a “Marvelmania Comic Artist Inking And Coloring Kit,” a set of photographs of the Marvel Bullpen artists, and a collection of artist self-portraits, all of which included contributions by Marie.

Sometimes, though, when things seem too good to be true, they are. The December 1971 Bullpen Bulletin announced the end of Marvelmania. What it didn’t say is that apparently numerous fans ordered merchandise they never received. Contributors like Jack Kirby and staffers like Mark Evanier also did not get paid what they were promised. Marvelmania got off to a promising start, but came to an abrupt and disappointing end.

Marvelmania In October 1969 issues of Marvel comics, the Bullpen Bulletin announced that the MMMS was being incorporated into a new fan club called “Marvelmania International,” to be run by an unnamed “California executive,” independent of Marvel. As Stan Lee noted in the Heroes section, Martin Goodman felt like the MMMS was becoming too costly. Starting the following month, Marvelmania began to advertise its new membership kit. For $1.75 plus a quarter for shipping, fans received a membership card, a poster based on the cover of Captain America #106, a decal sheet and Hulk sticker, as well as a catalog of Marvelmania merchandise, a “Mad Money” coupon for 42 cents, and a return envelope, the latter items bearing images of Doctor Doom. Members also received a sample issue of Marvelmania magazine or newsletter. The magazine, of which six regular issues were published, routinely featured contributions by Marie. A later version of the membership kit included a membership certificate and six small posters with artwork by Jack Kirby.

MARK EVANIER HAS SCRIPTED numerous comic books and for years wrote the column “Point of View” in Comics Buyers Guide.

He also wrote for television, including Welcome Back, Kotter and several animated cartoons, among them Scooby Doo and Plastic Man. He is author of the award-winning biography, Kirby: King of Comics. Evanier talks to Aaron Sultan about Marvelmania and Marie Severin.

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same money, and she felt baited and switched, kind of. And then the fellow who ran Marvelmania would visit the office a couple times, was always running around taking photos of everybody, and Marie got very annoyed. “How’s he going to exploit these photos?” I have a photo someplace that he took of her, and you can tell she’s really pissed at him. [laughter] Sultan: Was that for the bullpen photos?

Evanier: They used them there, but he was just running around. This guy was kind of a sharp entrepreneur. He was just like, “Oh, maybe I can sell this!” He would run around the office kind of grabbing the artwork lying around the office.

He’d grab it and want to take it with him. They’d go, “Wait, we’re going to print that. It has to go to press.” So he was not well-liked up there, and she was one of the people who was more vocal than the others, maybe, at telling them that he was annoying the hell out of her. But, anyway, she did a few things because that was the job, then. I can’t say specifically which ones she colored, although she probably colored most of them. Probably the people who redid them based their colors on her schemes. I don’t know if she did the final paintings of these things, but I think she made the color choices they were following.

Sultan: Marvelmania had some other color items, like, for example, the decal sheet. Did she have a hand in those?

Evanier: I have no idea. Those were colored in New York, but I don’t know by who. We just sent those back to—I think it was John Verpoorten. They were sent back, and it was kind of like, “Here, have somebody color these and send us the bill.” John may have colored some of them. The guy running Marvelmania, he didn’t know these people from one another.

He didn’t even read the comics.

From the Marvelmania artist self-portrait set. The cover for Marie Severin: The Mirthful Mistress of Comics is a composite from this drawing.

Interview with Mark Evanier Aaron Sultan: We know that Marie was involved in fan club stuff to some extent, and I’ve heard at one point that she did, for example, a lot of the coloring on the Marvel t-shirts in the midSixties. And I think she had some hand in Marvelmania. So maybe we could start there.

Mark Evanier: Yeah, the answer is, she did a little stuff for Marvelmania. She colored some of the pieces, some of the posters. She did a self-portrait for the self-portrait kit. When they did those giant posters, she did several of them. I don’t think she did all of them. The company was printing those posters by a full-process separation. I mean, they were photographing the color guides like paintings, so the paintings had to be kind of flawless. And comic book coloring, at that time, was not. The comic book coloring back then, which was dyes for the color separator to follow using your color choices, then they hand-cut the colors that they place on the comic books.

So Marie did very neat, lovely color guides for the posters, initially, but she either didn’t understand, or it wasn’t communicated to her, that they were going to actually photograph right off these. And she went over the lines, she did a very professional job, but they weren’t flawless paintings, so they had to be done a couple of times to be satisfactory, and I’m not sure if she did all of them, or some of them. She was very annoyed at Marvelmania because she had quoted a certain price for the coloring, the freelance job that she did on her own time to be paid for, and she had understood one kind of coloring, then they expected her to do much more elaborate coloring for the

Sultan: When you were doing some of the Marvelmania stuff, who was your interface at Marvel?

Evanier: I just worked for the guy. The guy’s name was Don Wallace. He dealt with Marvel, for the most part. He called people there, and I think he called whoever he could. He spoke to Roy Thomas, he spoke to John Verpoorten, he spoke to Stan Lee, and he would just say, “I need a cover for this, I need a drawing for this.” He dealt with some of Marvel’s business people, Chip Goodman and such. The only time he dealt directly with Marie was the time he went back to the Marvel offices and was walking around with his cameras, and was trying to just grab artwork and take it someplace.

Sultan: So the Marvel bullpen photos, then, were actually shot by him?

Evanier: Yes. Well, I think the Kirby one—there was a Kirby one, wasn’t there?

Sultan: Yes, he was at his drawing board.

Evanier: Steve Sherman might have shot that one. He didn’t shoot all of them, but he shot the ones in the Marvel offices, the people in the bullpen. Romita, Herb Trimpe, Marie, and a couple of those. And then maybe the Roy Thomas one. But, then, Dick Ayers sent his in, Don Heck sent his in.

Sultan: Yeah, there is a Don Heck one, probably Joe Sinnott.

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it’s not a healthy set of chemicals you’re inhaling when you’re in there. Marie was sitting there every day. Everyone in the office was subjected to that, but she was very close to it.

Today there’s a lot more sense with these things, they would probably close the whole thing down and fine Marvel. She sat there at this little tan drawing table surrounded by [drawings], on the wall she had cover comps, sketches she had done for covers, some of which were used, some of which weren’t, and all these insulting cartoons of Stan Lee, and Goodman, and John Romita, and Herb Trimpe, and everybody else who came within her gaze. If you were around Marie for more than fifteen minutes, she would draw an insulting cartoon. She was very funny, and she had this wicked sense of humor that made people just adore her. I don’t think anybody ever took umbrage at the cartoons. I think some people were probably slighted if they weren’t insulted. But she did draw insulting pictures, but they were so good. I was Jack Kirby’s assistant at the time, and I met her, and introduced myself in that way, because that was my calling card. And I said something about how much Jack loved her caricatures and thought she was better than he was at caricatures, and she was so flustered.

She said, “Oh, no, I’m not better than Kirby at anything!” And she was very nice, even though I was working for this company which she despised, she was very nice to me, and we talked for a while that day. And, subsequently, I met her

Evanier: The Don Heck one Don had shot, himself. The Dick Ayers one, it was kind of funny. Dick Ayers took that photo to Marie. She added the mustache on it. She drew the mustache onto the photo, because he had grown a mustache, but there was no mustache in the photo he had at that time, so she drew it onto the photo and sent the photo to us. The Joe Sinnott one was one that Joe had professionally done for himself. I don’t remember all of them. I think John Buscema mailed his in.

Sultan: Verpoorten was in there, too.

Evanier: He probably shot that one. He just was up in the office one day, and he pulled out his camera. He was really a crummy photographer, but he would take his camera and take pictures of everybody. So he went to Marvel and shot a couple hundred photos.

Sultan: On the self-portraits that you mentioned, did they get paid to do those?

Evanier: They got paid for the drawings. Yeah, I’m pretty sure they got paid. One of the few times the artists did get paid by Don. He stiffed a lot of people. It was a very crooked operation.

That’s why I got out.

Sultan: That’s amazing.

Evanier: The guy had no money. He ran the company so badly.

His premise was that he was going to produce these items, kids would order them by the ton, and that would give him the money to produce the items. He didn’t have any capital. All of a sudden the orders were nowhere near what he’d figured, and he all of a sudden discovered that he had to come up with fifty thousand dollars or whatever it was to produce some items he’d advertised and sold orders, and he wasn’t getting fifty thousand dollars worth of orders. So the company always lagged behind, and he had creditors from other businesses that were siphoning stuff. It was just a crummy, under-financed, catchpenny business. He was hoping to catch lightning in a bottle and have it all work out. It didn’t work that way. The same story happens on Wall Street these days.

Sultan: Wow, incredible. Okay. Tell me a little bit about Marie in terms of maybe when you first met her.

Evanier: Well, I met Marie the first time I went to the Marvel offices, which was July of 1970, and she was very cordial, and very funny. And you could tell that she was the absolute world-class champ at drawing insulting pictures of the staff on the wall. She had this little cubicle that was situated in a room that no human being should have worked in.

She was sharing it with Stu Schwartzberg and his Photostat machine, and the Photostat machine they had then used these very noxious chemicals. It smelled, literally, like being in a photography darkroom. If you’ve ever been in one of those,

TOP LEFT Photo of Mark Evanier from the 1992 Famous Comic Book Creators card set.

TOP RIGHT Marie’s not happy about having her picture taken. BOTTOM RIGHT Photo of Dick Ayers from the Marvelmania Bullpen Photo Set, complete with mustache courtesy of Marie 145

a page of what Mort Drucker got, and given about 1/20th as much time. So it is a shame, to me, that Marvel never really did a project where they let Marie Severin work exclusively on humor material, and develop her style more, and encourage her, and let her be as wonderful as she could be, because she had the skills, obviously, she had the sense of humor, and she had a unique viewpoint. She didn’t come to this stuff naturally drawing in guys like Kirby’s style that Marvel used so much.

That was an acquired thing she learned. It was not organic to her style. And she did some wonderful material in the super-

on other visits to the Marvel offices, at conventions. As far as her work goes, I always thought she was an amazingly talented artist. She probably should not have been doing super-heroes or adventure comics, but, when she did, she always did a very fine job of them. I just thought she had this wonderful sense of humor. It’s one of the unfortunate parts of the comics business that if Charles Addams walked into the Marvel offices one day looking for work, instead of letting him be Charles Addams, they would have said, “Can you ink like Joe Sinnott?” [laughs] The business has always had this problem of pigeonholing

Membership kit for the Friends of Ol’ Marvel (FOOM) in-house fan club. Courtesy Heritage Auctions. hero genre. I really like the Kull that she did. I liked some of her run of the Sub-Mariner comic book. I thought she was miscast for that kind of comic, but she did it well. And I loved some of the Not Brand Echh stuff she did, where she started drawing a little bit more like Marie Severin, albeit Marie Severin parodying John Romita and John Buscema. But the main thing she was at Marvel was a troubleshooter, fixing things, fixing other people’s art, doing cover layouts. There were an awful lot of cases where another artist would draw a cover for a book, and the day before it had to go to press, Stan, or Martin Goodman, or Chip Goodman, or someone would say, “Well, that’s a sucky cover, let’s redo it.” Marie would, overnight, come up with a new cover. If not the finished art, then at least the layout for somebody else. So there are all these Marie Severin cover designs all throughout that made some of the Marvel books look very good. And in other people’s comics, you’d see her pop up, especially with caricatures, if somebody was doing a comic and they had to draw a celebrity or something, Marie Severin would paste in the face. It would have been much nicer if the

people to what they already are publishing, “Can you replicate our company book and do what everybody else is doing?”

Marie’s skills were not those of John Buscema or Gene Colan, but there were times when Marvel needed another Gene Colan, or another John Buscema, she was asked to be that person.

But she probably should have been drawing in her own style in MAD magazine or something of that sort. And Marvel made a number of attempts at humor magazines, at least in part since they had Marie there. Not Brand Echh, and CRAZY, and some of the other things they tried were… I don’t think they specifically said, “Let’s do the magazine so Marie Severin can work in it,” but it sure didn’t hurt that she was there, and that they knew she’d be good in those venues. But, unfortunately, in my opinion, she was too far in the “I want you to draw like John Buscema” category to really let her own unique style flourish to its full extent. And she was working on the staff, coloring comics, doing cover layouts and cover illustrations. But when she did do humor work for them, she was expected to match the standard Mort Drucker, but she was paid about 1/20th 146

as I was fond of Bill Gaines and the people at MAD magazine, I just thought it was always very sad that she wasn’t in the magazine, and if it was, indeed, because of her gender, I think that was kind of shameful, because she could have added so much to that publication, and she could have gotten much closer to finding the place where she belonged, because I don’t think, spiritually, she belonged in super-hero comics. I don’t want to criticize, because nobody ever didn’t like her work. She was loved, the work was loved. And she knew the people at MAD, obviously, and she did occasional jobs for them. In the MAD Special in the early Sixties, when they did a fake Sunday Comics section, Wally Wood imitated Pogo, and George Evans did Flash Gordon, and they did a 16-page Sunday Comics section, and she did the coloring for it. Every so often, they would tap her for a coloring job, or a production job, but they never thought of her as somebody who could actually draw, say, a movie parody. And she would have drawn a better parody than a lot of other people they used. She obviously could do likenesses, and, at that time, MAD was paying ten times what a Marvel artist was getting paid for a page. It would have been fascinating to have seen her spend two days drawing a page of comics, as opposed to three hours. I would have loved to have seen what she would have done, because it would have been amazing.

original artist had had a chance to redo it or had risen to the challenge, but somebody had to redo it, and Marie would redo it. And I liked her Hulk. I liked some of the different places she would pop up. But mostly I liked the little caricatures she did on the walls. It was a shame that nobody ever grabbed those all up and published a book of them, because they were some of the cleverest things at the Marvel offices for many years.

Sultan: Yes, they are amazing.

Evanier: I think she was just a very humble lady. Jack Kirby used to praise her as the greatest caricaturist in comics, and also as the greatest colorist, and when Jack went to DC, one of his many battles was that DC’s production department coloring had all these theories about how comics should be colored. They were at odds with Jack’s take on how comics should be colored, and it was sacrilege to question DC’s color policies. DC took pride in its coloring, and they thought they did much better color than Marvel, and were horrified that Jack did not agree with that, and it actually led to a number of very angry disputes. And Jack was always holding Marie up as the person who should be coloring his books. When DC started reprinting the New Gods in color, they came to me and they said, “Do you think we should apply the original color scheme, or should we have the stuff recolored?” You could make an argument either way. There’s an argument to be made for historical fidelity, printing that material the way in which it was printed, but there’s an argument to be made that says, well, look. Jack didn’t like the coloring anyway, and we’re now printing on better paper, and a better process. It wasn’t colored initially in this process, and if it had been, if the colorist at the time had had this palette available, they would have colored it differently, themselves. So why not color it differently? My recommendation, which was not followed, was to hire Marie Severin to color them, because that’s what Jack wanted in the first place. If not her, then someone coloring with her sensibility, her approach. And DC didn’t go for that. I don’t know that Marie was at that moment available for that much work, anyway. But she colored when I did Superman Adventures, I wrote a few of those, and she colored them, and they were quite good. And she had a really smart sense. If I were running a comic book company, I’d hire coloring artists. I would have better things for her to do. But there’s a certain satisfaction seeing the work done well, and she did it well.

Sultan: It is surprising, considering Bill Gaines knew Marie, obviously, from the EC days, with her coloring, and caricatures, and so forth.

Evanier: Yeah, they certainly knew her. She was considered family up there and they loved her, but she was family for production. They didn’t think of her ever as somebody who should be drawing for MAD. I think she should have been drawing for MAD, because she was so good, and if a guy had been doing that same quality of work, probably would have been a regular in MAD. She probably would have had the job that Angelo Torres ended up getting, somebody else to do movie parodies up there. Mort Drucker reached the point when he couldn’t handle as many pages as was needed, and that’s when Angelo Torres began doing half of them. And that could have been Marie. She could have done that as well as anybody. So that’s just a thought I have that I’m a little embarrassed to have.

Some things were not meant to be, though, whether it was Marvelmania or Marie Severin in MAD. The end of Marvelmania was not the end of Marvel fan clubs, though. You can’t keep a good idea down. FOOM was yet to come.

Sultan: Any further things that you can remember with Marie in the Seventies?

Evanier: I’ll mention one other thing… People used to always say, “Marie belongs in MAD magazine.” And she did. She should have been in MAD magazine. And I hate to think it’s true, although it possibly is, that the reason that she wasn’t was that she was a woman. If you noticed, while Bill Gaines was running MAD magazine, they never had a woman artist there. They only had one or two women who ever even wrote for MAD in that period, and one of them was somebody’s girlfriend, and one of them was a woman, I am told, who, since she had an androgynous name, they didn’t realize it was a woman until they bought the article. There’s a lot of prejudice against women, anyway, but there in particular seemed to be one in comedy. Johnny Carson never had a woman writer on The Tonight Show. Bill Maher will not have a woman writer on his show. And, as much

Friends of Ol’ Marvel (FOOM) The demise of Marvelmania left a void in Marvel fandom. In 1973, Stan Lee decided to fill that void by starting a new fan club called “Friends of Ol’ Marvel” or FOOM for short, and he enlisted fan favorite artist Jim Steranko to helm the new club.

In his editorial for the first issue of the fan club magazine, Steranko describes how FOOM came to be, “I dropped in at the Marvel bullpen to rap with Stan Lee about the current comic scene when the subject came up. Stan mentioned that he was thinking seriously about initiating a new Marvel Comics club... it would be Marvel-based, not leased out like the previous 147

not know a single person in Manhattan. So Tony Isabella let me sleep at his place until I found a place of my own. People used to do that back then. Maybe they still do.

one...In the heat of enthusiasm, I volunteered my services as a designer, writer, and comic historian to the cause.”

The FOOM membership kit included a membership card, a gorgeous color poster by Steranko featuring the heroes of the Marvel Universe, 6 decals, and an issue of the fan club magazine, all packed in a cool envelope bearing the face of the Hulk for $2.50. Subscriptions to the magazine could be had for $3.00.

The FOOM magazines were well produced. They featured articles about upcoming comics, interviews with creators, and commentary on current trends in comics, as well as original art. Also included, especially in the earlier issues, were games, puzzles, and cartoons. Each issue typically had a theme or character around which the articles were centered, such as issue #4, which focused on villains and issue #11, which profiled Jack Kirby’s return to Marvel.

Marie was a fixture in the FOOM magazines. She occasionally illustrated features like “My son, the super-hero” and she routinely provided caricatures. She also illustrated a couple of covers for FOOM, including the sixth issue, which featured Jarvis, the Avengers butler, as well as the sixteenth issue, which featured a cutaway diagram of the Marvel offices. (See the interview with David Anthony Kraft below for more on the latter.)

FOOM also offered some merchandise, such as a set of posters reprinting classic Marvel covers and bronze coins featuring images of the Hulk, Spider-Man and Conan, as well as more obscure things like super-hero popsicles.

FOOM enjoyed a good run, lasting over five years. There have been other Marvel fan clubs since, most notably the Wild Agents of Marvel (WAM) formed in 1991, but none that achieved the success of the original three.

Cassell: What year was that?

DAK: Very early in ’74.

Cassell: So Marie was already there.

DAK: Oh, yeah, long since.

Cassell: Do you recall what role she was playing at the time that you got there?

DAK: Well, she was playing the role of helping to ease me into Marvel Comics. [laughs] Imagine, here is me in my teens, I’m in New York City, and I have no idea—It turns out Manhattan is very easy to find your way around in, and I love it—but when you just blow into town on a motorcycle, you do not know anything about it. And she took me out to lunch, and I remember thinking, “My God, if I lose her in this crowd, I’ll never find my way back to Marvel.” [laughter] But it was a very nice thing to do. Anyhow, she was like that. She would just ease people in.

She used humor a lot, which I love. So that’s one of my earliest memories is her taking me out to lunch.

Cassell: That’s great. Somewhere along the way, then, you got involved with the fan club, right?

DAK: Yes, but, actually, before I got involved in the fan club stuff, I also colored some of the Marvel Comics.

Cassell: Oh, really?

DAK: Yes, we were auteurs back then, or at least we liked to think so—so I wanted to not just write The Defenders, but also color it, and she gave me some coloring tips and sort of coached me through it. And at that time, she was—I’m not sure what the title would be, or if there even was a title, but she was basically in charge of handing out the coloring, and checking it over when it came back. And she’d been doing this stuff since EC Comics, so she knew what she was doing. And then I branched out with some of my friends, like Roger Slifer and Ed Hannigan, and we would pitch in overnight sometimes when there was a problem with the regular colorist. Like, I think Slifer and I colored Avengers [note: Avengers #160], and Ed and I colored lots of books together, sometimes under his name, sometimes mine, or both. There’s probably a page on the Internet somewhere with all this stuff. I should stop here to say how coloring worked back then. So totally different.

Stu Schwartberg would take a photostat, which was sort of like a reduced Xerox copy, of the original art, and then you used Doctor Marten’s watercolor dyes, and it was up to you to color each and every bit of each and every page. And sometimes you had to code it, like, if it was a tricky bit of coloring, because the separators were human beings who were cutting this stuff out of overlays, so if it was tricky, you had to colorcode what you were doing, or else the results were horrible.

There’s an issue of The Defenders with a panel that looks like a Three Musketeers candy bar wrapper. I did this beautiful sky. It breaks my heart to this day, that I did not color-code it, because I was early in the process and I didn’t know you had to do that. And it came back and it just has alternating magenta and blue stripes. [laughs] It was, like, “Arrggh!” Because I care-

ONE OF THE KEY contributors to the success of the Marvel fan club FOOM was editor David Anthony Kraft. Kraft is known for his scripting of The Defenders and Savage She-Hulk, as well as founding Comics Interview in 1983, which ran for 150 issues. In this interview, Kraft talks about his experiences with FOOM, Marie, and the Marvel special projects.

Interview with David Anthony Kraft Dewey Cassell: Can you tell me how you came to work for Marvel?

David Anthony Kraft: Yeah, it was cool. I was here in northeast Georgia working for another publisher, and I always intended—in fact, I didn’t just intend, I knew I was going to work for Marvel, but I thought I would have to go and camp on the doorstep. So one day I went down to the office and there was a letter from editor-in-chief Roy Thomas, and he said, “You know, you should really be working for Marvel.” And I couldn’t have agreed more, so I called him on the phone, and we worked out details, and I got on my motorcycle, and two weeks later I was at Marvel. Interesting, though, because I did 148

West Coast, there was no more Atlas. [laughter] I was out there all ready to have my writing career with all these books, only there was no company to give me any work. So I kind of goofed off that summer, and then I went back to Marvel. And I kind of had to get myself going again over there. And that’s around the time that I got on the fan club, on FOOM, because I was looking for any kind of work. And, hey, I stuck with it. I liked it.

fully painted it, and they couldn’t replicate that without the coding, so they just went plop, plop, plop, and this thing that was supposed to look really cool looked awful. But, anyway, Marie was in charge of all that stuff, back then.

Cassell: So, did she hand out all the coloring assignments then?

DAK: Yes. And she would check them over when they came back in.

Cassell: Did you help start FOOM? DAK: No, that was Steranko, actually. Stan was always trying Cassell: So if something came back in like what you’re talking to do fan clubs. If you remember the Merry Marvel Marching about, and it wasn’t what you were hoping for, was there an Society, I don’t know what happened to that, because I was a opportunity to redo it, or were the deadlines so tight—? comic book reader at that time, and I loved the idea of it, but DAK: No, it was done. Everything in those days moved at a in between there and when I was at Marvel, somehow it went lightning pace. It’s so much better today. For instance, I’m away, and FOOM came in its working on the Yi Soon place. And Steranko did the Shin: Warrior and Defender first two issues, with the cool comic book, and not only is graphics that he’s known it colored in Argentina by a for. And I may not have them great colorist—I mean, she in order, but various other uses the computer to make people edited it after him, her coloring look like it’s a including Tony Isabella and painting—but, if you don’t like Duffy Vohland. And then, I something, you can go right don’t know, it was up for in there and fix it. We did not grabs. So I took over with have those luxuries. Usually issue #15. that stuff was done overnight. “This book has gotta go Cassell: So, when you were to the printer tomorrow! Stay putting the thing together, how up all night and color it!” And did it work? How did you enlist, think about coloring an entire like, Marie, for example, to comic with watercolors. contribute to it?

You had to clean your brush DAK: How it worked was, and between each color! We had a I guess, even though Marvel polite way of saying someis now owned by Disney and thing was bad coloring, “Well, is a hundred billion trillion he must have had green on dollar company, it’s pretty the brush.” Because, if you much exactly the same as looked at a comic and it just it was back then, which is a had way too much green in very small, cheap budget. I it, it would be somebody who will have to say, you need to was coloring it in a hurry and adjust for inflation but, even didn’t have time to clean that then, it was a small amount brush totally, go to a different “My Son … the Super-hero” by Stan Lee and Marie of money. The entire editorial color, clean that, go back to Severin, from issue #6 of FOOM. budget to produce that magathe other color. So that was a zine was 750 bucks. [laughs] derogatory phrase. Somebody brought a job in and Marie said, “Ah, he must have had purple Cassell: You’re kidding! on the brush.” That wasn’t really a good thing. But it was all DAK: I’m not kidding. And so you’re faced with a 32-page done overnight. And, once it went to the printers, you couldn’t magazine, and I’m thinking I can’t even pay creators their correct stuff. You didn’t see it again until it was printed. normal Marvel rate. Like, if I want Chris Claremont to write something, I can’t. See, the black-and-whites, which I was Cassell: How did you get into the fan club stuff? also editing, they had better budgets. You got paid this much DAK: That was fairly early on. I had worked at Marvel for about a word, or that much per page, if you were doing comics. But a year, and then Larry Lieber, Stan’s brother, went over to Atlas if I paid one or two people the going rate, the whole budget Comics and phoned one day about five o’clock and said, “You for FOOM would be gone. So I had to be really creative, and should come have a meeting. You should come over here.” So I that’s where I came up with the idea of doing interviews. did. And I had dreams of being Steve Englehart. You know how Mainly it was not a newsstand magazine, it was for hardcore he moved to the West Coast and he had all these Marvel books Marvel subscribers, who all wanted to know what was coming that he was writing? Well, Atlas was like, “You can take all up. I mean, in today’s world everybody takes that for granted these books to the West Coast.” So I did! But when I got to the 149

The complete cover of FOOM #16 featuring a detailed rendition of the entire 1973 Marvel Bullpen 150

in caricature by Marie. Key on page 153.

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And you’d be, like, “Well, wait a minute. I’m doing an Iron Fist story,” or whatever. And then it would be, like, “Everybody, quickly, do Godzilla!” Because it’s on the schedule. And, about two weeks later, they would cancel Godzilla before it ever even came out, and they would put something else, like Planet of the Apes. So when you’re a reader, you’re thinking, “Well, this stuff, it’s measured, and people have some time to do it.” And, that’s not how it was at all. You’d come in with your Iron Fist assignment, and they’d be yelling, “Iron Fist? What the hell?

What’s wrong with you? Where’s Planet of the Apes?” [laughter] It was a madhouse. So I’m not sure exactly why FOOM got canceled, maybe they wanted to launch Marvel Age and make some money from the newsstand sales, but I would assume we were, probably from upstairs’ point of view, not making a lot of money.

because you’ve got the Internet, you used to have Wizard, you’ve got all these magazines. Well, back then there was The Comic Reader, but there was no official organ. So I would interview people, which was great, because I got to talk to Jack Kirby and pretty much everybody else, even the people who didn’t come in to the office, like Jack. But then I would pay a legal secretary who could transcribe really, really, really fast, and I would have her transcribe all those interviews, and then I would edit them into actual print. So that’s how I invented the way to actually produce the magazine. [laughs] For that small amount of money. But the nice thing about Marie is, because she was on staff at Marvel anyway, she would do things to contribute to the magazine during her staff time so that it didn’t eat into the budget, because, again, to pay Marie for a couple of things, there would have been the whole budget. So, in her capacity as Marie Severin, Staff Person, she would actually contribute to the magazine. There’s that super-duper cover I’m so proud of, even today. I’m so damn glad we did that. You know the one, I think it was issue #16, where it shows the whole Marvel bullpen?

Cassell: I hadn’t thought about it that way, but you’re absolutely right. In many respects, it was far more successful than anything else they’ve done.

DAK: I mean, 22 issues, I think it was quarterly or something, if I remember, so if you think about that, that’s a pretty long run.

Cassell: The one that Marie did? It was great!

DAK: Yeah. I commissioned that from her, and, at the time you do these things, you cannot see the future. But now, looking backwards from the future, I’m so glad that I did that, and she did that, because Marvel moved many times after, and there’s been literally hundreds of different staffers, editors, and all, so that captures a snapshot of how Marvel was back then. I mean, it’s so brilliant. That is exactly how the office looked. It’s how each person really looked. And behaved. Like, Duffy Vohland is in that, and, if you notice, he’s in the hallway, and he has his ear to Sol Brodsky’s door. [laughs] And Duffy was sort of a notorious gossip, and he’d love to know what was going on, and so that was totally capturing him in one little caricature. And everybody in there is like that. She’s got everybody in character, in the place they were in the office, doing what they did.

Cassell: You’re absolutely right.

DAK: I had moved back down here when I did the final issue.

There’s a picture of me on a motorcycle on the edge of the Tallulah Gorge waving goodbye.

Cassell: I realize the cover for #16 was a little bit of an anomaly but, ordinarily, would you just approach Marie and say, “Hey, I need an illustration about such-and-such,” and she would go off and…

DAK: Yeah. Sometimes she would have done one. Like, let’s say if something happened in the office and she just couldn’t help herself, she would throw those caricatures out. While you and I were talking, she’d have three of them done. So she might be making fun of somebody in the office over something, and I’d look at that and go, “That’s really cool. Can I use that?” Or sometimes I would take her an article and say, “We’re introducing these new editors,” or—here, I have a great example: the different writer/editors at Marvel at that time. I was the last writer/editor, and, generally, I don’t think anybody knows that now. But we all had our own heading, so each person would talk about the books they were writing and/or editing, and she did little headings for everybody that were representative. She did one for Jack Kirby, for Marv Wolfman, for Len Wein, for Roy Thomas, just for everybody. Here’s what’s funny. She did one for me, and at first I was disappointed. It was basically my face, and she had taken it and cut it apart with scissors, and then she had these random pieces, and they sort of came together as you looked at it, and fitted themselves together at the end to be, like, a little caricature of my face. And I thought, well, everybody got something that really sums up their character, and I just got this crummy cut-up thing. And it took me a while to realize, she nailed me, too. That’s exactly how I work.

And I don’t know how she picked up on that or did that, but I realized later, when I start a project, it’s all random bits and pieces. And I will think, “Well, I have this, I have that,” and it sort of really comes together for me as I go. And this is when I worked in TV, as well, anything, it is how I work. And so, without my knowing it, she nailed me, too. And I’m looking at that and going, “Well, how come there’s not a cool thing

Cassell: So why do you think that FOOM didn’t survive?

DAK: Well, I look at it the other way around. It survived vastly beyond what anybody thought it would survive, I think.

Cassell: Oh, really?

DAK: Consider how short-lived the Merry Marvel Marching Society was, or anything before or since. FOOM was a fan club where people got a poster, and a card, and this and that, and then they also got a magazine. It survived for quite a long time.

And my guess is, nobody actually told me, and, God, I have no idea what the circulation on that thing was, but every so often Jim Galton or the people upstairs would look at the Marvel books and decide, “These books are at the bottom of where we’re making any money, so let’s introduce some new books.”

Usually they would do that about once a week. [laughs] And I’m veering over, here, but when it comes to the black-andwhite magazines, it used to drive people crazy. Tony Isabella was editing black-and-white magazines back then, and Chris Claremont was his assistant, and he’d come in and he’d have a memo from upstairs, and it would say there was going to be a Godzilla black-and-white, but we’re canceling, like, Iron Fist, and we’re going to put this instead. So everybody who’s working on that he’d have to call up and go, “Whoa, stop where you are!”

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floor with no warning. It was like an office chair with a springy back, but the spring, at a certain point, it would just give way, and you’d go, “Ahhhh!” We sent a memo upstairs: “Could we get a new chair?” And do you know what ninth did? They sent down a roll of duct tape. No sh*t.

of me?” And later I’m like, “Wait a minute. That’s me!” So she was good for that. And with Jack Kirby, she just had all these creative things coming out of his brain, because, again, that’s the essence of Jack.

Cassell: I’ve heard before about how she would do these little caricatures in the office. If they didn’t end up in FOOM, what did they do with them?

DAK: Well, I don’t know. I guess sometimes the people she did them of kept them. Maybe she kept them. Maybe some random passerby kept them. I don’t know. But—I don’t know if I should tell this on the record or not, but I’m going to, or you can obscure the name. Because it’s like everything, some people were annoyed by him, and other people thought highly of him.

As for me, I had no particular opinion one way or the other.

I’ll just leave his name out and that’ll solve that. But we were all on the sixth floor, which we liked to call “creative,” and the business stuff for Marvel was all on the ninth floor, which everybody just called “ninth.” And you didn’t really like visits from the ninth floor, or calls, or anything. And there was a head accountant, comptroller, whatever they had up there. And sometimes we would be sitting in chairs, the backs of which were broken, old chairs like you would see Captain America have in World War II. And they’d be broken, and you’re trying to work. And there was a trick chair in the office that we used to trade with each other because nobody really wanted it, and if you leaned back too far in it, the thing just threw you on the

Cassell: You’re kidding!

DAK: I am not kidding. It was like, “Here, you want a new chair? Tape that one up.” Okay, so that guy that was in charge of Ninth, in that department, at a certain point he was out at lunch, I guess, and there’s a lot of traffic, you know, midtown, lunchtime. Nobody obeys the traffic rules, and I love that about Manhattan, but he apparently tried to cross the street between two cars and got his legs crunched at bumper level, like one car crunched him into the other. And he was okay, he just had two broken legs. And I guess they patched him up. Somebody should have sent him duct tape, actually. [laughter] But, anyway, Marie did this caricature that to this day tickles me. She took out a piece of art board, 10” x 15”, the standard size. And she drew a truck roaring away, like for her version of this, and it was, like, the back end of a truck zooming away from you. And she painted it with watercolor and everything. And, in the foreground, she took the guy’s tennis shoes, his actual tennis shoes that he was wearing, and she pinned them on there so that you saw this truck roaring away with this pair of tennis shoes that belonged to the guy upstairs. And nothing else. I mean, the thing just spoke for itself. But, I’ve got to tell you, that tickled so many 153

do. They’d leave that to me, basically. But they’d say, “At some point in the story, they have to fight in front of or inside of this store.” Or be at the Texas State Fair. So the rest of the story was me, but there had better be a scene at the Texas State Fair, damn it. So that was in Sol’s domain.

people on the sixth floor. And that was pinned on a wall or a door down there for a long time. And you can say, “Well, that’s very cruel.” But not really.

Cassell: That’s great.

DAK: In the early days Marvel was more of a… I was going to say “a cohesive organism,” but I can’t really say that because everything was deadline-driven and haphazard, but there weren’t, like, warring departments and things. In the earlier days, everybody would kind of stick together. Later on, things sort of coalesced into different departments and got more bureaucratic, like, “This is the line of demarcation between my department and your department,” stuff like that. And so I pretty much worked for all the departments, but sometimes I would be on one side of this line, and sometimes I would be on the other side of that line. And, for a while, I was in Sol Brodsky’s department. He was the Vice President of Operations. And Marie was over there, at that time, somehow she fell on that side of the line. And I had a freelance contract. This was such a sweet deal. I wasn’t actually on staff like a nine-to-fiver or anything, or even required to come in at all, like an editor. I was totally freelance, but I got an office at Marvel, anyway, because I had to meet with lots of writers and artists and things. And it’s when they were launching Marvel Books, and doing storybooks, and trying to move into the juvenile market. And that’s again when I worked a lot with Marie. And I can’t remember if we did any coloring books together, but a lot of times there would be weird projects. And I did some, there were coloring books shaped like newspaper strips, for example. You know how newspaper strips have three panels across, and they’re a horizontal shape? Well, there’s actual coloring books of the FF and other Marvel characters like that. But then they dramatized the script and included those floppy records they used to do. And there were just all kinds of projects like that. Things for the American Cancer Society. Books for weird things like Sunday editions of newspapers in Texas featuring the X-Men. Being on that side of the line was a very strange, but kind of a fun place to be, and we worked together on a lot of that stuff. And we were not in charge of what we were going to do. Like, Sales might decide, “We’re going to license Crystar, the Crystal Warrior.” Well, you had no say in that. It would just be like when they would say, “You’re doing a Godzilla book,” or whatever. But we worked together on some of those storybooks, stuff like that.

Cassell: Did you and Marie then have to go do some homework on what the Texas State Fair looked like?

DAK: Yeah, and we didn’t have the Internet, so good luck with that. But sometimes they would provide us with material, because they would be the ones setting it up.

Cassell: If you were going to tell people what you think is the thing you most admire about Marie, what would that be?

DAK: Just her—herself. Marie the She. Her work was always great, but she was everything rolled into one. She was incredibly competent. She’d been in comics forever, she could do everything. She worked on very serious, cool stuff. She worked with Stan on Hulk and she worked on Kull. She did that level. She could do the caricatures. She could do the storybooks. But, above it all, she brought a lot of good cheer to the actual office. There are people who can do good work, but they’re kind of surly or whatever, and she was just so the reverse of that. I mean, she made me, when I was new, feel at home, and she would just do that for people. And she always brought laughter to things. So I think of her that way.

It was cool, when I first started, she was in the same room.

The Marvel bullpen had Marv Wolfman at one desk, Marie Severin at one desk, me at one desk, Glynis Wein, who was a colorist and Len Wein’s wife, at one desk, Don McGregor at one desk. That was basically the room. It was so small when I started there. That’s what’s funny. I mean, today it’s like, “Oh, we have security, and we have departments.” But, back then, there was the production room, and the editorial room, and Stan’s office, and then a lot of executive-type stuff. And the British department.

Cassell: I appreciate your recollections about Marie and Marvel.

DAK: I seem to find little angles on things, going back to that time period. We would work until we drop. And, of course, not everybody was on staff. Only a few of us were. There was only Roy, the editor-in-chief of the color books, and he set policy. And he would okay stuff. Like, if you said, for example, “I want to use Doctor Doom,” he would make sure that it didn’t conflict with anything and give you a go-ahead. But he did not look over your shoulder or anything like that at all. He was busy doing higher-level stuff. And the only other two editors there were Don McGregor and me, so every single book passed through our hands. Then you’d go home after work and you had to do your own writing and plotting. So, once you put in your day, and, on the subway, every place is, like, an hour to someplace else, then you would go home and, presumably, eat, and get your laundry done, and do whatever you do in life. And then you’d kind of work half the night on your own thing. So it was a hectic, crazy time. But, looking back on it, I liken it to The Godfather. The Godfather makes the Mafia look nostalgic because they put that beautiful golden light on everything.

And, not to say there weren’t conflict and problems, but when I look back on those years, it’s like that. It has that nostalgic golden light flooding over everything.

Cassell: I remember that. As you said, Crystar was one. There was a Fantastic Four…

DAK: Yeah, it may have been with her, I think I did a Fantastic Four, and a Spidey at the big top, at the circus. Anyway, there’s like a whole unexplored realm of stuff over there that we did together.

Cassell: And then, as you said, like the newspaper supplements, the Spider-Man and the Dallas Cowboys thing.

DAK: Yeah. The Dallas Cowboys, the X-Men at the State Fair of Texas, really offbeat stuff. But that stuff was pre-sold.

Sometimes those things had print runs of, like, a million copies.

Cassell: Oh, wow.

DAK: They would make a deal and then come to us and go, “We have an X-Men book.” And they wouldn’t tell us what to 154

fAnzinEs FANZINES ARE MAGAZINES PUBLISHED by fans, typically dedicated to a genre or character, with varying degrees of professionalism. Marie contributed on several occasions to fanzines, both in the form of interviews and artwork. Some of the more notable ones include: Ragnarok was a fanzine published in the early 1970s by Mark Collins in 5.5 x 8.5 inch format, which lasted for at least three issues.

The second issue, published in 1972, featured an extensive interview with Marie Severin and published drawings and sketches, as well as candid photographs of Marie in the Marvel offices, all behind a great color cover of the Hulk.

The Fans of Central Jersey was a comic book club in New Jersey that published a regular magazine-sized fanzine. The club started in 1976 and lasted about five years. Later issues of the fanzine were very well produced and typically centered around a theme or artist, such as Murphy Anderson or Gene Colan. Issue #13 featured a wonderful interview with Marie Severin (which was reprinted in issue #95 of Alter Ego magazine.) The issue also sported a terrific cover by Marie in Not Brand Echh style.

Comic Crusader, published by Martin Greim, was one of the more successful fanzines, lasting 17 issues. It was well produced, in magazine-sized format, and included artwork by several fan artists who later went on to become professionals. The fanzine also published original “Mr. A” stories by Steve Ditko. Issue #16, published in 1974, featured an interview with Marie Severin accompanied by unpublished alternate cover illustrations of CRAZY #3 and Captain America #125 by Marie.

ABOVE Not Brand Echh style cover by Marie of issue #13 of the fanzine Fans of Central Jersey, published in 1977.

With the permission of Martin Greim, here is the 1974 interview with Marie as it appeared in Comic Crusader #16.

Comic Crusader Interview with Marie Severin Q. Which of the many strips you’ve worked on, did you find the most enjoyable and/or rewarding and why?

A. I always enjoy humor, but in the “adventure” area Kull had material I personally could dive into—if I had a good inker and more experience, I think at the time Doc Strange would have been great fun.

Q. Are you “comfortable” working in a field dominated by men? Are you treated with equal respect?

A. I like it better than a field dominated by women. More and more women are coming into comics, which is good.

Women, I’m sure, will have an effect on comics. As far as respect as an equal goes … if you act like a dope, fellow or gal, you will be treated like a dope.

Q. What are the chances of a female artist making it in the comics business? (Better or worse than the male artist?)

A. In the past no one expected ladies to do comics.

They were usually not trained or geared for it and were exposed usually to cute bunny bodies—then Millie the Model and then Romance comics, if they saw comics at all. Today I know for a fact at Marvel, and I imagine the other companies, it is not considered far-fetched that a woman would be useful. Of course if a Marilyn Monroe applied she would probably get a longer interview than a Gravel Gertie, but if Gertie qualified she’d get the job.

Q. Would you mind “getting political” and tell us what you think about the world and do you have any special causes?

A. I’m not active in any political or local organizations.

I read the papers and get mad at just about the same things everybody else does—vote for different parties all the time—contribute art and money now and then to various causes. I’m not a crusader or a BLAH. Q. Did you find it hard to be accepted as an artist when you first started at Marvel?

A. I had worked for Stan Lee (Timely) in the late Fifties, so when I returned in ‘64 or ‘65 to Stan Lee (Marvel) I was immediately given production and coloring, which I had handled before. As time went on, I became useful in art and also had to become acquainted with the SuperHero stuff, which was new to me. Stan was great in his guidance—then and now the staff at Marvel will give useful criticism. Because of the crash of comics in the Fifties there was a gap of new people coming into comics. Now we have the older people and the younger. The young have new approaches and new ideas … a whole potential of new trends. The older people have the proven techniques and know how and if both learn from the other and the company sees and uses the best of both you have a strong line of sellers. I’d like to add that “old pros” very often have not grown with the times. The ones who have are the ones you still see (or read). That should be fair warning to the young … Keep Your Mind Moving!

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Q. I believe you were the head colorist at EC. Did you have any trouble working with “the guys”?

A. In those days most coloring was so awful that EC people were delighted to see their work get special attention. This was due to their interest in quality—which they thought should be tried—maybe it would sell.

Q. On the subject of coloring, did you use a different method of coloring at EC, as opposed to the way you color at Marvel? I ask because it seems the coloring jobs at EC were more sensitive (and there’s a different look) than at Marvel (generally).

A. There is a distinct difference in color (or should be) for every subject matter. You say EC color was more sensitive—maybe you are nostalgic—or maybe you like EC stories better. Anyway yesterday’s comics and today’s comics are comic books because they are colored. The same artists have to approach the look differently. For a black-and-white they strive for the illustrative look by completing the work in the inking. Much of comics (the colored ones) would look very open without color. So much of the mood in color comics can be influenced by the colorist and they can’t do much for a job that is poorly inked (they also can foul up some work with thoughtless color). What I’m trying to say is a colorist should add as much as they can to the story telling.

Q. Do you enjoy your job and why?

A. Well I guess I’m not unhappy. I’ve been there 9 or 10 years. Why? The work on the whole is what I like to do.

No job is heaven. You have to work but I’ve found they pay me for doing what I like and most of the staff is insane.

Q. Do you feel your “creativity” is hampered by the fastpaced work schedules?

A. Depends. Sometimes the schedule is the only thing that spurs you on—or it can hold you back because of time on adding that extra thought which makes the job more gratifying. Some artists (writers) are gifted with a direct, forceful grasp of the story and work faster.

Others are specialists which is so hard if you have no real interest in the subject (I hate drawing tanks and modern buildings). All things considered schedules are a fact, a necessity. If you have a hang up on a story, or are in love with it, are under too much pressure by taking on more work than you can handle, then schedules are hideous.

TOP The gang from Not Brand Echh drawn

by Marie in 1997. Courtesy Jim McPherson.

BOTTOM 1969 Cover of Alter Ego #10 featuring a portrait of Gil Kane by Marie.

Q. Do you prefer the dramatic-type art or the funny stuff you did for “Not-Brand-Ecch?”

A. It’s like a two-sided coin. After a long stretch of doing one, it’s nice to do the other.

Q. Do you have any authority in helping produce a book?

A. If a situation arises on a job I will suggest changes or additions to the editor or art director or writer—and it 156

is discussed—in final decisions on anything big the editor or art director must evaluate whether you’re nuts or have added a good thought. At Marvel I think they try to use the best of people’s talents and encourage team work. In a way, you have as much authority as your talent provides.

3. Rob a bank and not get caught.

4. Have time to sculpture.

Q. Is there a particular reason why you and your brother (John Severin) are not working on King Kull any longer?

A. John Severin and I were devoting more time than we at Marvel could afford. We quit and Marvel understood.

Q. What are your favorite comic artists and who or what influences you the most?

A. Me!

Q. What is your opinion of the new talent in the comics field? (Guys like Wrightson, Mayerik, Ploog, Weiss, Staton, and Starlin, etc.)

A. They are bright, new, good and have faults just like us old pros did and do.

Q. Do you have any interests in the fine arts (art, sculpture, music, etc.) and what are they and how do you think they have influenced you?

A. That depends. Museum stuff old and new, handy-crafts, whatever, can be considered fine arts by some—well I’m getting off here—let’s say if I had the money and space, my home would look like a Flea Market to some. My interests are varied, which is valuable to a comic book person I think, because you must be aware and visualize all kinds of atmospheres and situations.

Imagination is as important as skill. The development of imagination (if you have the gift or a little present to begin with) is dependent on how much you were and are able to cultivate. I was lucky to have an artistic family (understanding), strict schooling (forced to learn things I didn’t think valuable then), availability ABOVE Photo of Marie at the 1971 of books (all kinds), movies (as many as New York Comic Art Convention allowance allowed), and not too much from Fantastic Fanzine Special #2. of anything.

Q. Any comments on the black-and-white line Marvel is producing?

A. As I said before, artists and writers must approach stories differently. They don’t use color and they don’t have the Comics Code. In many ways it is adult.

Color is attractive to young audiences, but wouldn’t it be great to have all illustrated stories printed in full color as many European books do.

Q. I’d like your opinion of The Academy of Comic Book Art. A. ACBA has brought together at meetings many people who would never have occasion to meet on a social-able basis for discussion of work, problems, and mutual awareness. I hope ACBA continues as an Academy to improve the industries image and standards.

Q. Finally, almost, I’d like some background on yourself. Where you grew up, your parents, education, your brother, relationships, and anything you’re dying to tell someone.

A. I grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. I was very surprised growing up, that outside of the family: 1. Not everybody draws …what do they do with themselves?

2. That girls do not get dirty.

3. Nor do they get a Lone Ranger doll for Christmas.

4. It was considered cute for a girl to work in comic books.

5. It is very good to have friends outside of work as well as in. What could be more boring than to discuss in all your free time what you do at work.

I have nothing else to tell anyone. I express enough in the funnies.

Q. What is your opinion of the undergrounds? Also would you do work for “them” if the chance arose?

A. “If I had a chance”—I haven’t the time, and above ground comics censorship doesn’t bother me. Some undergrounds are really funny and some I really don’t understand.

Q. What is your opinion of comic fandom? Any efforts worth noting?

A. Depends on the fan. I wouldn’t be answering this interview if I were against fandom, but please note some fans treat comic people like movie stars, which is dopey. Some come on like thieves, but I like the ones who adore me … at a distance.

Q. If you had your choice of strips, which would you like to work on?

A. Tarzan—Prince Valiant—Donald Duck.

Q. How do you want to be remembered (now or later)?

A. Okay—As that talented, stunning lady—who no one wanted to die … because she was so wonderful!

Q. Which job(s) do you enjoy and dislike?

A. The most desirable job should offer a challenge—let you show off a bit and pay well.

Q. Are there any projects yet undone you’d like to do?

A. Yes! 1. Finish this interview.

2. I would have liked to have brought Kull to its conclusion— and to have given Sub-Mariner more time.

As Marie noted, memories of comic books and fan clubs tend to make collectors nostalgic. It all stems from our childhood. And for a time, Marie contributed to comics made especially for children.

157

As the average age of the comic book reader increased, the number of comics suitable for children decreased. But Marvel continued to offer some comics targeted specifically at younger kids.

With her straightforward style and gift for caricature, Marie was an obvious choice to bring the Marvel Age to a new generation.

Among the more successful licensed properties that Marvel published was ALF, based on the comedy television series that ran from 1986 to 1990 about an Alien Life Form (ALF) living with a human family. The comic book was launched in 1987, initially under the Star Comics imprint (although it was not reflected on the cover), and it lasted for 50 issues and several specials. The stories were loosely based on the television series, although some of the details varied. Some stories parodied mainstream Marvel characters. Marie inked almost every issue of ALF over Dave Manak’s pencils. She also colored about two thirds of the issues.

KiD sTuff DURING THE MID-1980S, Marvel launched several new comic books for younger readers, many of which were licensed properties. Although it was more expensive to use a licensed property, you had the advantage of instant character recognition, which was important when trying to draw new fans into the flock. Fewer kids were reading comics, so you had to find new ways to leverage the competition—television.

Some of the new comics were branded under a new Marvel imprint, Star Comics. Star Comics was launched in 1984 specifically to publish comic books for younger children. Titles in the Star Comics line included properties from Jim Henson and George Lucas.

“Jim Henson’s Muppet Babies” was an animated television show that first aired in 1984 and lasted for seven seasons. The show depicted the classic Muppet characters as children living in a nursery under the care of a Nanny, the only recurring human character. The Muppets included were Kermit, Miss Piggy, Fozzie, Animal, Rowlf, Scooter and Gonzo, with others making periodic appearances. Scooter’s twin sister Skeeter was a new character who appeared only in this show. Marvel introduced Muppet Babies in 1985 and Marie Severin penciled, inked, and colored numerous issues in this series, and illustrated many of the covers. The characters lent themselves well to Marie’s style of drawing and her sense of humor. Among her non-super-hero work, Muppet Babies is a favorite with many fans and pros, among them John Romita. (See the Romita interview in the Heroes section.) Marie also illustrated the first issue of Fraggle Rock, which was based on the original live action “muppet” television series created by Jim Henson for HBO. The Star Comics line also included titles based on the classic science-fiction epic, Star Wars by George Lucas. The Ewoks debuted in the same time period as the Muppet comics and Droids was released the following year. The former title featured the cute, furry creatures from the film Return of the Jedi and the latter starred C3PO and R2D2. Both the Ewoks and Droids were appearing in their own animated television series at the time. Marie Severin contributed to both comic book titles, as did John Romita. (Marie had previously contributed to the Star Wars comics Marvel published in the early 1980s.)

Other Star Comics titles that Marie was involved in include Thundercats and Misty. Star Comics lasted until 1988, at which time Marvel absorbed some of the titles into their mainstream publishing. However, Marvel continued to pursue new licensed properties for comics.

A history of Mighty Mouse by Marie from issue #2.

Mighty Mouse comics have been published by a variety of companies, most notably St. John, Dell, and Ned Pines. Marvel introduced their version of the super-powered rodent in 1990.

Marie inked several different pencilers on this series, which often parodied popular culture and other comic book stories, such as “The Dark Knight Returns,” “Crisis on Infinite Earths,” and the “Torment” storyline that launched the new Spider-Man title by Todd McFarlane. Marie inked all ten issues in the series.

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Marvel also published a comic book based on the hit television series “The A-Team” in 1984, although it only lasted three issues.

Marie co-plotted, penciled and colored the debut issue.

Marie also illustrated the Marvel Comics adaptation of the Disney motion picture Dragonslayer in 1981.

Peter MacNicol and Sir Ralph Richardson starred in the fantasy story in which, as described by IMDb, “A King has made a pact with a dragon where he sacrifices virgins to it, and the dragon leaves his kingdom alone. An old wizard, and his keen young apprentice volunteer to kill the dragon and attempt to save the next virgin in line—the King’s own daughter.” The same story was printed as a two-issue comic book adaptation, a Marvel Illustrated Book and in issue #20 of the magazine Marvel Super Special, all in the same year.

The use of licensed properties was obviously a hit-or-miss proposition, and it would seem that the experiment to draw in younger readers was not entirely successful, since circulation has continued to decline. However, the licensed properties did provide an opportunity to broaden the stories that could be told in Marvel comics, and it is clear that at least some found an audience with younger—and older— readers who still remember them fondly today.

TOP Panel from page 2 of issue #11 featuring the Muppet Babies in action courtesy of Marie.

ABOVE “Dr. Doom Cracks Up” from issue #8 of Pizzazz magazine, illustrated by Marie and published in May 1978.

Courtesy of Mike Collins.

There was one particular Marvel publication targeted at older kids that was not a licensed property.

In 1977, Marvel launched Pizzazz magazine, intended to compete with Scholastic Press’ highly successful magazine Dynamite. The focus of the magazine was popular culture, including celebrities, music, television, and movies that appealed to youth. Topics featured in the magazine included Meat Loaf, Battlestar Gallactica, and the films Grease, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Superman. The magazine also included a serialized Star Wars comic that is noteworthy because it was the first original Star Wars material following the movie. Marie illustrated several articles in Pizzazz, including “Doctor Strange’s Hypnotism Lesson” and “Top Secret Intelligence Tests Run on the Hulk!” She also colored some of the Star Wars serialized comics. The magazine lasted 16 issues.

Ironically, Marie also had some art appearing in Dynamite, prior to the start of Pizzazz.

The secret to licensed properties is that the characters in the comics must look just like the ones appearing on television. Marie’s exceptional ability at caricature made her a natural choice to ensure the finished product would be recognizable. But this was just one of the ways in which Marie found use for her talent for caricature, as noted in the next chapter.

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Marie possesses the remarkable ability to capture the true character of a person—not just their appearance, but their personality as well—in caricature. As Roy Thomas put it, “She could see through to the essence of a person.” And she does it with such rapidity and ease that it makes one wonder.

What does she see that the rest of us don’t?

For Fun

Marie loved to draw caricatures for fun. It didn’t require much of an excuse or occasion for her to break out the pencil and start drawing. She had the uncanny ability to find humor in almost any circumstances. Here are some examples of the caricatures that Marie did for her friends, peers, and fans.

When she was younger, Marie used to love to write letters. She wrote regularly to her friends Jean and Eleanor, and the letters frequently included a little drawing on the letter (or a big drawing included with the letter or a drawing on the outside of the envelope.) Quite often, the caricatures were a parody of something Jean or Eleanor had just told Marie the last time they talked. One showed Eleanor, wearing her habit and crying at the news that nuns don’t dress up for Halloween. Another depicts Jean sitting at her teacher’s desk, as a child (looking a bit like a young Marie) gives her a bottle of wine and Jean says, “Thank you dear .. now you’re getting the idea.”

Her peers at work were a constant source of new material for Marie’s caricatures. In 1953, Marie drew caricatures of each of the gang for the EC Christmas party, including Jack Davis decked out in a Confederate solider uniform and Bill Gaines dozing at his desk. In the 1960s, one of the caricatures, drawn on Marvel stationery, depicted Flo Steinberg, prostrate and bleeding, skewered by a giant thumb tack. Flo tells how it came about, “I think I refused to order more ‘push pins’ for the Bullpen. (My job was to order as little as possible.)”

An article about Marvel Comics appeared in the September 16, 1971, issue of Rolling Stone magazine. The cover featured a drawing of the Hulk by Herb Trimpe and the article, written by former Marvel staffer Robin Green, included colorful comments by Stan Lee, Herb Trimpe, Flo Steinberg, Roy Thomas, Jim Steranko, and Marie Severin. When asked about the cartoons she did of her co-workers, Marie said, “You can dearly love people, but they sometimes become awful pests and you cannot verbally assault them because they’ll never forgive you.

But a picture, they are so flattered that you took the time to do it, they don’t realize that you are getting rid of this anger.

Comic book artists are always excreting all this stuff all over the place, and thank goodness. We’re like Peter Pan. We refuse to grown up but we get paid for it. Which is fortunate. We’re channeling all this immaturity into something instead of standing on street corners making obscene gestures.”

Even fans were occasionally the recipient of a caricature by Marie. Behind schedule on completing a commission for Craig Rogers in 2003, Marie sent him a caricature of herself giving Daredevil a peck on the cheek, as Daredevil wears a sour expression and says, “You smell late.” Craig treasures the caricature as much as the commission (which he received the following year.)

CARiCATuREs MARIE HAS BEEN DRAWING caricatures since she was a young child, as evident from the testimony of her brother John in the earlier section about Home. “Ri-ri” continued to draw caricatures for her friends growing up, often sending them through the mail and adorning the envelopes. The practice persisted throughout her careers at both EC and Marvel, to the delight of her co-workers. She even graced her fans with an occasion caricature as well.

Marie’s caricatures fall into one of two categories: those she did for fun—for friends and her peers at work—and those she did in the comic books she drew. Both reflect the incredible insight and delightful sense of humor that defines Marie.

In Comics The caricatures that Marie drew for the comics were integrated, to varying degrees, into the stories themselves.

Although the text of the story typically provided additional clues as to the identity of the caricatures, Marie typically did such a recognizable job of drawing them that such identifi-

1996 Happy Anniversary card to Eileen and Roberto, rendered in caricature as Wonder Woman and Superman by “Marie the Severin.”

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Caricatures in comics by Marie.

TOP Caricature of Marie and Don McGregor from Planet of the Apes #6. MIDDLE LEFT Caricature of Gary Friedrich from the story “Midnight in the Wax Museum” in Tower of Shadows #3. MIDDLE CENTER Caricature of Len Wein from framing sequence in Giant-Size Chillers #3.

MIDDLE RIGHT Caricature of George Perez from letters page of Logan’s Run #2. BOTTOM Caricature of Sol Brodsky from Marvel Age #22. cation was superfluous. Here are just a few of the many instances in which Marie did caricatures that appeared in Marvel comics.

One of her earliest, and best, caricatures in comics was a humorous backup feature in The Amazing Spider-Man Annual #5, published in 1968. The three-page story, written

by Stan Lee and penciled by Marie, is entitled “Here We Go A-Plotting.” It depicts Stan, Larry Lieber, and John Romita in an antic-filled story conference, trying to come up with an idea for The Amazing Spider-Man newspaper strip.

Amazing Adventures #16 featuring the Beast, published in 1972 , recounts the story of Len and Glynis Wein, Steve Englehart, and Gerry Conway on their way to celebrate Halloween in Rutland, Vermont, when they encounter the newly-furry blue Hank McCoy. Bob Brown drew most of the story, but the caricatures of the Marvel staffers, along with Roy and Jean Thomas and legendary fan Tom Fagan, were done by Marie.

Giant-Size Chillers #3, published in 1975, was a collection of reprints from Chamber of Darkness, Tower of Shadows, and Monsters on the Prowl, except for a framing sequence that featured caricatures of Len Wein and Tony Isabella introducing the stories. The framing sequence was drawn by Marie with her usual humor and the likenesses of the Marvel staffers was dead on (pun intended, since Isabella bludgeons Wein with a typewriter at the end.)

The letters page in issue #2 of Logan’s Run, published in 1976, featured an essay by writer David Anthony Kraft (since it was too early to have received letters about the first issue).

The essay was accompanied by caricatures of Kraft and artist George Perez, drawn by Marie. (The facing page featured an advertisement for CRAZY magazine with an image of the Hulk, also drawn by Marie.)

On a more serious note, issue #22 of Marvel Age featured a tribute to Sol Brodsky, who passed away in 1984. Marie did a caricature of Brodsky for the editorial page.

And finally, proving turnabout is fair play, Marie Severin appears in issue #15 of Ms. Marvel, illustrated by Jim Mooney.

Marie appears as herself, working as an artist for Woman

magazine (for which Ms. Marvel’s alter ego Carol Danvers is the editor.)

Whatever the circumstances, a caricature by Marie was always a welcome sight. They seemed to flow naturally from her, almost effortlessly, and yet evoking a smile from the recipient, even if you were the brunt of the joke. They were a very special part of the legacy that Marie left behind, everywhere she went.

And so, we have come full circle. Home again. Retired after a lengthy and distinguished career in comics, Marie Severin finally gets a well deserved rest. Well, not exactly.

161

Not Brand Echh style flyer for the 1995 Dallas Fantasy Fair by Marie. This image originally appeared as a Marvel Comics advertisement in the 1982 and 1983 Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide. Courtesy of Linda Fite.

162

7 Home Again “Retirement” for Marie Severin did not translate into sitting on the couch. Marie continued to remain active in the field of comics in a variety of ways, including contributing to sketch card sets, attending comic book conventions, and doing commissions for fans.

ters and some full figure cards (which was quite a feat on a trading card!) She also drew a few Not Brand Echh cards and even ones of Stan Lee. Collectors will also find “uncut” sketchagraph cards that Marie did later, often at conventions.

Marvel Legends

In 2001, Topps won the license to produce Marvel trading cards and released the Marvel Legends set, with randomly inserted sketch cards called “Custom Covers.” In 2003, they produced a set focused entirely on the Incredible Hulk, using the same type of sketch cards. Marie Severin was one of the artists who drew sketch cards for the Hulk set.

Most of the cards Marie did for this set were head sketches and all were of the Hulk, making it difficult to have each one be entirely unique. There were less of them, though—only one in every twenty boxes—making them more rare.

The artists did not get paid much to do the sketch and autograph cards. (George Tuska recalled it was only about $1 per autograph and $2 per sketch card for the Marvel Silver Age set.) However, because they were small, they could be done fairly quickly, and it provided a brief diversion for Marie during her “retirement.”

Sketch Cards Like many other artists, Marie was asked to contribute to various trading card sets, most notably the Marvel Silver Age and Marvel Legends.

Marvel Silver Age In 1998, Fleer/Skybox produced the Marvel Silver Age card set, which included randomly inserted “sketchagraph” cards and autograph cards by some of the best Marvel artists from the Silver Age of comics (as well as a few newer artists).

Contributors included John Romita, Gene Colan, George Tuska, Dick Ayers, and Marie Severin. Instead of a photograph, Marie’s autograph card featured a caricature of her above her signature. For the skechagraphs, Marie penciled many different characters, including Doctor Strange, the Hulk, the Avengers, Thor, the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and the X-Men, among others. Marie attempted to make each card unique and, unlike most other artists, she drew a tremendous variety of charac-

Conventions and Commissions Along with many of her peers, Marie attended and supported various comic book conventions over the years. She attended both the 1975 and 1976 Marvel Comics Conventions held in New York. She also attended the “Women in Comics” conven-

2003 Topps Marvel Legends “Custom Covers” sketch cards of the Hulk by Marie.

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tion in 1978, organized by the Delaware Valley Comicart Consortium (DVCC), an organization of fans formed to conduct “activities to promote an appreciation of the comic book form,” as co-founder Rich Greene described it. Marie Severin was a guest of honor at the convention and drew the cover for the convention program, depicting dozens of female characters in comics. She also donated a gorgeous piece of Kull artwork (previously used in FOOM) for the poster advertising the 1977 Comic Art Benefit Auction at the Chicago Comicon.

Marie has also been the recipient of numerous awards. The Academy of Comic Book Arts bestowed the Shazam Award for Best Penciller (Humor Division) on Marie in 1974. She received the Inkpot Award at the San Diego Comic Con in 1988. In July 2000, Marie went back to the San Diego Comic Con as part of a 50th anniversary EC Reunion that included Al Feldstein, Bill Elder, Jack Davis, Angelo Torres, Jack Kamen, and Al Williamson, among others. She returned again to the Comic Con the following year to receive the Will Eisner Hall of Fame award.

Marie also attended smaller conventions. Jeff Harnett, friend and fan of Marie, recalls one such local show, “A comic shop in my area holds an annual Christmas charity auction to benefit under privileged children and families.

Some artists, writers and creators in the medium are asked to attend to help sell more raffle tickets for this wonderful cause. I asked Marie and she immediately said ‘Yes’. When the e-mails and flyers went out to advertise this event (listing auction items and the guest list ) it read: ‘The First Lady of Comics’ Marie Severin will be attending. Marie was truly touched by the number of people who told her they had come just to see her. The night of the event Marie spent countless hours doing free sketches of all the Marvel super-heroes for

young and older fans alike. Everyone seemed fascinated with all her stories of the early days at Marvel and being a woman in a field dominated by men.”

Attending conventions provided its own set of challenges. Marie is a very generous person, and was unfortunately taken advantage of by a few people at earlier shows, who turned around and simply sold her artwork for profit. Once she learned the ropes, Marie helped out other artists, like George Tuska, who were new to the convention circuit, to make sure they did not undervalue their artwork. In spite of the challenges, Marie enjoyed attending conventions, especially if she could go with friends like Jean Davenport and Ramona Fradon. (See their interviews in the sections Home and The First Lady of Comics.)

Marie also drew commissions for fans, although at times it was difficult for her to keep up with the demand. It might take her a while, but fans were typically thrilled with the level of detail she put into the finished product. Jeff Harnett recalls his commission experience with Marie, “I first called Marie Severin in 2004 as a fanboy/art collector expressing my admiration for her body of work. Over time we became good friends and in 2005 I requested a Doctor Strange pencil and ink commission. That May, Marie called me and asked if she could bring it to me in person. When she arrived, she proudly held up this beautiful painting which was way beyond what I had originally inquired about.

Upon asking for her fee, Marie said ‘I do not charge my friends’, and would not accept my offers. Instead I was able to convince her to have lunch with me at a local pub.

Marie immediately asked the waitress ‘What cold beer do you have on tap?’ While having our meal, Marie talked about Stan Lee’s charisma, Colan and Sinnott’s talents, Kirby’s epic stature and Buscema’s incredible skills.

Marie also talked about getting comfortable with the Marvel

Fleer/Skybox Marvel Silver Age sketchagraph cards by Marie.

TOP Spidey takes a break. BOTTOM LEFT Self-portrait of Marie.

BOTTOM RIGHT Full figure sketchagraph card of the Hulk. Courtesy of Jeff Sharpe.

164

Bullpen in the early days being ‘The Boys Club’, and it seemed okay as this 75-year-old finished off her beer. When she left to go home, I realized my painting was special but our time together was priceless.”

Marie also did commissioned drawings for special occasions. She drew the invitation to her friend Jean Davenport’s 80th birthday party. (Note the cake on fire in the background.)

She also painted the cover for issue #1258 of Comics Buyers Guide, which was a tribute to Stan Lee on his 75th birthday, surrounded by the heroes of the Marvel Universe (and a few DC ones), all done in Not Brand Echh style.

Marie is no longer attending conventions or doing any commissions. But she has left fans with a wonderful legacy of her artistic talent and sense of humor, evident in the body of work, professional and commissioned, that she drew over the years.

TOP LEFT Marie Severin cover to the 1978 “Women in Comics” Convention sponsored by the Delaware Valley Comicart Consortium. TOP RIGHT Photo of Flo Steinberg and Marie from a “Women in Comics” panel at the 1974 Comic Art Convention in New York.

BOTTOM LEFT 1996 Sub-Mariner commission drawing by Marie. Commission courtesy of Jerry Boyd.

Conclusion As the saying goes, “All good things must come to an end,” and so must this tome about Marie Severin. I am certain that, in spite of my best efforts, I have left something out or gotten something wrong, and so I beg the readers’ indulgence for any oversights or errors. I hope the finished product is a faithful and worthy tribute to Marie, although I can hear her saying now, “They all talk about me like I’m dead!” Long live the “mirthful mistress of comics” and long live her legacy of art and humor for fans to enjoy for generations to come.

Make Mine Marvel Marie! ‘Nuff said.

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Index of credits THIS LISTING IS A compilation from various sources, some of which were not complete. It does not include advertising or promotional illustrations, or her fanzine and non-comics work. So, while this may not be an entirely comprehensive list of Marie’s credits, it should provide those new to her artwork with a place to start, and those completist fans with something unexpected to search for.

PEnCilinG AnD inKinG (inTERiOR) THIS LISTING INCLUDES ISSUES in which Marie was not the primary artist, but provided caricatures or alterations. The 1-2 page Timely/Atlas text pieces for which Marie provided illustrations often appeared in more than one title. Comics to which Marie has contributed have been translated and/or distributed in numerous other countries, including Norway, Mexico, Italy, France, Canada, Australia, and the UK. Many of the comics to which Marie has contributed have been reprinted in Marvel Essentials, Masterworks, and/or Treasury Editions, which are not included in this list.

Year(s)

Pencils Inks/Both

1975

b

31

1998

b

DC

9-11 - The World’s Finest Comic Book Writers & Artists Tell Stories to 2 Remember

2002

b

DC

Batman Black and White

2002

b

DC

The Big Book of Bad

1998

b

DC

The Big Book of Losers

1997

b

DC

The Big Book of Martyrs

1997

b

DC

The Big Book of Scandal

1997

b

DC

The Big Book of the ‘70s

2000

b

DC

The Big Book of the Weird Wild West

1998

b

DC

Bizarro Comics

2003

I

DC

Fanboy

4

1999

b

DC

Looney Tunes

100

2003

b

EC

Crime Suspenstories

27

1955

b

Eclipse

Mr. Monster’s Super Duper Special

2

1986

b

Federal The Story of Checks Reserve Bank

1958

p

G.T. Labs

Dignigying Science

2003

b

Harvey

Muppet Babies

1994

b

Last Gasp

Strip AIDS U.S.A.

1988

b

Last Gasp

Wimmen’s Comix

10

1985

b

Marvel

2099 Unlimited

6

1994

b

Marvel

ALF

1-18,20-38,40-50

1988-1992

I

Marvel

ALF Annual

1-3

1988, 1989, 1990 I

Company

Title

Big Apple

Big Apple Comix

Claypool

Soulsearchers and Company

Issue(s)

2

6

166

Company

Title

Issue(s)

Year(s)

Pencils Inks/Both

Marvel

ALF Comics Magazine

1

1988

I

Marvel

ALF Holiday Special

1-2

1989, 1990

I

Marvel

ALF Spring Special

1

1989

I

Marvel

The A-Team

1

1984

p

Marvel

Amazing Adventures

16

1973

p

Marvel

The Amazing Spider-Man

195

1979

I

Marvel

The Amazing Spider-Man Annual

5

1968

p

Marvel

Astonishing Tales

20

1973

p

Marvel

The Avengers

57,218

1968,1982

b

Marvel

Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey

1

1991

I

Marvel

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Comic Book

4-7,9-10,12

1992

I

Marvel

Captain America

257,440

1981, 1995

I

Marvel

The Cat

1-2

1972-1973

p

Marvel

Chamber of Darkness

2

1969

p

Marvel

Conan Classic

3,7

1994

b

Marvel

Conan the Barbarian

10

1971

p

Marvel

Conan the King

20

1984

I

Marvel

Coneheads

1-4

1994

I

Marvel

CRAZY Magazine

11,69,70,73,75,78,79

1975-1981

b

Marvel

Damage Control

4

1990

I

Marvel

Daredevil

340

1995

I

Marvel

The Deadly Hands of Kung Fu

16,22,27

1975,1976

b

Marvel

The Defenders

127

1984

b

Marvel

Doc Savage

4

1976

p

Marvel

Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme

78,79

1995

p

Marvel

Dragonslayer

1-2

1981

p

Marvel

Epic Illustrated

9,11-13

1981-1982

I

Marvel

The Ewoks

1

1985

I

Marvel

Fallen Angels

3

1987

p

Marvel

Fantastic Four Annual

12

1977

I

Marvel

Fraggle Rock

1

1985

b

Marvel

Francis, Brother of the Universe

1

1980

I

Marvel

G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero

28

1984

p

Marvel

Giant-Size Chillers

3

1975

b

Marvel

Giant-Size Hulk

1

1975

p

Marvel

Haunt of Horror

2

1974

b

Marvel

Howard the Duck (1976 series)

16

1977

b

Marvel

Howard the Duck (1979 series)

9

1981

b

Marvel

Hulk magazine

10,25

1978,1981

b

Marvel

The Incredible Hulk

102-1 06,190,260,354,358-367

1968, 1975,1981, b 1989-1990

Marvel

The Incredible Hulk Special

1,4

1968, 1972

p

Marvel

Iron Man

82-85, 159-160

1976,1982

b

Marvel

Ka-Zar the Savage

32

1984

b

Marvel

Kid Colt Outlaw

133,172,226

1967, 1973, 1978 p

Marvel

Kull and the Barbarians

1

1975

p

Marvel

Kull the Conqueror

2-10

1971-1973

p

Marvel

Marvel Comics Super Special (Dragonslayer)

20

1981

p

Marvel

Marvel: Heroes & Legends

1

1996

b

167

Year(s)

Pencils Inks/Both

1993

b

1975

b

22

1980

b

Marvel Super-Heroes

12

1993

p

Marvel Team-Up

74

1978

I

Marvel

Marvel Treasury Edition

2,5-6,12

1974-1976

b

Marvel

Marvel Two-In-One

23

1977

p

Marvel

Midnight Sons Unlimited

6-7

1994

b

Marvel

Mighty Mouse

1-10

1990-1991

I

Marvel

Monsters on the Prowl

16

1972

I

Marvel

Moon Knight

27

1983

b

Marvel

Moon Knight Special

1

1992

b

Marvel

Muppet Babies

1-6,10

1985-1986

b

Marvel

The New Warriors Annual

1

1991

I

Marvel

Not Brand Echh

1-13

1967-1969

b

Marvel

Power Man

35

1976

p

Marvel

Power Man and Iron Fist

60

1979

b

Marvel

Psi-Force

3

1987

I

Marvel

Rampaging Hulk magazine

8,9

1978

b

Marvel

Red Sonja

8

1985

I

Marvel

Sergio Aragonés Massacres Marvel

1

1996

I

Marvel

Smurfs

1

1982

I

Marvel

The Spectacular Spider-Man

45,47-48,51,54

1980-1981

b

Marvel

The Spectacular Spider-Man Annual

3,11

1981, 1991

b

Marvel

Spider-Man and the Dallas Cowboys

1983

p

Marvel

Spoof

1-5

1970, 1972-1973

p

Marvel

Star Trek

13

1981

I

Marvel

Star Wars

41

1980

b

Marvel

Strange Tales

153-160

1967

b

Marvel

Sub-Mariner

9,12-19,21-23,44-45

1969-1972

p

Marvel

Supernatural Thrillers (It!)

1

Tales to Astonish

14,30,92-101

Marvel

Thor

296,306,308

1972 1960,1962,19671968 1980-1981

p

Marvel Marvel

Thundercats

13

1987

I

Marvel

Toxic Crusaders

1,3,6,7

1992

b

Marvel

Transformers: Generation 2

3

1994

I

Marvel

What If? (1977 series)

32,34

1982

b

Marvel

What If...? (1989 series)

17

1990

I

Marvel

What The—?!

16,18,21,25,26

1992-1993

b

Marvel Books

Dragonslayer TPB

1981

p

Random House

X-Men Night of the Sentinels

1993

b

Timely/Atlas

Astonishing

54

1956

b

Timely/Atlas

Dexter the Demon

7

1957

b

Timely/Atlas

Homer, the Happy Ghost

12-18

1957-1958

b

Timely/Atlas

Journey Into Mystery

50,74

1959,1961

b

Timely/Atlas

Journey Into Unknown Worlds

50,51

1956

b

Timely/Atlas

Kathy

6

1960

b

Timely/Atlas

Marines in Battle

21

1958

b

Company

Title

Issue(s)

Marvel

Marvel Holiday Special

Marvel

Marvel Premiere

24

Marvel

Marvel Preview

Marvel Marvel

168

p b

Company

Title

Issue(s)

Year(s)

Pencils Inks/Both

Timely/Atlas

Melvin the Monster

3-5

1956-1957

b

Timely/Atlas

Mystery Tales

50

1957

b

Timely/Atlas

Mystical Tales

4

1956

b

Timely/Atlas

Tales of Justice

66

1957

b

Timely/Atlas

Uncanny Tales

54

1957

b

Timely/Atlas

Willie the Wiseguy

1

1957

b

Timely/Atlas

World Of Mystery

7

1957

b

COVERs Company Title

Issue(s)

Year(s)

Pencils Inks/Both

Marvel

The A-Team

1

1984

I

Marvel

ALF

1-5

1988

I

Marvel

Amazing Adventures (1970 series)

38

1976

b

Marvel

Amazing Adventures (1979 series)

10

1980

b

Marvel

The Amazing Spider-Man

82

1970

b

Marvel

Arrgh!

1-2

1974-1975

b

Marvel

Astonishing Tales

1,3,5,8

1970-1971

b

Marvel

The Avengers

73,82

1970

p

Marvel

Beware

7

1974

b

Marvel

Captain America

115,124-125,127-128,130134,256

1969-1971,1981

b

Marvel

Captain America Annual

1

1971

p

Marvel

Captain Marvel

10,15

1969

p

Marvel

The Cat

1

1972

p

Marvel

Chamber of Chills

8

1974

p

Marvel

Chamber of Darkness

4,6

1970

p

Marvel

Conan the Barbarian

10

1971

b

Marvel

Coneheads

2,4

1994

I

Marvel

CRAZY

1-3

1973

b

Marvel

Creatures on the Loose

10-13

1971

I

Marvel

Daredevil

61-68,70-76,115

1970-1971,1974

b

Marvel

Dead of Night

3

1974

b

Marvel

The Defenders

7,12

1974

p

Marvel

Doctor Strange

175

1968

b

Marvel

Dragonslayer

2

1981

b

Marvel

Fantastic Four

96,132,180

1970,1973,1977

b

Marvel

Fear

1,4

1970,1971

b

Marvel

Fraggle Rock

1

1985

b

Marvel

Francis, Brother of the Universe

1

1980

I

Marvel

Godzilla

3

1977

b

Marvel

Howard the Duck

21

1978

p

Marvel

The Human Torch

4

1975

p

Marvel

The Incredible Hulk

102-108,175,178,208

1968,1974,1977

b

Marvel

The Incredible Hulk Special

1

1968

p

Marvel

Iron Man

9,16,24-25,27-30,32,37,76 1969-1971,1975 169

b

Courtesy Heritage Auctions

Company Title

Issue(s)

Year(s)

Pencils Inks/Both

Marvel

Iron Man Special

1

1970

p

Marvel

Ka-Zar

1-3

1970-1971

p

Marvel

Kull the Conqueror

1-2,9-10

1971,1973

b

Marvel

Kull the Destroyer

19,20

1977

b

Marvel

Man-Thing

2

1974

I

Marvel

The Marvel Comics Illustrated Version of Star Wars Return of the Jedi

1983

p

Marvel

Marvel Double Feature

2

1974

p

Marvel

Marvel Super Action

32

1980

p

Marvel

Marvel Super-Heroes

21,28-29,33

1969-1972

p

Marvel

Marvel Tales

26-28,30

1970-1971

p

Marvel

Marvel Team-Up

74,112

1978,1981

p

Marvel

Marvel’s Greatest Comics

30

1971

p

Marvel

Master of Kung Fu

48,81

1977,1979

p

Marvel

Monsters on the Prowl

10-13

1971

b

Marvel

Ms. Marvel

6

1977

b

Marvel

Muppet Babies

1-3,5

1985-1986

b

Marvel

Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD

16-17

1970-1971

b

Marvel

Not Brand Echh

2-4,6-13

1967-1969

b

Marvel

Power Man

35

1976

p

Marvel

Power Man and Iron Fist

60

1979

b

Marvel

ROM

41

1983

p

Marvel

The Savage She-Hulk

7

1980

p

Marvel

The Silver Surfer

15

1970

p

Marvel

Smurfs

1

1982

I

Marvel

Special Marvel Edition

1

1971

p

Marvel

The Spectacular Spider-Man

16

1978

p

Marvel

Spider-Man: Christmas In Dallas

1983

p

Marvel

Spider-Woman

21-23

1979-1980

p

Marvel

Spoof

1-5

1970,1972-1973

b

Marvel

Strange Tales

139,154,156,158

1965,1967

p

Marvel

Sub-Mariner

13-19,21-23,25,38-39,41,59 1969-1973

b

Marvel

Super-Villain Team-Up

8

1976

b

Marvel

Tales to Astonish

93,95,97,99-101

1967-1968

b

Marvel

Thor

158,175,179-181,202

1968,1970,1972

b

Marvel

Tomb of Dracula

3

1972

b

Marvel

Tower of Shadows

3-7

1970

b

Marvel

Toxic Crusaders

7

1992

b

Marvel

Two Gun Kid

119

1974

b

Marvel

Weird Wonder Tales

3

1974

b

Marvel

Western Gunfighters

5,21

1971,1974

b

Marvel

What If?

12,26

1978,1981

b

Marvel

What The—?!

16

1992

I

Marvel

Where Creatures Roam

1,3,6-7

1970,1971

b

Marvel

Where Monsters Dwell

3-11

1970-1971

b

Marvel

X-Men

52,65-67,88

1969-1970,1974

p

Marvel Random House

X-Men Annual

2

1971

p

1993

b

X-Men Night of the Sentinels

170

Courtesy Heritage Auctions

COlORinG THIS LIST INCLUDES BOTH covers and interior stories colored by Marie. EC coloring credits reflect assumed start date of early 1952.

Company

Title

Issue(s)

Year(s)

CPL/GANG Pub.

Heroes, Inc.

2

1976

Dark Horse

Harlan Ellison’s Dream Corridor Quarterly

1

1996

Dark Horse

Tales to Offend

1

1997

DC

9-11 - The World’s Finest Comic Book Writers & Artists Tell Stories to Remember

2

2002

DC

Bizarro Comics

DC

The L.A.W. (Living Assault Weapons)

6

2000

DC

Supergirl Plus

1

1997

DC

Superman Adventures

1-12,14-15,17-18,22-38,40-66

1996-2002

EC

Aces High

1-3

1955

EC

Crime SuspenStories

9-27

1952-1955

EC

Extra!

1-5

1955

EC

Frontline Combat

5-15

1952-1954

EC

Haunt of Fear

12-28

1952-1954

EC

Impact

1-5

1955

EC

Incredible Science Fiction

30-33

1955

2003

EC

M.D.

1-5

1955-1956

EC

MAD

1-23

1952-1955

EC

Panic

1-12

1954-1956

EC

Piracy

1-7

1954-1955

EC

Psychoanalysis

1-4,7-8

1955

EC

Shock SuspenStories

1-18

1952-1955

EC

Two-Fisted Tales

26-41

1952-1955

EC

Valor

1-5

1955

EC

Vault of Horror

23-40

1952-1955

EC

Weird Fantasy

12-22

1952-1953

EC

Weird Science

12-22

1952-1953

EC

Weird Science-Fantasy

23-29

1954-1955

Eclipse

World of Wood

3

1986

Fantagraphics

Anything Goes!

4

1987

Fantagraphics

B. Krigstein Comics

Gladstone

Mickey Mouse

219,221

2004 1986

Harvey

Muppet Babies

6

1994

Historical Souvenir Co.

Historical Souvenir Co. Epic Battles of the Civil War

1-2,4

1998

Marvel

2001: A Space Odyssey

1

1976

Marvel

2099 Unlimited

1,3,6

1993,1994

Marvel

The A-Team

1

1984

Marvel

The Adventures of Kool-Aid Man

2

1984

Marvel

ALF

1-18,20-32,34,36

1988-1990

Marvel

ALF Annual

1-3

1988,1989, 1990

Marvel

ALF Comics Magazine

1

1988

Marvel

ALF Holiday Special

1

1989

171

Courtesy Heritage Auctions

Courtesy Heritage Auctions

Company

Title

Issue(s)

Year(s)

Marvel

ALF Spring Special

1

1989

Marvel

Amazing High Adventure

1,3-4

1984,1986

Marvel

The Amazing Spider-Man

186

1978

Marvel

Annie

1-2

Marvel

Annie Treasury Edition

Marvel

Astonishing Tales

20

1973

Marvel

Battlestar Galactica

3

1979

Marvel

Bizarre Adventures

34

1983

Marvel

The Cat

1-2

1972

Marvel

Conan the Barbarian

25,69,72

1973,1976, 1977

Marvel

Crazy Magazine

78

1981

Marvel

Creatures on the Loose

10-15

1971-1972

Marvel

The Deep

1

1977

Marvel

The Defenders

53

1977

Marvel

Doctor Strange

20,31

1976,1978

1982 1982

Marvel

Dragonslayer TPB

Marvel

Dragonslayer

1-2

1981 1981

Marvel

Droids (Star Comics)

1

1986

Marvel

Epic Illustrated magazine

15-20

1982-1983

Marvel

The Ewoks (Star Comics)

1

1985

Marvel

Fantastic Four

177

1976

Marvel

Fraggle Rock

1

1985

Marvel

Francis, Brother of the Universe

1

1980

Marvel

Giant-Size Super-Villain Team-Up

1

1975

Marvel

Howard the Duck

7

1976

Marvel

Hugga Bunch (Star Comics)

2

1986

Marvel

HULK magazine

15

1979

Marvel

The Human Fly

1

1977

Marvel

The Invaders

14

1977

Marvel

Iron Fist

13

1977

Marvel

Iron Man

85,108

1976,1978

Marvel

Kickers, Inc.

2

1986

Marvel

Kull the Conqueror (1971 series)

1-4,7-8

1971-1973

Marvel

Kull the Conqueror (1982 series)

1,7,9

1982,1984, 1985

Marvel

Kull the Destroyer

18,20-21

1976,1977

Marvel

The Life of Pope John Paul II

1

1983

Marvel

Logan’s Run

1,3

1977

Marvel

Marvel Comics Super Special [Marvel Super Special]

2-3, 8-9, 15, 20, 22-23

1977-1982

Marvel

Marvel Premiere

50

1979

Marvel

Marvel Preview

8

1976

Marvel

Marvel Special Edition

1

1975

Marvel

Marvel Spotlight

12

1973

Marvel

Marvel Team-Up

74

1978

Marvel

Marvel Treasury Edition

12,15,24

1976,1977, 1979

Marvel

Midnight Sons Unlimited

6

1994

Marvel

Mighty Mouse

2

1990

Marvel

Meet Misty (Star Comics)

1-3

1985-1986 172

Company

Title

Issue(s)

Year(s)

Marvel

Moon Knight Special

1

1992

Marvel

Ms. Marvel

1

1977

Marvel

Muppet Babies

1-6,10

1985-1986

Marvel

Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD

17

1971

Marvel

Nova

6,11

1977

Marvel

Power Man and Iron Fist

60

1979

Marvel

Psi-Force

3

1987

Marvel

Punisher 2099

7-8,12

1993,1994

Marvel

Rawhide Kid

1

1985

Marvel

Royal Roy (Star Comics)

1

1985

Marvel

The Spectacular Spider-Man

4,8,54

1977,1981

Marvel

Spider-Man: Christmas In Dallas

Marvel

Spoof

3,5

1983 1973

Marvel

Star Comics Magazine

2

1987

Marvel

Star Trek

1-3

1980

Marvel

Star Wars

1,17

1977,1978

Marvel

Sub-Mariner

9,12-23

1969-1970

Marvel

Tarzan

1-2

1977

Marvel

Thor

253,287

1976,1979

Marvel

Thundercats

13-15

1987

Marvel

Tomb of Dracula

51,58,60

1976-1977

Marvel

Toxic Crusaders

7

1992

Marvel

The Uncanny X-Men at the State Fair of Texas

Marvel

Web of Spider-Man

27

1987

Marvel

What If?

34

1982

Marvel

What The—?!

18,21,25-26

1992-1993

Marvel UK

Captain Britain

1-2, 4-8, 10-11, 13-16

1976-1977

Pyramid Publications

Fiction Illustrated

1-2

1976

Random House

X-Men Night of the Sentinels

Courtesy Heritage Auctions

1983

1993

WRiTinG THIS LIST CONTAINS ONLY those issues in which Marie was credited for scripting, plotting, or co-plotting.

Company

Title

Issue(s)

Year(s)

Last Gasp

Strip AIDS U.S.A.

Last Gasp

Wimmen’s Comix

10

1985

Marvel

Crazy Magazine

75

1981

Marvel

The Defenders

127

1984

Marvel

Not Brand Echh

11,12

1968-1969

Marvel

The Spectacular Spider-Man

54

1981

Marvel

Spider-Man and the Dallas Cowboys

Marvel

Strange Tales

153-160

1967

Marvel

Sub-Mariner

13

1969

1988

1983

173

Acknowledgments A BOOK LIKE THIS is a labor of love, shared by many people over many years. The contributors to this tribute to Marie Severin are numerous. First and foremost, I want to thank Aaron Sultan, who conducted several of the interviews in the book, provided some great examples of Marie’s artwork, and served as a sounding board and constructive critic throughout the long process. Our friendship for over 20 years remains a great blessing.

I want to thank all of the people who consented to be interviewed for the book, including Stan Lee, Al Feldstein, Roy Thomas, John Romita, Jack Davis, Jack Kamen, Tony Isabella, Herb Trimpe, Gene Colan, Jim Mooney, Ramona Fradon, Trina Robbins, Linda Fite, Flo Steinberg, Irene Vartanoff, Mark Evanier, David Anthony Kraft, Joe Sinnott (and his son Mark), Marv Wolfman, and Mark Chiarello, as well as John Severin, Jean Davenport, Eleanor Hezel, and Denny O’Neil, who provided unique insight into the private side of Marie. You will have noted that the interviews are sometimes short, sometimes redundant, may contradict one another, or stray a bit from the topic of Marie, but I felt like they each provided distinct perspectives, as well as useful and important context to the situations and times in which Marie lived and worked. Note, too, that some of the artists worked from home and thus had limited contact with Marie.

Also, there are literally dozens of friends and fans who provided photographs and examples of artwork that Marie has done over the years. The book quite literally could not have been made without their contributions. Bill Leach provided rare photographs of Marie from the EC years and great examples of her art, which were first featured in the only official EC HorrorZine Horror from the Crypt of Fear, published by Bill Leach. Stephen Moore, one of the the foremost collectors of Hulk artwork in the world, provided many images from his collection. A special thanks to Jeff Harnett and Craig Rogers, who shared their personal recollections as friends and fans of Marie, as well as their commissions. Others who contributed to the book, in the form of advice and guidance (as well as art and photographs) include Roger Hill, Lynch Hymn, Eliot R. Brown, Jon Cooke, Scott Edelman, Steven Bialick, Ruben Espinosa, Sean Clarke, Jim McPherson, Mike Collins, Anne Grandinetti, Zaddick Longenbach, Jerry Boyd, Dave Braunstein, Dorothy Tuska, Scott Burnley, Spencer Beck, Glen Brunswick, Steven Gettis, Brian Sagar, Bob Beerbohm, Ger Apeldoorn,

Jeff Sharpe, David Siegel, Jim Ottaviani, Dan Forman, Ted Lanting, Nick Katradis, Michael Dunne, Thorsten Brummel, and Luigi Novi. And finally, thanks to Atlas Tales (Greg Gatlin), Romitaman (Mike Burkey), ComicLink and especially Heritage Auctions for allowing us to use images from their websites. Images not otherwise credited are from the collection of the author.

In addition, I want to thank John Province for agreeing to allow me to reprint his article by Marie from the Comic and Fantasy Art Amateur Press Association (CFA-APA), as well as Arnie Fenner, who agreed to allow me to use an excerpt from his 1976 interview with John Severin that appeared in REH: Lone Star Fictioneer, as well as the amazing Kull artwork he provided. Thanks, too, to Martin Greim for permission to reprint the 1974 Marie Severin interview from Comic Crusader #16. Portions of the book were drawn from articles I previously wrote for TwoMorrows magazines BACK ISSUE and Rough Stuff, as well as the CFA-APA. Many thanks to Scott Saavedra for the amazing job he did in designing the book, exhibiting great creativity and a genuine appreciation of the subject matter. Thanks, too, to Steven Tice for transcribing all of the interviews in the book, with great speed and exceptional accuracy. As well, I would like to thank John Morrow and the folks at TwoMorrows Publishing for finding merit in this project and being willing to publish it. John is a dedicated publisher and a terrific person and it has been my pleasure to work with him, and the distinguished editors of TwoMorrows, over the last nine years.

And, of course, I want to thank Marie for the hours of interviews, and for serving as the inspiration for the book, though she said on more than one occasion, “Why would anyone want to read a book about me?” Thanks to her too, on behalf of her friends and fans, for all the joy she has brought us through the years by just being Marie.

And finally, I want to thank my wife of 25 years, June, who while she may not be a comic book fan herself, has not only tolerated my hobby in general but this project in particular, and has served as a constant source of support and encouragement to see it through.

— Dewey Cassell

174

175

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FOR A FREE COLOR CATALOG, CALL, WRITE, E-MAIL, OR LOG ONTO www.twomorrows.com

TwoMorrows—A New Day For Comics Fandom!

TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 E-mail: store@twomorrowspubs.com • Visit us on the Web at www.twomorrows.com

Marie Severin

THE MiRTHful MisTREss Of COMiCs

SHE COLORED THE HORROR, science fiction, and war comics of the legendary EC line. She spent thirty years working for Marvel Comics, doing everything from production to coloring to penciling and inking to art direction. The characters she is remembered for include the Incredible Hulk, Sub-Mariner, Doctor Strange, and the Cat, as well as Kull the Conqueror, which she drew with her brother John. She is renowned for her sense of humor, reflected in the comic book Not Brand Echh, as well as the numerous caricatures she has done over the years. It is no wonder Stan Lee, former publisher, editor and writer at Marvel, nicknamed her “Mirthful Marie”.

This tribute to Marie Severin has been a long time in the making. It contains the revealing and often amusing insights of her close friends and her brother John, as well as many of the people she has worked with over the years, including Stan Lee, Al Feldstein, Roy Thomas, John Romita, Jack Davis, Jack Kamen, Tony Isabella, Herb Trimpe, Gene Colan, Jim Mooney, Joe Sinnott, Mark Evanier, and David Anthony Kraft, as well as extensive commentary by Marie herself. It also includes recognition from women in the industry who have been influenced by Marie and blessed to call her a friend, including Ramona Fradon, Trina Robbins, Flo Steinberg, Linda Fite, and Irene Vartanoff, making it easy to understand why she is often called “the First Lady Of Comics.”

THE BOOK FOLLOWS a roughly chronological journey and includes her work on advertising and special projects, fan clubs and fanzines, convention appearances and commissioned art.

Complementing the text is an abundance of photographs and artwork from throughout her career, including many rare and unpublished pieces, as well as classics that reflect the depth and breadth of her talent, in each genre in which she worked. A color gallery is also included.

ISBN-13: 978-1-60549-042-7

$24.95 in the u.S. ISBN-13: 978-1-60549-042-7 ISBN-10: 1-60549-042-3 52495

9 781605 490427

TwoMorrows Publishing Raleigh, North Carolina

Readers, even those already familiar with Marie, will discover an all-new appreciation for the lady and her work. As Stan Lee once said, “Calling Marie the best woman artist in the business is an injustice. Marie was one of the best artists in the business, period.” This book pays homage to the artist and the legacy of art she has left behind. It will bring back great memories (and a smile to your face), as you enjoy the remarkable story of Marie Severin: The Mirthful Mistress of Comics.