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Marie Severin: First Lady of the Silver Age

Marie Severin has deserved a column in "The Talent Pool" for sometime by virtue of her place in Marvel's Silver Age bullpen, but some delays for research kept delaying this column. As the image to the right suggests, I never did find a photograph to put up on this page (cf. "Steve Ditko"), but perhaps the pieces I have found about her will amount to a decent, if incomplete, description.

We don't see a lot of Marie Severin as a penciler or inker these days, and even during her period of most prolific art output we still had to make do with little enough to leave a comics aesthete's stomach all a-growl. She still works in the industry, and (I believe but can't verify) still does the occasional piece of art. This really grates if you consider the excellence of her work, both in straightforward, "serious" comics, and her truly remarkable work as a visual satirist.

Her interviews suggest a kind of aw-shucks self-effacing quality that seems, in context, unfair to the woman and her work, something she consistently underrates, perhaps in part to the high esteem in which she holds those who were her mentors and peers in earlier decades of the comics medium.

Nonetheless, to look at her work, particularly between 1965 and 1975, and compare it with the often incomprehensible or unreachably idiosyncratic output of the celebrities of the modern medium, one can fairly ache for the absence of her hand as a penciler or as an inker.

In the Fifties

Marie, in her EC work, seems mostly to have served in support functions, presumably like inking, lettering, and color, though occasional pieces of her pencil art did make it into EC titles. EC had various employees, mostly its main artists like Bill Elder, create full-page images of the assembled EC staff; Marie, in spite of her somewhat lesser role in the production pecking order, contributed a piece of her own here.

You can see Marie herself in this image if you go to the central figure - the publisher, Gaines himself - follow his arm upward and to the right to a male figure, and look at the woman with the brush standing immediately to the right.

She might have taken a back seat in the legendary EC days. Even so, this did much to break the boy's-club style male monopoly on the business. Furthermore, her supporting work on EC titles involved her in the center, rather than the periphery, of Educational Comics' line. Between 1953 and 1955, she worked on Crime SuspenStories, Haunt of Fear, Shock SuspenStories, Crime SuspenStories, Panic, and Weird Science-Fantasy. Only a credit on the original Mad comic would have done much for such a resume.

In the Sixties

Severin has Marvel credits dating as far back as 1959, properly still in the fifties and not even yet under the Marvel label, since that company bore the imprint "Atlas" in those days, but the late-fifties Atlas books and the pieces that formed the backbone of Marvel's Silver Age blend as a single piece in so many ways that her work on Tales to Astonish in 1959 seems best described in the context of the sixties.

If, as the records suggest, Marie Severin did work for Marvel (Atlas) so early, that tenure began relatively soon after her work with the defunct EC Comics line, the official martyr of comics companies. That EC background, particularly whatever exposure she would have to the old Mad comics, seems to have contributed much to her flowering as a satire artist, specifically her peerless work on Not Brand Ecch!

Before Severin hit that particular artistic peak, however, she had a long series of Marvel credits to her name. Stan Lee, back in his vigorous prime in the 1960s, abandoned much conventional thinking out of desperation after he watched Atlas Comics dying around him. After drastic surgery and a name change to Marvel Comics had failed to kill the patient, Lee could consider many of his experiments validated by their results. So, while DC manned its offices with talent that did their work in white shirts and neckties, Lee could ignore the obsequious 1950s notions of office decorum and assign projects based on ability.

Lee put Severin to work on all kinds of things in the center of the Marvel ferment. Severin did a lot of covers and some interiors as well in those days, showing the ability to pencil, ink, letter, color, and do almost everything that an editor and writer did not between the blank page and what went to the printers. Strange Tales, Tales to Astonish, Daredevil, Captain Marvel, Captain America, Sub-Mariner, Tales to Astonish, X-Men, and Chamber of Darkness all saw her efforts at various times in the sixties.

In the Seventies

Severin entered the seventies as part of a rotating art cast on Incredible Hulk, with Herb Trimpe and John Severin. While experimentation ultimately produced a winning combination by assigning Trimpe to pencils and John Severin to inks, Marie herself penciled the occasional piece and inked one or two others. Since Trimpe tried in those days to evoke as much of an EC feel as he could, and since both Severins had served tenures at Educational Comics, any two of them in combination had a fair chance of success in the recapturing of a dense and moody feel that did much to make Hulk stories distinctive in the aftermath of the perpetually-shifting lineup on Hulk stories since the initial Lee-Kirby launch of that franchise.

Marie Severin produced arguably her handsomest serious work doing pencils under the inks of her brother and fellow EC alumnus John Severin for Marvel's short-lived Kull comic.

Her resume, including cover and interior art, for this period includes such titles as Amazing Adventures, Amazing Spider-Man, Astonishing Tales, Captain America, The Cat, Conan the Barbarian, Creatures on the Loose, Daredevil, Defenders, Giant-Size Chillers, Giant-Size Hulk, Haunt of Horror, Human Torch, Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, Ka-Zar, Kull, the Conqueror, and just about any of the throng of reprint books that Marvel produced between 1970 and 1980.

Such broad experience contributes considerably to an artist's ability, and one can note in this period a solidification of one of Severin's styles. Her serious-heroic style, as represented by the Sub-Mariner cover above, suggests she developed a sense of proportion and body language similar to Gene Colan's, while using line weight and tone more typical of the house style Marvel created through artists like John Buscema and Sal Buscema.

In the Eighties

Marvel seems to have found work for Marie Severin in the eighties, albeit with no particular focus or tenure. The eighties saw the fading of a number of the luminaries of the Silver Age, partially because some had died, some had lost their positions to younger (cheaper) talent, some had left the companies where they had achieved prominence because of the ill-treatment that drives some of the best out of the business, some had lost the enthusiasm for the work in ways that showed on the printed page, and some simply became victims of the planned obsolescence of comics that periodically thrusts a new crowd of talents into the spotlight. The eighties belonged to properties like Teen Titans and X-Men and the talents that produced them. You might note, although both books achieved uncontroversial excellence, that of the talent involved, only George Perez retains the halo from the esteem he enjoyed in those days.

One might note that Severin worked in the thick of the key titles of EC in the 1950s, and, again, in the central vehicles of Marvel Comics in the 1960s. If one looks at available reference materials (such as the Great Comics Database), however, one may note that her assignments in the eighties kept her away from interesting, cutting-edge, or commercially successful material. While the occasional cult piece like a Howard the Duck fill-in or an Epic Illustrated assignment might help to maintain her credibility, other pieces, such as work in the Conan-book ghetto or the short-lived A-Team comic suggests that Marvel had begun to try to find work to give her rather than creating projects around her talents or making her a regular on any title of merit. Everyone who has worked for someone else knows that an employee assigned to trivial, disposable, or irrelevant work has taken an important step up the ladder on the downsizing scaffold.

Employers may pitch throwaway projects under the intentionally deceptive premise of need and duty - "I know you'd rather do something else but we need you for this" - but no reciprocal loyalty invests in those who take the unwanted tasks that accumulate in the dregs of an assignment inbox. The nineties would show precisely how flimsy Marvel's gratitude could become.

In the Nineties

Those who could endure reading the infamous "Herb Trimpe Diary" recall that Trimpe, as a footnote, mentions Marvel's dismissal of Marie Severin in the mid-nineties bloodbath that accompanied Marvel's ill-considered attempt to remake itself as Image Comics. A number of old hands and old-school talents, including Trimpe, saw Marvel roll their heads only a matter of months before that company encountered such comprehensive (and self-inflicted) trouble that it had to cancel its entire comics line and attempt the "Heroes Reborn" experiment. This critically-damned attempt to follow trends instead of set them could have intended a seminal revamp of the Marvel line, but probably represented a desperate and cynical attempt to buy time with a fill-in project.

If Severin became a casualty of the gimmick-addicted and ephemeral comics boom of the early and mid nineties, the skills she had picked up since the fifties, combined with her credentials as one of a dwindling body of talents who had worked in the Golden Age, Silver Age, and the present, would hold her in good enough stead that various projects would still fall her way.

For instance, EC reprints of the late nineties attempted to recapture the original look of the distinctive color of those books, a feel that often missed the mark until the publisher realized that a) Marie Severin could do color work and b) she had worked for EC when that company first published the original editions of these books. Not surprisingly, she managed to reconstruct a plausible version of the dense original hues typical of the most-desired comics of the 1950s.

Furthermore, her work occasionally crops up - albeit in annoyingly small portions - outside the "Big Gun" comics publishers. Dark Horse Comics, for instance, lists her among the long list of talents who have contributed to their assortment of publications.

She stayed in the business despite exceptional provocation, and also occasionally graces panels on the convention circuit. If Marvel chooses to fail to recognize her contributions, organized fandom errs less in this regard.

Keeping Her Perspective

Though available source material remains sparse (particularly to those of us who strip-mine the Internet for our facts), one might note that public statements from Marie Severin remain conspicuously benign and serene. Given her history in a medium that did more to give her a reputation than a living, one might forgive - or even expect - some rather nasty loud-talking on her part, particularly about her trip to the Marvel Comics Downsizing Guillotine in the 1990s. However, she seems strongly disinclined to bitter self-gossip and blame-laying. Instead, she describes her days in the Marvel bullpen in uplifting and optimistic tones, particularly the way she feels more gallant Marvel stalwarts tended to fawn over her (the name "Jack Kirby" comes to mind).

Furthermore, even though she recognizes some changes in the medium that must seem rather decadent by the standards she learned in an earlier generation of the business, she can put them in a context. She notes the grotesque and semi-pornographic distortion of the female form as an extreme version of the cheesecake traditions of the medium, recalling how much Stan Lee enjoyed the presence of well-depicted female forms in the books of the Silver Age. When discussing the female form as it appears in the comics of the 1990s (sixty-inch legs; XXX-cup bosoms; and four-inch waists), she dismisses such "things that are not possible" without rancor or the need to impugn the characters of the artists who put them on paper.

This tendency to benevolence and optimism seems to adhere to the known history of her career, and provides the source of the epithet "the Nicest Person in Comics." In the age of the self-important comics primadonna, of the incomprehensible comics gimmick gunslinger, and of the dreaded comics downsizing hit man, one could do much worse than to work with the likes of Marie Severin.