Marie Severin


Marie Severin was an American comics artist and colorist best known for her work for Marvel Comics and the 1950s' EC Comics. She is an inductee of the Will Eisner Comics Hall of Fame and the Harvey Awards Hall of Fame.

Early life and career

Marie Severin was born in East Rockaway, New York, on Long Island, the second and last child of John Edward Severin, born in Oslo, Norway, who immigrated to the United States at age 3, and a mother, Marguerite Severin, from Syracuse, New York, whose heritage was Irish. Her older brother, John Severin, was born in 1922. The family moved to Brooklyn, New York City, when Marie was 4. She attended a Catholic grammar school and then the all-girl Bishop McDonnell Memorial High School. The family lived in an apartment in the Bay Ridge neighborhood at the time; it is uncertain if this was the family's original Brooklyn locale from Severin's childhood or if the family moved to that neighborhood in the interim. Due to the high school's staggered schedule, Severin's class graduated in January 1948, rather than in mid-year as typical.
Severin grew up in an artistic household where her father, a World War I veteran, eventually became a designer for the fashion company Elizabeth Arden during the 1930s. In her teens, Severin took what she recalled as "a couple of months" of cartooning and illustration classes, and attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn "for one day and said, 'This is a college', and I wanted to draw and make money". Her first job was doing clerical work for an insurance company in downtown Manhattan "for a couple of years" while still living at home. She continued living there after her father died.
Severin was working on Wall Street when her brother John, then an artist for EC Comics, needed a colorist for his work there. Marie Severin's earliest recorded comic-book work is coloring EC Comics' A Moon, a Girl... Romance #9. In a 2001 interview, she recalled she broke in as a colorist
She would contribute coloring across the company's line, including its war comics and its celebrated but notoriously graphic horror comics, and also worked on the comics' production end, as well as "doing little touch ups and stuff" on the art. When EC ceased publication in the wake of the U.S. Senate hearings on the effects of comic books on children and the establishment of the Comics Code, Severin worked briefly for Marvel Comics' 1950s predecessor, Atlas Comics. After an industry downturn circa 1957, she left and found work with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. She recalled in 2001, "I did a little bit of everything for them—I did television graphics on economics I did a lot of drawing. I did a comic book that my brother did the finished art on... about checks".

Blue-panels assertion

, in his 1972 biography of EC publisher William M. Gaines, wrote, "There was Marie Severin, Gaines's colorist, and a very moral Catholic, who made her feelings known by coloring dark blue any panel she thought was in bad taste. Al Feldstein| Feldstein called her 'the conscience of EC.'"
Severin has repeatedly refuted that assertion, which became part of comics lore, while also saying she sometimes used coloring to "kind of shield" some gruesome content, noting,

Silver Age

In 1959, when the industry had picked up again during the period fans and historians call the Silver Age of Comic Books, Severin again worked for Marvel Comics in production. Severin recalled in 2001 that when Esquire magazine requested an artist to illustrate a story "on the college drug culture", Marvel production manager Sol Brodsky offered Severin rather than one of the regular artists, who were on deadline. Her illustration for the magazine led Marvel editor-in-chief Stan Lee to assign her the feature "Doctor Strange" in Strange Tales, replacing Bill Everett, who had succeeded character co-creator Steve Ditko. With Lee, Severin co-created the fictional cosmic entity the Living Tribunal in Strange Tales #157.
Severin was Marvel's head colorist until 1972, at which point she turned most of her coloring duties over to George Roussos so that she could do more penciling assignments. She continued to expand from colorist to do penciling and inking, and occasionally also lettering, on various titles. She drew stories of the Sub-Mariner and the Hulk, and the covers or interiors of titles including Iron Man, Conan the Barbarian, Kull the Conqueror, The Cat, and Daredevil. Additionally, she worked on Marvel's satiric humor magazine Crazy Magazine, as well as the company's self-lampooning comic book, Not Brand Echh.

Later life and career

In 1976, Severin co-created Spider-Woman, designing her original costume. She co-created Howard the Duck villain Doctor Bong in 1977. Two years later she provided the art for the Spider-Man and the Hulk toilet paper.
In the 1980s, she was assigned to Marvel's Special Projects division, which handled non-comic book licensing. She helped design toy maquettes and film and television tie-ins products, and worked on the short-lived Marvel Books imprint of children's coloring books and sticker books. During this time she also drew the Fraggle Rock and Muppet Babies comics for Marvel's Star Comics imprint.
During the following decade, Severin penciled the "Impossible Tale" of the "Li'l Soulsearchers" in issue #31 of Claypool Comics' superhero-humor comic Soulsearchers and Company, inked by fellow Silver Age veteran Jim Mooney; and she inked Dave Cockrum's penciling in issue #43. She also inked Richard Howell's pencils on the story "Favor of the Month" in Elvira #144.
Severin retired sometime afterward, but continued into the mid-2000s to make occasional contributions, such as recoloring many of the comics stories reprinted in the EC-era retrospective books B. Krigstein and B. Krigstein Comics. The former won both the Harvey and Eisner comic-industry awards in 2003.
On October 11, 2007, Severin suffered a stroke, and was taken to Huntington Hospital, in Huntington on Long Island, to recover and recuperate.

Awards and honors

Severin won the Best Penciller Shazam Award in 1974. The following year, she was nominated for both Best Inker and Best Colorist.
Severin spoke at a 1974 New York Comic Art Convention panel on the role of women in comics, alongside Flo Steinberg, Jean Thomas, Linda Fite and fan representative Irene Vartanoff. She also participated in the Women of Comics Symposium at the 2006 Paradise Comics Toronto Comicon.
Severin won an Inkpot Award at the San Diego Comic Con in 1988. She was inducted into the Will Eisner Comics Hall of Fame in 2001; she and Brenda Starr creator Dale Messick were the first women to be so inducted.
Severin's work was among that included in the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art exhibition of women comic-book artists, "She Draws Comics", July to November 2006.
In consideration of her contributions to comics, Comics Alliance listed Severin as one of twelve women cartoonists deserving of lifetime achievement recognition. She received Comic-Con International's Icon Award in 2017
In 2019, Severin was posthumously awarded the Inkwell Awards Stacey Aragon Special Recognition Award for her lifetime of inking artwork. Severin was also inducted into the Harvey Awards Hall of Fame alongside her brother John, and fellow Mad contributors Will Elder, Jack Davis, and Ben Oda.

Personal life

Her brother John was an artist who worked for EC and Marvel; her niece, Ruth Larenas, is a producer for her nephew John Severin Jr.'s Bubblehead Publishing.

Atlas Comics