Marie Severin

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Sub-Mariner #9 (Aug. 1969). Cover art by Marie Severin & Dan Adkins.

Marie Severin (born 21 August 1929 in Oceanside, New York) is an American comic book artist and colorist. In the latter capacity for the celebrated EC Comics in the 1950s, she would sometimes give especially gruesome panels a single color in order to tone-down otherwise graphic scenes of gore (Geissman 2005: 239).

After the Collapse of EC, Severin went to work for Marvel Comics in the early 1960s, where she remained until the mid-1990s, although it was for her output in the late 1960s and early 1970s that she is most celebrated today. It was also at Marvel that she began to branch-out as an artist and did penciling, inking, and occasionally lettering work on various books, in addition to her work as a colorist. During her early tenure at Marvel Ms Severin drew the adventures of Dr Strange, The Sub-Mariner and The Incredible Hulk, a trio of characters who would later join forces as members of a super-group called The Defenders, another book to which Ms. Serverin contributed art. Other Marvel comics to which she contributed covers and/or interiors include Amazing Spider-Man, Iron Man, Conan the Barbarian, Kull the Conqueror, Human Torch, The Cat, and Daredevil. Additionally, she worked on Marvel's satiric humor magazine Crazy, as well as the company's self-lampooning comic book Not Brand Echh.

Her brother John Severin is an equally well-regarded artist who also worked for EC and Marvel.

Severin won the Best Penciller (Humor Division) Shazam Award in 1974. The following year, she was nominated for both Best Inker (Humor Division) and Best Colorist. She spoke at a 1974 New York Comic Art Convention panel on the role of women in comics, alongside Flo Steinberg, Jean Thomas (sometime-collaborator with husband Roy Thomas) and fan representative Irene Vartanoff ^[1] She also participated in the Women of Comics Symposium at the 2006 Paradise Comics Toronto Comicon. Severin was inducted into the Will Eisner Comics Hall of Fame in 2001.

While generally retired for many years, she still manages to make occasional, significant contributions. In particular she did recoloring work on many of the comics stories reprinted in B. Krigstein and B. Krigstein Comics, Greg Sadowski's retrospectives on EC-era artist, Bernard Krigstein. The former book won both the Harvey and Eisner comic industry awards in 2003. She was reportedly Krigstein's "favorite colorist."

[edit] Footnotes

^ Lovece, Frank. "Cons: New York 1974!", The Journal Summer Special, 1974 (fanzine published by Paul Kowtiuk, Maple Leaf Publications; editorial office then at Box 1286, Essex, Ontario, Canada N0R 1E0).