Bill Everett
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William Blake "Bill" Everett, also known as William Blake and Everett Blake (born May 18, 1917, Cambridge, Massachusetts; died February 27, 1973) was a comic book writer-artist best known for creating Namor the Sub-Mariner and co-creating Daredevil for Marvel Comics. He is a descendant of the poet William Blake.[1][2]
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[edit] Biography
[edit] Early life and career
Bill Everett spent his early life in Arizona, graduating high school there before returning to his native Massachusetts to study at Boston's Vesper George School of Art from 1934-35.[3] Influenced by commercial magazines artists such as Meade Schaeffer, Dean Cornwell, and especially Floyd Davis,[3] soon dropped out to become a professional artist on the advertising staff of the Boston newspaper The Herald-Traveler for $12 a week.[3] Soon afterward, he left to become a draftsmen for the civil engineering firm The Brooks System, in Newton, Massachusetts.[3] From there he pursued work in Phoenix, Arizona and Los Angeles, California without success. He returned East, to New York City, where he again did newspaper advertising art, for the New York Herald-Tribune.[3] He next became art editor for Teck Publications' Radio News magazine, then assistant art director under Herm Bollin in Chicago, Illinois.[3] Fired for being, as Everett described, "too cocky", he returned to New York where sought employment as an art director. With no luck at this, and desperate for work, he ran into an old Teck colleague, Walter Holze, who was now working in the new field of comic books. As Everett recalled in the late 1960s, "He asked me if I could do comics. I said, 'Sure!!' At that point I was starving. I wasn't interested in the comics business; I was talked into it".[3]
Freelancing for Centaur Publications, Everett "sold my first page for $2 — writing, penciling, inking and all. 'Skyrocket Steele' was my first strip".[3] Soon he was getting $10 and then $14 a page, a respectable sum during this late-1930s period near the beginning of what historians and fans call the Golden Age of comic books. Everett co-created the superhero Amazing-Man at Centaur, working with company art director Lloyd Jacquet, and drew the first five issues.[3]
Everett and other creators followed Jacquet to his new company Funnies, Inc., one of the first comic-book "packagers" that would create comics on demand for publishers. Everett recalled, "I left Centaur with Lloyd Jacquet and another chap whose name as Max; I cannot remember his last name. Lloyd... had an idea that he wanted to start his own art service — to start a small organization to supply artwork and editorial material to publishers. ... He asked me to join him. He also asked Carl Burgos. So we were the nucleus...."[4] He added, "I don't know how to explain it, but I was still on a freelance basis. That was the agreement we had. The artists, including myself, at Funnies, worked on a freelance basis".[4]
[edit] Sub-Mariner
At Funnies, Inc., Everett created the Sub-Mariner for an aborted project, Motion Picture Funnies Weekly #1, a planned promotional comic to be given away in movie theaters. When plans changed, Everett used his character instead for Funnies, Inc.'s first client, pulp magazine publisher Martin Goodman. The original eight-page story was expanded by four pages for Marvel Comics #1 (Oct. 1939), the first publication of what Goodman would eventually call Timely Comics, the 1940s precursor of Marvel Comics. Everett's anti-hero proved a sudden success, quickly becoming one of Timely's top three characters, along with Carl Burgos' android superhero the Human Torch and Jack Kirby & Joe Simon's Captain America. Everett soon introduced such supporting characters as New York City policewoman Betty Dean, a steady companion and occasional love-interest, and Namor's cousin Namora.
Everett drew his star character in Sub-Mariner Comics, published first quarterly, then thrice-yearly and finally bimonthly, for issues #1-32 (Fall 1941 - June 1949).
Everett entered the U.S. Army for World War II military service in February 1942.[5] He attended Officer Candidate School at Fort Belvoir, during which time he met Gwenn Randall, who was work for the Ordnance Department at the Pentagon.[5] The couple married in 1944, when Everett returned from the European theater of operations, and their first child, a daughter, was born shortly before Everett was shipped out to the Philippines to fight in the Pacific theater; he returned home in February 1946.[5] With some money inherited from a great-uncle, Everett took some time off and traveled before settling in Fairbury, Nebraska, his wife's hometown. "This was when I renewed by association with Martin Goodman, working by mail on a freelance basis, picking up the Sub-Mariner where I'd left off four years ago".[6] His first recorded post-war credit is writing and full art for the 12-page story "Sub-Mariner vs. Green-Out" in Sub-Mariner Comics #21 (Fall 1946) — the third of three Sub-Mariner stories that issue, for which Syd Shores drew the cover. Everett was soon providing Sub-Mariner stories regularly for the solo title as well as for The Human Torch, Marvel Mystery Comics and even Blonde Phantom Comics.
Additionally, he drew the title feature in the three-issue spin-off series Namora (Aug.-Dec. 1948).
[edit] Atlas Comics
By now, Timely Comics had evolved into Marvel's 1950s iteration, Atlas Comics. Like most superhero characters in the postwar era, the Sub-Mariner had faded in popularity, and his solo title had been canceled in 1949. But after a nearly five-year hiatus, he briefly returned with Captain America and the Golden Age Human Torch in Young Men #24 (Dec. 1953), during Atlas' mid-1950s attempt at reviving superheroes. Everett drew the Sub-Mariner feature through Young Men #28 (June 1954) and in Sub-Mariner Comics #33-42 (April 1954 - Oct. 1955), which outlasted the other two characters' features. During this time, Namora had her own spin-off series.
Everett also drew the features "Venus" and "Marvel Boy", as well as a large number of stories for Atlas' anthological horror-fantasy series. One such tale, "Zombie!", written by editor-in-chief Stan Lee and published in Menace #5, introduced the character Simon Garth, the Zombie, who in the 1970s would be plucked from this one-shot story to star in Marvel's black-and-white, horror-comics magazine Tales of the Zombie.
[edit] Marvel Comics
With writer-editor Lee, Everett co-created the Marvel superhero Daredevil, who debuted in Daredevil #1 (April 1964). Comics historian and former Jack Kirby assistant Mark Evanier, investigating claims of Kirby's involvement in the creation of both Iron Man and Daredevil, interviewed Kirby and Everett and found that,
| “ | in both cases, Jack had already drawn the covers of those issues and done some amount of design work. He ... seems to have participated in the design of Daredevil's first costume. ... Everett did tell me that Jack had come up with the idea of Daredevil's billy club. ... Jack, in effect, drew the first page of that first Daredevil story. In the rush to get that seriously late book to press, there wasn't time to complete Page One, so Stan had [production manager] Sol Brodsky slap together a paste-up that employed Kirby's cover drawing. ... Everett volunteered to me that Jack had 'helped him' though he wouldn't — or more likely, couldn't — elaborate on that. He just plain didn't remember it well, and in later years apparently gave others who asked a wide range of answers.[7] | ” |
2000s Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada noted that when Everett turned in his first-issue pencils extremely late, Brodsky and Spider-Man artist Steve Ditko inked "a lot of backgrounds and secondary figures on the fly [and] cobbled the cover and the splash page together from Kirby's original concept drawing"[8] In an interview conducted by Marvel writer-editor and Everett's one-time roommate Roy Thomas, in what the latter recalled as either "late 1969 or in 1970", Everett said of Daredevil's creation five years earlier:
| “ | I must have called Stan, had some contact with him, I don't know why. I know we tried to do it on the phone. I know he had this idea for Daredevil; he thought he had an idea. ... With a long-distance phone call, it just wasn't coming out right, so I said, 'All right, I'll come down this weekend or something. I'll take a day off [from his job as art director of Eton Paper Corporation in Massachusetts] and come down to New York'. ... I did the one issue, but I found that I couldn't do it and handle my job, because it was a managerial job; I didn't get paid overtime but I was on an annual salary, so my time was not my own. I was putting in 14 or 15 hours a day at the plant and then to come home and try to do comics at night was just too much. And I didn't make deadlines — I just couldn't make them — so I just did the one issue and didn't do any more.[9] | ” |
Within two years, however, Everett began penciling for Marvel once again, first on the character the Hulk, in Tales to Astonish, initially over Kirby layouts, and on Doctor Strange in Strange Tales. Readers during this 1960s Silver Age of comic books also became acquainted with his Golden Age and 1950s stories in the comic books, which were reprinted first in the book The Great Comic Book Heroes, by Jules Feiffer (Dial Press, 1965), and then in the comic books Fantasy Masterpieces, Marvel Super-Heroes and Marvel Tales.
Everett even returned to his enduring character, writing, penciling and inking Sub-Mariner #50-55 & 57 (June 1972 - Nov. 1972; Jan. 1973), with script assists by Mike Friedrich on two issues; and #58 (Feb. 1973), co-written with Steve Gerber and co-penciled with Sam Kweskin. He also co-wrote and inked Sub-Mariner #59 (March 1973), plotted #60 (April 1973), and co-wrote, co-penciled (with fellow Golden Ager Win Mortimer) and co-inked #61 (May 1973). His final efforts on the character he created were five pages of pencils (inked by fellow Golden Ager Fred Kida) that appeared posthumously in Super-Villain Team-Up #1 (Aug. 1975).
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ Interview with granddaughter Wendy Everett, Comic Book Artist #2 (Summer 1998)
- ^ Whitson, Roger. "William Blake and Visual Culture", ImageTexT vol. 3, #2 (2006)], pub. Department of English, University of Florida
- ^ a b c d e f g h i Steranko, Jim. The Steranko History of Comics - Volume One (Supergraphics, 1970), p. 59. The book's Everett interview closely coincides with a letter from Everett to Jerry DeFuccio, written May 19, 1961, originally published in The Comics, vol. 10, #1, and reprinted at the website Live ForEverett
- ^ a b Bill Everett interview, originally published in Alter Ego #11, 1978; reprinted in Alter Ego vol. 3, #46 (March 2005); p. 8 of the latter.
- ^ a b c Steranko, History of Comics, p. 60
- ^ Steranko, History of Comics, p. 61
- ^ Evanier, Mark. POV Online: "The Jack FAQ"
- ^ Quesada, Joe. Newsarama: "Joe Fridays" (column) #4
- ^ Everett interview, Alter Ego (2005), pp. 28-29
[edit] References
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