RIP: Marie Severin

When it rains, it pours.

I can't say I ever followed Marie Severin's career closely, but she was a talent I took notice of primarily because she was one of the only female comic book creators of the 50s/60s who people remembered, spoke of, and was still in the business. Much of her early career was spent as a colorist and she became not only one of the few lauded female comic book creators, but one of the few lauded colorists in the business. Her work coloring for EC Comics in particular has been lauded again and again. I certainly appreciated the effort she went to recently to recolor some of her early work for the Bernie Krigstein collection Messages in a Bottle (that's Reed Crandall art above, colored by Marie Severin).

Marie Severin put in a lot of time as an artist on Marvel's Sub-Mariner and Incredible Hulk, although she seemed most pleased to tackle humour. Above is a cover she drew for Marvel's Tower of Shadows, one of the earliest places I saw her artwork.

Her brother John Severin was one of the greatest inkers comic books have ever produced. There were a few times where the siblings were privileged to team up on projects, such as the Kull comic above, penciled by Marie & inked by John. In interviews, Marie would frequently call those Kull issues her favourite experience working at Marvel because was working with her brother. She was a talented woman and by every account an extremely likeable person. Rest in peace, Ms. Severin.

RIP: Gary Friedrich

Comic book writer Gary Friedrich has died.

Friedrich had plenty of detractors during his career, but I've never had the heart to be one of them. Sure, he wrote the fascinatingly-misguided Gunhawks series for Marvel and he was never well-suited to super hero material, as his turns on Incredible Hulk, Captain America and X-Men proved. He also struggled as the follow-up to Jim Steranko's Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., telling stories which were visibly straining the efforts of artist Frank Springer to emulate innovative storytelling.

Yet Friedrich did have some talent when outside of the typical super hero format. He wrote all of Marvel's 70s-era war comics: Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, Captain Savage and His Leatherneck Raiders and Combat Kelly and the Deadly Dozen; sometimes he did very well in that genre with thoughtful parallels to the contemporary situation in Vietnam. Other times he missed the mark.

His western work - outside of the aforementioned Gunhawks - had a bit more pep than most Marvel westerns and he toiled for a time on all of Marvel's big names - most prominently the super hero-esque Ghost Rider but also Kid Colt, Outlaw, Rawhide Kid, Two-Gun Kid and the revival of Outlaw Kid. His Monster of Frankenstein was very good and he's definitely going to be remembered for his creation of the Johnny Blaze version of Ghost Rider, hands-down his most significant contribution to Marvel Comics.

Followers of this blog may recall I reviewed Friedrich & Ditko's Morlock 2001 and the Midnight Men #3 and rather enjoyed it; I also covered his Fright #1 and poked fun at some bad continuity in one of his Rawhide Kid stories.

Rest in peace, Mr. Friedrich.

Rest in Peace Russ Heath

Russ Heath died three days ago, 91 years of age. He was one of the last few remaining artists who worked on Atlas Comics in the 1950s and Atlas, as my blog archives will bear out, is a passion of mine.

Heath's earliest art is barely recognizable with his eventual style but he did find his footing extremely quickly. From the 1950s to the 2010s, he had an immensely well-honed style with very clean lines but plenty of detail. As an artist who worked for the major comic book publishers, his style of realism wasn't a terrific fit for the kind of super hero comics which overwhelmed the industry from the 1960s onwards but the few times he did delve into super heroes he made it work.

Heath is going to be best-remembered for his war comics work (particulary DC's Sgt. Rock) but I enjoyed his Atlas horror comics the most. His art had a way of appearing light and almost humorous about ghastly subject matter, but when the time came to convey something horrific on the panel, he always came through. The above from "On with the Dance" (Menace #2, 1953) was the first of his horror stories I read and remains a personal favourite; from then on, I always paid close attention to any story bearing his signature.

I've only made one trip to San Diego Comic-Con (and I probably won't ever go back) and was present at the 2009 SDCC ceremony where Heath was presented with the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame award; it was easily the highlight of the entire Eisner ceremony. After his name was announced, Heath took a very long time to shuffle up to the podium, accept the honour, and with little more than a terse 'thank you' departed. I visited his booth the following day to congratulate him on the honour and to purchase one of his prints, which he autographed for me.

With 60+ years of comic book art credits to his name, Heath has left behind an enormous legacy. Among that legacy are several pages of original comic art which is now in possession of my employers, the University of Calgary Archives & Special Collections. Heath is going to be remembered.

Finding One's Meaning in the Video/Movie Guide

Before resources like the Internet Movie Database existed, your best hope for understanding the length, width, breadth and height of filmdom was through one of many video/movie guides. They were ubiquitous, not only on bookstore shelves but even convenience store racks. They tended to range about 1000 pages and were printed on cheap newsprint with easily-smudged black ink. Depending on the design, you could fit 8-10 films on a single page as they didn't offer complete cast lists and only the briefest of plot summaries. Critical commentary was frequently limited to the star rating chosen by the editors, but sometimes they would pause to note something particularly wonderful about a film. Better still, there were those terse put-downs of movies, a devastating slight against the film which could settle the picture's reputation in your mind with only a single line of text.

I loved those books.

We had a few video/movie guides as I was growing up. I'm not sure when I began taking an interest in them, but around the age of ten I was leafing through them. By the age of twelve I would read them practically cover-to-cover. I particularly enjoyed guides which were sorted by genre; you could tell where the 'science fiction/fantasy' section was from the dark smears on the outside leaves, worn down from the hours I had spent pouring over them. Likewise, you could easily find the 'western' section by its pristine white pages.

Even if the book were simply an A to Z of film, there were particular places in the alphabet where I would pause. Having an interest in science fiction, 'space,' 'star' and 'invasion' were good places to search. I read with fascination about movies from the horror genre, always certain I would never have the stomach to sit through one. I began to have a sense of what exactly was out there in the world of film and what was considered good or bad within it. I didn't truly become a film aficionado until I watched my first Alfred Hitchcock picture, but even at the time, movies fascinated me. Renting a movie was still a novelty in those days, a rare treat. Boning up on what existed in the world of film gave me ideas of titles to locate at our local video stores.

Of course, there was one movie I held in esteem throughout my childhood, a picture which figured in many of my earliest memories. I can remember the sense of crushing disappointment I had when I made a point of looking it up in the video/movie guide one day. To my horror I read this:

Star Wars (1977)

I was speechless. 1977??? How could it be? I was certain I had seen the movie copyrighted to 1978. Perhaps I had simply owned a Kenner Star Wars toy with a 1978 production date, but somehow, at some point, I had believed Star Wars first came out in 1978. I compared one video/movie guide to another and each confirmed the fact: Star Wars had been originally released in 1977. A year before my birth. A year and a few months, in fact.

I was young enough at the time that I still played with my Star Wars toys and scoured used toy sales for other kids' cast-offs. Marvel Comics' Star Wars was the first comic book I began avidly collecting, attempting to build a complete set of issues. I didn't watch the movies too frequently (the only copies my family owned were those we taped off television in the late 80s) but we watched them at least once per year. At the time I made my discovery about the year of Star Wars' release, Star Wars was still an active presence in my life and would continue to be so until I went to college.

I realize now that I had been so willing to believe Star Wars had come out in 1978 because I was attempting to attach some higher meaning to my affection for the movies. It wasn't enough, apparently, that they were just good films - I wanted to believe Star Wars and I had come into the world together, that there was something verging on the spiritual about my connection to those motion pictures. And there wasn't, not really.

I'm hardly alone in this; certainly not alone in an irrational fervor about Star Wars, but I, like most of us, was trying to figure out my place in the world, a sense of meaning and purpose. I had no concept of what I would do for a living until after my high school years, so I frequently looked to my hobbies to define myself.

Even after I found my career, I flirted with the idea that my hobbies somehow revealed cosmic truths about my identity. There's a website called Mike's Amazing World of Comics which enables people to sort comic book releases by month & year. Visitors are encouraged to use this feature in order to find out what comic books were on sale the month they were born. How could I resist finding out? As a comic book fan, as someone who wound up being employed by Marvel Comics for eight years, surely there would be something there that would... explain who I am. Some piece of the puzzle. That I would click on the 'filter' button, see my favourite comic book story was printed the same month I was born and exclaim, 'Aha! It all makes sense!'

Okay, I was born the month Michael Korvac died. That's... something...?

There were some decent comic books published the month I was born. None that I would consider to be 'great.' And anyway, my favourite comic book story was first published when I was four years old.

It's a human thing to want to find patterns. Everything from astrology to numerology to fortune cookies are designed to appeal to our disbelief in randomness, our mistrust of coincidence, our willingness to find or invent purpose and meaning in items which are inconsequential.

I am grateful, then, to my family's video/movie guide for teaching me a lesson about my identity. If I had been born the same year as Star Wars, I fear I would have internalized that information and forced it to remain part of my identity as I grew up. It's good that I realized I was in error and rejected the idea. It's better to have your eyes open, searching for meaning than to center your life around a fanciful lie you want to believe. It was certainly easier for me to let go of Star Wars in college because I had disconnected myself from the idea that it held a place in my origin.

When my older sister turned 30 my parents were struggling to find something to tack-on to her birthday present that year, when they decided to simply buy her the movie which won the Academy Award for Best Picture the year she was born. Amused by this, I checked up to see what had won the Award in 1978: The Deer Hunter. I had never seen it but knew it wasn't exactly a happy film. I let my parents know that I expected them to buy me a copy of The Deer Hunter when I was thirty and they did - but I don't think I discovered anything more about who I am from that motion picture. Nor did I expect to. "This is this," philosophizes De Niro's character in The Deer Hunter, and that pragmatism has some weight. Movies are movies. Art is art. Art might help you find the tools to express your identity, but you and the art are not the same thing.

"See this? This is this. This ain't something else. This is this."

I've looked beyond popular culture to world events to see what was happening in 1978, what kind of environment I was born into, something which might give me a greater sense of identity. I suppose I feel like a blank slate; I no longer identify myself by the media I consume. How then do I define myself? Through my Christian faith? But how has my faith journey been unique? Having been born into a Christian home and never rejected faith, hasn't it always been there?

And then this year I finally found something which happened in 1978 that might help me make sense of my identity going forward. It wasn't rooted in popular culture or notable enough to earn a footnote in a newspaper. But it was rooted in my family and in faith.

Forty years ago, my aunt & uncle went to Angola to serve as missionaries.

This year, I decided I would do the same.

Skrulls! is on Comixology! Right now!

Going back to 2008, this was a quasi-saga quasi-handbook one shot originally released to tie-in with the Secret Invasion crossover and I was part of the team of writers.

Skrulls! (2008) #1

Ever since the dawning of the Marvel Age of heroes, the Skrulls have been known as scheming, conniving, insidious interlopers in the affairs not just of Earth, but the whole universe. Now, get the Skrulls' side of the story! Who are they, what drives them, and what are their ultimate goals? Who are their heroes, and who are their villains? And what will become of their clash between religion and modernity - manifest in their relentless pursuit of the Earth as the final prize - when it spills over into universal mayhem? SKRULLS! helps answer these questions and gives you the clues to ask even more!

You can buy a copy at Comixology right here!

Manly Wade Wellman's Lee Granger, Jungle King!

I began talking about Manly Wade Wellman yesterday. As noted there, he worked for a while in the comic book industry. Fawcett Comics were his patrons and he did a number of text stories (some about Captain Marvel) plus a number of comic book heroes.

As I've been using this blog to occasionally feature Angola in the Comics, when I first learned Wellman had been born in Angola I wondered if any of his comic books touched upon that background. And as it turns out, he did write a jungle adventure hero character for Fawcett!

The hero in question is Lee Granger, Jungle King who appeared in every issue of Slam-Bang Comics: #1-7 (1940). When the series ended he popped up in Master Comics #7-10 (1940-41), then entered comic book limbo. Slam-Bang Comics was populated entirely by action-adventure heroes and, as comics history has always been biased towards super heroes, none of the characters featured in Slam-Bang Comics went on to fame.

The Grand Comics Database credits Wellman as authoring the first Lee Granger story (Slam-Bang Comics #1) and he said in an interview that it was the first script he ever sold to Fawcett, but none of the stories featured creator credits (or story titles for that matter) and no one is certain whether or not Wellman wrote the other tales. The art is thought to have been done by Jack Binder, but not confirmed. Essentially, these are anonymous comic book stories. The Digital Comic Museum has all of Lee Granger's appearances so I've just read through them all. You may have questions about the material:

Well, how about it? Is Lee Granger, Jungle King set in Angola? Nope. In fact it's set in a very generic kind of fantasy-land-Africa.

That's too bad. But are there interesting flashes of insight about Africa, as you'd expect from someone who was born there? No, no more so than any other jungle adventure hero series. The author might as well have been born in Alaska.

Okay. But it isn't racist, is it? Er, it's about as racist as any other comic book from 1940-41.

You're depressing me. Why even bother looking back at Lee Granger? Oh, there's a good reason: it is the weirdest jungle hero series I've ever read!

WOW! Weirder than Fletcher Hanks' Fantomah? ...I meant, it is the second-weirdest jungle hero series I've ever read!

With that out of the way, let's go!

Above is the masthead for the first story and it shows you how Lee will be depicted for pretty much all of his adventures - bare-chested and clad in blue jodhpurs. We open on "noted scientist-explorer" Lee flying over "Africa's most dangerous jungle" unaware Arabs who are trying to protect their secret slaving operations have planted a time bomb on his plane. The Arab slave trade in Africa was pretty much over by 1940 but boy, it lived on a lot longer in pulps and comic books. Anyway, the bomb explodes and shatters the plane into pieces, yet leaves Lee unscathed. He has no parachute but improvises one using his jacket. That doesn't sound too likely to me, but all of this is waaaay more believable than what's to follow.

Alighting on the ground, he's confronted by a tribe of pygmies. Pushing aside the chief's spear, the spear's tip brushes against the chief's chest and poisons him. Granger works quickly to save the chief by lancing out the poison. "You are no white devil - but a white friend." says the chief. The pygmies invite Lee back to their village but the huts are too small for Lee. Lee builds himself a house from hand-crafted bricks (no idea how long it took him to do this; having built brick buildings in Africa myself, that should be the better part of a week) and the pygmies, impressed by his "wisdom" ask him for lessons. He teaches them how to domesticate zebras (quite a feat! zebras are notoriously difficult to domesticate) and how to forge iron (no idea what their spear-heads were made of previously). Then with "the acid, and these parts made from various metals, we will have electricity." Yes, within no time, Lee Granger has built electrical devices out of nothing. Soon the entire village has been revamped into brick homes and a flag with a large 'G' flies over Lee's home. Credit where due: the pygmies don't speak in any kind of 'Negro' dialogue popular in stories like these, nor are they drawn with the 'big lip' style found in other Fawcett comics such as Captain Marvel. The pygmies are more problematic in that they're physically inferior to Lee - drawn like children. It's a bit patronizing and emasculating. But let's keep going...

One day a lion attacks a pygmy. Lee saves the pygmy and ties up the lion. Bringing him to his laboratory, Lee hooks up the lion to a machine and runs electrical currents through its body. "This lion will be almost human." Lee claims. How on Earth can he know that? What is this machine? How could he possibly have built from scratch something sophisticated enough to increase an animal's intelligence to human levels? Darned if I know; but it works: the lion can speak! The now-intelligent lion takes the name Eric; he will be Lee's supporting cast going forward.

Anyway, the Arab slavers from the beginning of the tale return, but Lee, Eric and the pygmies vanquish them. The pygmy chief offers to guide Lee out of the jungle but Lee intends to remain. "Then we shall make you our king!" says the chief. Hence the series' subtitle: 'Jungle King.' And so ends the first story.

I won't go into as much detail about the other stories, especially as I have no idea whether Wellman authored them. In Slam-Bang Comics #2, the daughter of a consul general in 'Sudana' (Sudan?) is held prisoner by the bandit Boko tribe. Lee and Eric save her and the pygmies declare "We shall make her our queen!" but instead Lee returns her to her home. This establishes a pattern for future stories as Lee is constantly meeting attractive white women in the jungle, then parting ways without so much as a chaste kiss.

But now we're at Slam-Bang Comics #3 my friends and this - this is where it gets truly wild. This is the only time Lee Granger rated the front cover for one of his appearances and it might be the best of all Lee Granger stories; not saying much, right? The villains, who you can make out on the cover, are called the Djinn (after Jinn) and these bat-like humanoids threaten this month's lady-in-distress Ameera, a lost Arab girl (the demonizing of Arab men while lusting for Arab women is a well-worn trope of Orientalism). Ameera's father and tribe were all wiped out by the Djinn, so Lee prepares his pygmies for combat, arming them with anti-air weapons (spear-launchers) and a one-man aircraft (called a "flying suit") which allows Lee to battle the Djinn mid-air with his sword and shield. At this point, Lee building a flying suit from scratch should be small potatoes next to giving Eric human-level intelligence, right? But he's about to top it.

The Djinn overwhelm Lee and carry him away as a prisoner. Ameera plans to save him with another flying suit which she somehow knows about. But Ameera doesn't intend to wear this flying suit herself - she equips Eric with it. Yeah, the talking lion is now a talking, flying lion!!! The Djinn's king offers to let Granger live if he gives them his scientific secrets. Granger refuses, of course, and Ameera & Eric fly in to save Lee at the last moment. Ameera hands Lee a pistol and he shoots the king dead with one shot. And then, because this is the last page of the story, the Djinn are just... beaten. Without the king I guess the rest of the Djinn just... don't matter?

Onward to Slam-Bang Comics #4. This time we have a small party of white people exploring the jungle when the warlike Kolu tribe attack, kill one of their party and take the remaining two prisoner (need I even mention one of the two is a beautiful white woman?). Lee and Eric head to the rescue because "It's our duty to save them, Eric. They're white people." I guess as a white guy it is kind of his mess to clean up, but the implication is that Lee wouldn't feel duty-bound to involve himself if the prisoners were anything other than white? Anyway, Lee saves the man and woman from the Kolus and helps continue their expedition, battling giant a giant gorilla. Finally they arrive at a series of ruins which they wanted to explore. This leads to a particularly bad piece of comics storytelling which I've presented above. In the first panel, the woman tries to open a door; in the second, the ceiling collapses. Without the text, you can't really tell what's happening. The doorway is just barely in frame in the first panel and the wall is just a featureless void. In the second panel, you'd assume the door and wall had exploded, not that the ceiling had fallen in. Comic books were still a young format in 1940, but comics storytelling itself wasn't; this sort of lousy storytelling is what helped ensure comic books would continue to be considered inferior to comic strips.

Slam-Bang Comics #5 pits Lee against two white hunters who want to capture Eric, as a talking lion is quite a novelty. The most notable information here is that the pygmy chief finally gets a name: Jabor. (hopefully not as a corruption of 'jabber') There's a rare appearance by a female pygmy, but for some reason all the pygmies in this story are coloured pink - but the Kolus reappear and are still brown. In Slam-Bang Comics #6 we return to the kind of high fantasy camp of the Djinn story as Lee and his white-woman-of-the-month battle a woman leading an army of massive ants. In the end, Lee's ally kills the queen of the ants; on the one hand, that's a bad ass moment for a woman in a 1940 comic book; on the other hand, it's mostly done out of expediency to keep Lee from murdering a woman.

Slam-Bang Comics #7's white-woman-of-the-month is a news reporter looking for a story on Lee. I kind of like the above panel because of how nonchalant Eric is. "I was waiting for you." I'd like to imagine Eric's voice has a very flat vocal register.

Anyway, moving to Lee's new home, in Master Comics #7 the villains are the Leopard Men, Africans dressed in animal skins (likely inspired by the Leopard Society). A white woman who commands an army of elephants calls for Lee's help and there are a few notable moments... like Eric 'talking' to an elephant (we only see Eric's side of the conversation) and the above sequence where the artist suddenly attempted to channel one of Jack Kirby's inventive page layouts by depicting a Leopard Man hurled between panel borders by the elephants. At least the art is improving!

Master Comics #8 pits Lee against gold plunderers and Jabor gets a moment of heroism by blowing up the plunderers' camp with dynamite. Master Comics #9 again pits Lee against the Kolus as they build a dam to try and starve the pygmies. Finally, we get to Master Comics #10, wherein the feature is dubbed 'Jungle King,' no longer prefacing Lee's name. Appropriately, this final story looks back to the first one as Lee has rebuilt the engine from his plane. Using a newly-discovered oil well on the pygmies' land (oil and gold? those pygmies should be living large-- er, living comfortably today) Lee builds a new airplane. Never mind that a few months ago we saw Lee had built two flying suits for himself and Eric, building this new airplane is treated as a big deal. "From the air we can patrol the region better," Eric notes, as though they had no means of aerial surveillance. But for this final month we have a new kind of enemy for Lee to face -- very hazily-defined Europeans! Yep, by this period the comics were beginning to stand up to the fascists in Europe but weren't quite ready to call them out by name. The artist on this final story seems to be a completely different person than whoever did the previous 10 stories.

The story in Master Comics #10 ended by asserting Lee and Eric would return in the next issue of Master Comics. They didn't. They have never appeared again. And, sure, good riddance to them. These were some lazily-crafted and lazily-drawn stories, no question about it. But man, when this series went wild, as in the Djinn story, it had some promise. If the series had embraced a little more weirdness, who knows - it could have been a diamond in the rough. As it is, it's not as bad as some comic book stories of the time and genre. The talking lion Eric is appealing. That's about all I can say in its favour.

The Wellmans of Angola

As someone who loves to read and occasionally write, my interest in Angola eventually led me to the Wellman family, a family of published authors with a decade-long link to Angola.

Patriarch Frederick Creighton Wellman (1873-1960) was a specialist in tropical medicine who transported his family to Angola in 1896 (at the time the nation was usually called 'Portuguese West Africa'). Three of his four children were born in Kamundongo during his nine years there. Unfortunately, Frederick was a very free spirit - a philanderer who earned the nickname "Casanova of Tropical Medicine." He and his wife divorced a few years after leaving Angola. At the same time he was practicing medicine he also published a number of novels under the pseudonym 'Cyril K. Scott.' Here are a couple of his books. His Wikipedia article also asserts he performed scientific research for the Benguela railway, though I haven't found corroboration for what exactly he did. It sounds like he was quite a 'character' as he was married four times and served in several overseas locales. And so, it shouldn't be too surprising that his four children lived pretty notable lives.

His eldest, Paul Wellman (1895-1966), was the only child born outside Angola. However, his overseas upbringing doesn't seem to have had a great impact upon his later life. He became an author but was almost entirely devoted to the western genre. Several of his novels were adapted into motion pictures, the most famous being The Comancheros (1961) starring John Wayne himself. Here's his books at Goodreads.

Second-born was Frederick Lovejoy Wellman (1897-1994). Like his father, he became a doctor. Unlike his father, he didn't go into medicine - he became a phytopathologist! His name still entertains some prestige as the Wellman Award handed out to phytopathologists is named after him.

Third-born was Alice Wellman (1900-1984). It was only late in life during the 1970s that Alice took an interest in writing. Unlike most of her family, her writing was specifically focused on her childhood in Angola. She wrote several works of children's literature set in Angola. It's a pity that by the time she began writing these books the nation was being completely revamped by the collapse of the Portuguese - the Angola she knew became a thing of the past within a few years of her first novel's publication. Here's her books at Goodreads.

Finally, the youngest Wellman - and the one who first drew me into investigating the family. Manly Wade Wellman (1903-1986) had the most prolific career of the Wellmans, writing not only novels but all sorts of short stories for pulp magazines. He also toiled in comic books, making him perhaps the first Angola-born person to work in the comic book industry? He was nominated for a Hugo Award in 1959 and one of his stories was adapted for TV's The Twilight Zone. He did occasionally draw from experiences growing up in Angola, most significantly in his first published tale, "When the Lion Roared" in a 1927 Thrilling Tales magazine - but his best-known writing was for the fantasy genre. Here's his bibliography.

More on Manly Wade Wellman tomorrow...