| Bill Everett | |
|---|---|
 Everett in a 1940sTimely Comics promotional image | |
| Born | William Blake Everett (1917-05-18)May 18, 1917 Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Died | February 27, 1973(1973-02-27) (aged 55) New York City, U.S. |
| Area | Writer,Penciller,Inker |
| Pseudonym(s) | William Blake, Everett Blake Willie Bee Bill Roman |
Notable works | Sub-Mariner Zombie Daredevil |
| Awards | The Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame, 2000 |
| Children | 3 |
William Blake Everett (/ˈɛvərɪt/; May 18, 1917 – February 27, 1973) was an American comic book writer and artist best known for creatingNamor the Sub-Mariner, as well as co-creatingDaredevil and the zombieSimon Garth with writerStan Lee forMarvel Comics.
Everett was born on May 18, 1917, inCambridge, Massachusetts.[1][2] Everett, a fabulist who spun fanciful stories of his youth, claimed at various points to have graduated from high school inArizona,[3] or instead to have joined theU.S. Merchant Marine at ages ranging from 15 to 17, among other tales. In actuality, he was born at the Cambridge Hospital (renamedMount Auburn Hospital in 1947) and raised in nearbyWatertown, Massachusetts, with his parents Robert Maxwell Everett and Elaine Grace Brown Everett,[4] and his sister Elizabeth, born in 1915.[5] His 300-year-oldNew England family includedEverett, Massachusetts' namesake,Edward Everett, who after serving as president ofHarvard University becamegovernor of Massachusetts and, in 1852, theU.S. Secretary of State.[4] It also includes Edward's son, MassachusettsCongressmanWilliam Everett; and the poetWilliam Blake.[6][7]
Everett's father ran a successful trucking business,[5] and when Everett was young the family bought a large summer home inKennebunkport, Maine.[8] Both parents supported the artistic talents of their son, whose reading tastes ran to the classics rather thanpulp novels orcomic strips, and included work bySamuel Taylor Coleridge andJack London.[8] He would later find artistic influence in such commercial magazine artists asMead Schaeffer,Dean Cornwell, and especiallyFloyd MacMillan Davis.[3]
At 12, in 1929, Everett contractedtuberculosis, and was pulled from sixth grade to go with his mother and his sister to Arizona, to recuperate for four months. They then returned to Massachusetts, but a recurrence of the disease sent the trio back West, first toPrescott, Arizona, and then toWickenburg, 60 miles away.[8] There, taking his first drink, Everett began the path to teenage alcoholism. Nonetheless, he became well enough by 16 to return home with his mother and sister to theBoston area, where his father, unscathed by theGreat Depression, had a large house inWest Newton. His alcoholism and natural rebelliousness caused his parents to remove him from high school at age 16, in his second year, and enroll him in 1934 at Boston'sVesper George School of Art. His inability to focus, however, led him to drop out in 1935, after a year-and-a-half of the program.[9]
That same year, his father died of acuteappendicitis, and the family, though remaining well-off, moved to an apartment back in Cambridge.[10] Everett knew his father "always wanted me to be acartoonist, and he died, unfortunately, before he saw that come true. But that was probably in back of the whole thing."[11]
Everett soon became a professional artist on the advertising staff of the Boston newspaperThe Herald-Traveler for $12 a week.[3] Soon afterward, he left to become a draftsman for the civil engineering firm The Brooks System, inNewton, Massachusetts.[3] From there he pursued work inPhoenix, Arizona, andLos Angeles, California, without success. He then returned east to New York City, where he again did newspaper advertising art, for theNew York Herald-Tribune.[3] He next became art editor forTeck Publications'Radio News magazine, then assistant art director underHerm Bollin inChicago, Illinois.[3] Fired for being, as Everett described, "too cocky", he returned to New York where he 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 forCentaur 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 theGolden Age of comic books. Everett co-created thesuperheroAmazing-Man at Centaur, working with companyart directorLloyd Jacquet, and drew the first five issues.[3]
Everett and other creators followed Jacquet to his new companyFunnies, 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 was 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....[12] 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."[13]
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 publisherMartin Goodman. The original eight-page story was expanded by four pages forMarvel Comics #1 (Oct. 1939), the first publication of what Goodman would eventually callTimely 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 withCarl Burgos'androidsuperhero theHuman Torch andJack Kirby andJoe Simon'sCaptain America. Everett soon introduced such supporting characters as New York City policewoman Betty Dean, a steady companion and occasional love-interest, and Namor's cousinNamora.[6]
Everett drew his star character in many issues ofSub-Mariner Comics, published first quarterly, then thrice-yearly and finally bimonthly, for issues #1–32 (Fall 1941 – June 1949).[14] When his work was interrupted by military service, stories were drawn byCarl Pfeufer.
Everett entered theU.S. Army forWorld War II military service in February 1942.[15] He attended Officer Candidate School atFort Belvoir, during which time he met Gwenn Randall, who was working for the Ordnance Department at thePentagon.[15] The couple married in 1944, when Everett returned from theEuropean theater of operations, and their first child, a daughter, was born shortly before he was shipped out to thePhilippines to fight in thePacific theater; he returned home in February 1946.[15] With money inherited from a great-uncle, Everett took some time off and traveled before settling inFairbury, Nebraska, his wife's hometown. "This was when I renewed my association with Martin Goodman, working by mail on a freelance basis, picking up the Sub-Mariner where I'd left off four years ago".[16] His first recorded post-war credit is writing and full art for the 12-page story "Sub-Mariner vs. Green-Out" inSub-Mariner Comics #21 (Fall 1946) – the third of three Sub-Mariner stories that issue, for whichSyd Shores drew the cover.[17] Everett was soon providing Sub-Mariner stories regularly for the solo title as well as forThe Human Torch,Marvel Mystery Comics and evenBlonde Phantom Comics.
Additionally, he drew the title feature in the three-issue spin-off seriesNamora (Aug.–Dec. 1948).[14]
Earlypseudonyms includedWillie Bee andBill Roman.[18]
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 withCaptain America and the Golden AgeHuman Torch inYoung Men #24 (Dec. 1953), during Atlas' mid-1950s attempt at reviving superheroes. Everett drew the Sub-Mariner feature throughYoung Men #28 (June 1954) and inSub-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.[14]
Everett also drew the features "Venus" and "Marvel Boy", as well as a large number of stories for Atlas'anthologicalhorror-fantasy series.[14] One such tale, "Zombie!,"[19] written by editor-in-chiefStan Lee and published inMenace #5, introduced the character Simon Garth, theZombie, who in the 1970s would be plucked from this one-shot story to star in Marvel's black-and-white horror-comics magazineTales of the Zombie.[20]
With writer-editor Lee, Everett co-created the Marvel superheroDaredevil, who debuted inDaredevil #1 (April 1964). Comics historian and formerJack Kirby assistantMark Evanier, investigating claims of Kirby's involvement in the creation of bothIron 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.[21]
Conversely, 2000s Marvel editor-in-chiefJoe Quesada said the cover had been created afterward. When Everett, he said, turned in his first-issue pencils extremely late, Brodsky andSpider-Man artistSteve 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."[22]
In an interview conducted by Marvel writer-editor and Everett's one-time roommateRoy 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 forDaredevil; hethought 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 asart director of Eton Paper Corporation inMassachusetts] 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.[23]
Within two years, however, Everett began penciling for Marvel once again, first on the character theHulk, inTales to Astonish, initially over Kirby layouts, and onDoctor Strange inStrange Tales. Readers during this 1960sSilver Age of comic books also became acquainted with his Golden Age and 1950s stories, which were reprinted first in the bookThe Great Comic Book Heroes byJules Feiffer (Dial Press, 1965), and then in the comic booksFantasy Masterpieces,Marvel Super-Heroes, andMarvel Tales.[14]
A multi-talented creator, he wrote issues #77-79 of Marvel'sSgt Fury and his Howling Commandos, inked Jack Kirby's pencilled drawings on Thor and Gene Colan's pencils on the Black Widow stories inAmazing Adventures, and colored several of Marvel's comics, including the first issue of the Silver Surfer.
Everett even returned to his enduring character, first inking Namor's adventures inTales to Astonish #85–86, then taking over full artistic duties for issues #87–91 and #94, and penciling issues #95–96. He then did complete stories – writing, penciling and inking – onSub-Mariner #50–55 and 57 (June 1972 – Nov. 1972; Jan. 1973), with script assists byMike Friedrich on two issues; and #58 (Feb. 1973), co-written withSteve Gerber and co-penciled withSam Kweskin as his health began to deteriorate for the final time. He co-wrote and inkedSub-Mariner #59 (March 1973), plotted #60 (April 1973), and co-wrote, co-penciled (with fellow Golden AgerWin Mortimer), and co-inked #61 (May 1973).[14] He had also been announced to draw an issue ofMarvel Team-Up starring Spider-Man and the Sub-Mariner, but, according to one contemporaneous report, "was not able to finish this one before his death."[24]
EditorRoy Thomas explained on the letters page ofSub-Mariner #61,
As you've no doubt noticed from the first three pages of this issue, Everett was back…and better than ever! And then, with only those three pages completed, [he] took ill. And, sad to say, it's the kind of illness that's going to keep him offSub-Mariner (or any mag) for a month or two to come."[25]
Despite Thomas's optimistic tone, that would be Everett's last work on the series. His final efforts on the character he created were five pages of pencils, inked by fellow Golden AgerFred Kida, that appeared posthumously inSuper-Villain Team-Up #1 (Aug. 1975).[14]
Artist Gene Colan said that Everett had been Lee's first choice to draw the horror seriesTomb of Dracula, which premiered in 1972 and for which Colan then lobbied successfully.[26]
Everett died on February 27, 1973, at the age of 55.[1][2]
!["Marvel [News]"](/mt/?noimg=&dark=on&url=http%3a%2f%2f1.bp.blogspot.com%2f-sFEU8viHzgc%2fUyZWgxUMcBI%2fAAAAAAAACgc%2fvXX5VHtedeM%2fs1600%2fcomicreader98-shores.jpg){kind=link}
