In my estimation, Bill Everett is the most underrated talent of the Golden Age. His style continued to improve right up until his untimely death. Back in the ‘90s, I bought five sets of five issues each of GA Marvel Comics on microfiche just so I could read Everett’s Sub-Mariner serial in its entirety, not just in dribs and drabs here and there. With the release of Marvel Masterworks Marvel Comics Vol. 6, I can now continue where I left off, and read Sub-Mariner stories I have never seen before. The ones in #21-24 aren’t as serial in nature as previous stories have been, but there’s still a certain amount of story-to-story continuity, more than in most of the other features.
#21: Namor and Betty infiltrate an American group of Nazi airline saboteurs (in a comic book cover dated July 1941, well before Pearl Harbor).
#22: Namor invents a miniature jeep for the U.S. army using Atlantian steam-driven technology, then he must keep the Nazis from stealing it.
#23: Laying off the Nazis for an issue, Namor must thwart the plans of a mad scientist who is experimenting on escaped asylum inmates to create a race of sub-mariners.
#24: Namor returns to Atlantis only to discover that the throne has been usurped by Daka, one of his uncles, and has allied Atlatian forces with the Seal People and (who else?) the Nazis. My favorite story of this volume.
There are other noteworthy stories in this volume as well (including a prose origin story written by Stan Lee for Simon & Kirby’s Vision), but I always read the Sub-Mariner ones first.
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My admiration for Bill Everett has really been growing over the last decade or so. Awhile back, I managed to get ahold of his entire run in the early 70's, none of which I had ever read before. I was stunned. I think of that as possibly his best work ever. Which makes it all the more criminal it tok so long for it to happen. A letter printed really said it all, when the person writing said, "After 49 unreadable issues, at last the book got good!" Of course, they also had some letters saying the exact opposite... but what do THEY know? Looking back at early-70's Marvel, I found Everett's year on SUB-MARINER a totally refreshing change from what their output had mostly become... bad writing, bad art, directionless storytelling, downbeat, depressing stories. Evertt's stuff was well-done on every level, exciting, and most of all, FUN. He may be the only person in the whole of the 70's who unashamedly showed Namor as a HERO, even to certain surface people!
I suspect Roy Thomas' lifelong obsession with origins caused him to feel Namor should ALWAYS be like he was in his earliest appearances-- angry, destructive, and thought of as a menace to the surface world. (It's kinda like those who prefer Batman BEFORE Robin became his partner...)
I remember thinking DC's WONDER WOMAN ARCHIVES finally "got it right", when, instead of reprinting stories acording to magazine, they collected ALL her appearances from various books-- ALL-STAR, SENSATION and her solo book. Which is what they should have done with SUPERMAN and BATMAN in the first place.
So I figured, Marvel had the chance to "do it right" with SUB-MARINER... but they fumbled the ball. I have ZERO interest in reading anything else that appeared in MARVEL MYSTERY, and would have to buy 3 Masterworks books just to read the first storyline in its entirety! Insane.
What blew my mind a year or so back was discovering that Marvel has put out close to 2 DOZEN Masterworks books all featurine Golden Age Sub-Mariner stories. Isn't that nuts? From nothing to way too much. No way I can afford any of that stuff right now...
Someone suggested to me that, since DC did a chronological BATMAN collection (about 15 years after the separate BATMAN and DETECTIVE hardbounds), Marvel may do the same with Subby.
I think the difference with Marvel is, and I say this based on having read the 2 books of THE GOLDEN AGE OF MARVEL COMICS, 80-90% of their output back then was junk. Maybe some of it was fun, but the stuff Everett & Kirby did was so far above and ahead of everything else, it makes these comprehensive anthology collections seem like a rip-off. (I wish the SA Marvel site was still up... you should see what I was doing with the "Reprints" pages.)
Yes, much of what Marvel published in the Golden Age was junk. It's interesting from an historical perspective, and also because so many of their one- and two-shot characters are being brought back in series such as The Twelve and All-Winners Squad: Band of Heroes. I have those two GAoM tpbs, too, and I was initially suprprised at how much of that material (at least 50%, I'd say) has been reprinted elsewhere before (as if those were the only stories worth reprinting).
I can see how DC started down the road of two (or more) separate Batman and Superman archives, but I wish they'd merge them going forward.
I enjoyed Everett's work on the Sub-Mariner stories in the new Essential Sub-Mariner. The were good comics, and a change of gears indeed. I'd have to say that Stan Lee did not present Everett's work in the best possible light. He seemed to be overly self-consciuos that Everett's style was old-fashioned and outdated, and he virtually apologises for it on the first page of Everett's stint.
He was setting Everett up for a fall, in leading the readers to expect something 'not as good' as the then current house-style Marvel comics. For myself, I wouldn't have noticed that Everett's style was so different. It wasn't just Everett's drawing style Stan was referring to, but the well-paced plot-driven story (rather than angst-ridden) that he was probably referring to. Perhaps if Lee had actually plotted and written it himself he could have put his name to a storytelling style that he was more comfortable being associated with, and wouldn't have to apologise for a great creators work!
Henry said:
That is addressed in that 1970s Rolling Stone article we looked at elsewhere:
That very much ties into the prescient themes in the article that the 'Fan elite' were taking these heroes down darker and darker paths. (Although, as you say, Namor was very dark at the start of his career, anyway.)