Marie Severin, 1929-2018

The comics community lost a true legend and pioneer with the passing of Marie Severin yesterday at age 89.

Marie was a pioneer for women creators in comics. She began her career in the 50’s as a colorist for EC comics, where her brother John worked as an artist. In fact, Marie colored the original issues of MAD during it’s Harvey Kurtzman comic book incarnation, as well as many of EC’s famous horror and adventure comics. She would of course go on to become an important part of Marvel Comics, working as head colorist through the 60’s but also penciling and inking various titles during a 30 plus year career there. Eventually she turned over the coloring duties to do more drawing for Marvel, working on virtually all of their biggest characters at some time or another.

Marie was a talented and well rounded artist, but she was especially good at humor. Sadly, she never contributed her own art to MAD, but she did do a lot of really great work for Marvel’s various humor titles like Crazy and Not-Brand-Ecch.

I never met Marie but I did work on a Marvel comic book mini-series called The Coneheads with her in 1994. I won’t rehash that story here but if you want to read about it, here you go. She inked my pencils for the four issue series, and it was a real education comparing the copies of my penciled pages to her inks, seeing where she corrected my drawings and made me look like I knew what I was doing. Best of all when it came time to divvy up the original art (pencilers got 75% of the art, inkers 25%) we talked on the phone and she told me she would sign all the pages Marvel sent her and then send them on to me. So, for a while I had the complete run of original art for that series, with 25% of the pages signed by Marie. Unfortunately I was pretty dumb back in those days and when a collector contacted me about buying all the original art for that series I sold him the entire run including the pages Marie signed… something I have regretted for years and never more than right now. That’s why these images of some of the original Coneheads pages are from Heritage and other sources. I could have sworn I kept some of the Marie signed pages but I can’t find them anywhere, so I think that is just wishful thinking.

I was sad to hear that Marie passed away. She was very nice, supportive and generous on the phone all those years ago. She was also a great talent.