Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the six hundred and ninety-fifth installment where we examine comic book legends and whether they are true or false.

Sorry for the Labor Day delay in this week's Legends. Click here for Part 1 of this week's legends.

COMIC LEGEND:

Marie Severin started at EC Comics in the 1940s

STATUS:

I'm Going With False

This is a weird one, because it is possible that I played a small part in this falsehood being perpetuated recently. When I did CBR's article about the death of the great Marie Severin, I credited A Moon, a Girl...Romance #9 as Marie Severin's first coloring work at EC Comics. That book came out in 1949.

Since then, I've seen plenty of obituaries of Severin, like this one from the New York Times, that credit that same timeline:

She started in the industry in 1949 as a colorist for EC Comics, working with her brother, John Severin, an artist known for his realistic war and western comics. She was one of a handful of female artists who gained prominence during comics’ so-called Silver Age, from the mid-1950s until the early ’70s.

Now, hopefully all of these newspapers were just doing what I did, which was to credit the available comic book credit information that we have, like the amazing Grand Comics Database, which lists Severin as the colorist on that issue. The GCD is an awesome, awesome website, but at the same time, just like everyone (certainly myself included), it occasionally gets things wrong, and I think there was a mistake here (I've since edited my own write-up on Severin's passing).

The famous tale of John Severin recruiting his younger sister to color for him at EC Comics, leading to her getting a regular gig as a colorist there is almost certainly correct.

Here's the problem, though, John Severin wasn't actually WORKING at EC Comics yet in 1949.

His first story appeared in Two-Fisted Tales #19, which came out in late 1950...

In his awesome book on Marie Severin, Marie Severin: The Mirthful Mistress of Comics, Dewey Cassell quotes EC historian Roger Hill on the topic, "I was told by Al Feldstein years ago that the pre-trend stuff and up until around late 1951 was colored by either the artists who turned in the stories, or left up to the engraver. I think in Kurtzman's case, he colored his own work early on and probably most of his covers all the way through. Don't forget, Kurtzman did color roughs for each of his covers. The story about John telling Harvey about Marie is true, so she definitely couldn't have been at EC before her brother. I have seen original EC silverprints and I seem to remember that early silverprints were hand-colored, but with no marking codes on them for the engravers. The engraver/printed would have to match the color guide as best he could, which left room for errors and deviations. When Marie took over, she started using the color codes to make sure the engravers/printers were following the designated colors correctly. It took the guess work out of it, if you know what I mean. My personal opinion is that Marie came on board EC in early 1952."

That all makes sense to me (and the dates check out with the bits that we KNOW Severin colored, since she talked about them later on), so yeah, whatever the specific date that she started at EC Comics, it was definitely in the 1950s, not the 1940s.

Thanks to Dewey and Roger for the help and my apologies if my article about Marie Severin put anyone on the wrong path in their own obituaries.

Check out my latest TV Legends Revealed - Was Roseanne Barr's character almost killed off in the second season of her original sitcom, Roseanne?

Also check back soon for the final part of this week's Comic Book Legends Revealed! Also a Marie Severin legend!