A confession, first and foremost…I never met or knew John Severin. His sister, Marie, however, barely knew me but disliked me intensely.
Why, you ask? Because she willfully misunderstood a comment I made to her about her brother, a remark of glowing admiration. This remark was made in the mid 1970s, and despite the efforts of the fabulous Flo Steinberg, Marie’s likely best, or perhaps only friend, to explain her misunderstanding, she died hating me.
Oh well.
That said, I worship the work of John Severin, and have since I first became aware of it in his work at Marvel in the mid 1960s. I used the word “crusty” in my description of what I saw in his work to his sister, and maybe that read as an insult, but it was meant as a profound compliment.
While all too many comic books featured textureless and all too slick imagery, with no real humanity, Severin, in his own pencils and inks, and in his inks over others seemed to represent a rare human scale, a bit shabby and tad used, in a medium that tended to reward polish over nuance.
About a year after he started appearing in Jack and Stan’s stuff, I discovered his work for Kurtzman and Feldstein at EC—and that was all she wrote.
To be clear, I arrived at the EC stuff because of, to use Gil Kane’s perfect descriptor, the bravura work of Wallace Wood and Al Williamson. I lacked, at that early age, the eyes to identify the qualities in Harvey Kurtzman’s work as writer/artist/editor, not to mention the brilliance of Bernard Krigstein or Johnny Craig.
It was all about WEIRD SCIENCE and WEIRD FANTASY.
And then I saw Severin’s adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s short story, THE MILLION YEAR PICNIC. Eschewing the Alex Raymond pulpishness of Williamson, or the sensual and obsessive antics of Wood, Severin instead delivers a profoundly human and deeply moving portrayal of a family, with technology and costuming that neither overpowers the narrative, nor interferes with the character’s narrative journey.
Along with my then nascent embrace of the work of Toth and Krigstein, my appreciation of this job might very well demonstrate my ascension to a more sophisticated understanding of comics, genre be damned…and the development of a more studied, detached and critical eye.
This wasn’t sophisticated graphics influenced by industrial design, like Toth…or emotional abstraction in the manner of Krigstein. Rather, Severin brought a matter of fact, mid-century American—socially and politically conservative American, to be very sure—approach to everything he did.
And then, his work with and for Kurtzman in FRONTLINE COMBAT and TWO-FISTED TALES came to light.
That same restraint, that same verisimilitude which informed the work of his with which I was already familiar seemed to have its birth here in these two extraordinary runs. His own penciled and inked stories, as well as the brilliant collaborations with Will Elder, are among the greatest examples of the all too frequently ignored genre of war comics.
This work had a grit, a human scale, a common truth that no other war comics before or since possessed. This, I’ve come to gather from anecdotes, as the result of a running argument between Kurtzman and Severin, two men who today we might call by that awful neologism “frenemies,” who shared a genuine mutual respect in tandem with diametrically opposed worldviews, deeply liberal and profoundly conservative, respectively.
It’s a trope of EC fandom to, if not dismiss, then to disdain the work that Severin and his collaborator, Colin Dawkins, delivered in (THE NEW) Two-Fisted Tales, after Kurtzman was sucked away by the labor intensive, sudden and surprise success of MAD comics.
This is unfair to all parties concerned. To be sure, these were not issues or stories bearing the detachment, the depth nor the irony that was Kurtzman’s hallmark. For the record, I regard Kurtzman as a singular genius, for whom Severin, Elder, Davis, Wood and the rest of the squad who delivered material to the three books that are Kurtzman’s legacy EC did the best work of their careers and their lives.
That said, I personally would have killed to see more Ruby Ed Coffey stories, and I know for damned sure I’m not alone.
Severin’s career was a long one, and I had the pleasure of working with him just once, on a special stand alone issue of AMERICAN CENTURY, a book length western drawn and presented by a man in his early eighties with the same verve and style that had attracted me in work produced fifty years ago.
In the late aughts, I was in conversation with his wife, Michelina, who agreed to have John do the artwork for a counterfactual eight-page story entitled GEORGE ARMSTRONG CUSTER: THE LATER YEARS. A few weeks later, she called back, to say that John would be unable to do the job due to declining health.
I ended up doing the artwork…but needless to say, as a fanboy in this regard, it would have been swell to have this eight page snark fest drawn and quartered by this master.
When John Severin died, his passing was one more milestone in the vanishing world of the men who made our industry possible. He got the usual accolades, but because he wasn’t one of those bombastic crowd pleasers, the attention was limited, not to say muted.
John Powers Severin (1921 – 2012)
So perhaps it’s time to give this genuine giant, a man who contributed enormously to the sort of comics that seem to have fallen out of fashion with a fickle and all too fatuous audience his due.
And perhaps, some of that audience will outgrow their obsession with that bombast and embrace the subtle humanity of John P. Severin.
As ever, I remain,
Howard Victor Chaykin…a Prince among Kings.
