Previously ... on Marvel's Agents of SHIELD

THE SWINGING SIXTIES was a brilliant time to be growing up. Popular culture was suddenly being driven by young customers who wanted their music, fashion and movies to be different from their parents'. But it didn't happen overnight. It took a few years - from the 1962 release of The Beatles "Love Me Do" to around 1966 - to take hold properly.

For this 10-year old, Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD epitomised just about everything I was fascinated by at that age - Secret Agents; check. hi-tech intelligence organisation with cool acronym name; check. Sinister enemy organisation with menacing costumes; check. I couldn't have been happier.

During those formative years, the things most important in my life were The (tv) Avengers (from series 4, 1965), The Man from UNCLE (1965) and Marvel Comics. So you can imagine how happy I was when Stan and Jack debuted Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD - Supreme Headquarters International Espionage Law-enforcement Division - in Strange Tales 135 (Aug 1965) ... though that wasn't the first episode I saw. I came into the series with Strange Tales 139 (Dec 1965), and was at a bit of a loss to figure out what was going on. I recognised Tony Stark - who seemed to be SHIELD's chief technical officer - as Iron Man from sister publication Tales of Suspense.

My first issue of the Agent of SHIELD strip at least had a few familiar faces, but I couldn't figure out why Dum-Dum and Gabe looked little different from how they appeared in the (two decades earlier) Sgt Fury series. I did think Hydra was pretty cool, though ... a villainous organisation cast from the same mold as UNCLE's Thrush.

I also recognised Dum-Dum Dugan and Gabe Jones from the Sgt Fury comics, though I was puzzled as to how they looked so young 20 years after WW2. Clearly I had to go back and fill in the gaps, by tracking down the earlier issues of Strange Tales.

SURVIVING WW2

Of course, the SHIELD series wasn't the first time Nick Fury had appeared in a contemporary Marvel Comics setting. I was already aware of his guest-spot in Fantastic Four 21 (Dec 1963), which I'd seen the previous year. In that, Fury - by 1963 a colonel in the CIA - is the catalyst that brings the FF back together after the Hate Monger's ray makes them hate each other. 

Nick Fury and Reed Richards are reunited in Fantastic Four 21, some twenty (Marvel) years after their first encounter in Sgt Fury 3. Fury had not, at this point, taken to wearing his eyepatch, despite the incident that cost him the sight in his left eye having occurred earlier in WW2 (see Sgt Fury 27, Feb 1966).

A few months earlier, Stan had told the story of how Fury had met Reed Richards - then a major with the O.S.S (Office of Strategic Services) - during WW2 in the pages of Sgt Fury 3 (Aug 1963). The incident was more of a cameo for the future Mr Fantastic, though it is referenced in FF21.

By the time Fury is being inducted into SHIELD, he seems to have transferred from the CIA to G-2, the intelligence arm of the US Army. Or maybe he's just being security-minded and not revealing to these ordinary soldiers that he's a CIA operative. You can't take anything at face value in the intelligence community ...

By the time Fury shows up in Strange Tales 135's inaugural SHIELD tale, the CIA colonel has acquired his eyepatch, if not the security clearance to be forewarned of the SHIELD initiative.

From the creation of the LMDs in the opening scene to Fury's spectacular escape from unseen assassins in the flying Porche 904 - Bond would have loved one of those - "The Man for the Job" overspills with startling creativity from the first page. Particularly scary was the way Hydra managed failure. I loved the Death Pendulums at the time and I still think it's a dark and disturbing way of dealing with under-performing staff.

That first SHIELD story is brimming with brilliant ideas. Though it does owe a debt to the James Bond movies Goldfinger (1964) and Thunderball (1965), and something more to the Man from UNCLE tv series, the mis-en-scene of Agent of SHIELD averages one fabulous concept per page across its 12-page running time.

The story begins with a befuddled Colonel Nick Fury undergoing a body scan in an undisclosed location. It's part of the process of creating LMDs (Life Model Decoys), lifelike androids designed to draw fire from an unknown but expected enemy. And draw fire they do ... as Fury is whisked away in a sporty Porsche, headed for the next phase of his induction. But Fury and the unnamed driver don't get far before the enemy renews its attack, dropping napalm from a fighter jet on top of the car. To Fury's astonishment, the car sails unharmed through the inferno then the driver takes out the jet with a pair of rear-mounted Sidewinder missiles and finally the Porsche converts to an air-car and flies upwards. The driver explains that these devices have been created by an international organisation called SHIELD and the assassins work for a group of criminal fanatics called Hydra.

We then switch scenes to Hydra's secret headquarters where the failed assassin is reporting to his boss, The Imperial Hydra. Understandably, the chief is not best pleased his people failed to kill Fury and orders the assassin to fight for his life, unarmed, on the Pendulums of Doom.

Top: Compared to Hydra's hidden headquarters, Thunderball's SPECTRE HQ looks more like the board meeting of an accountancy firm. Bottom left: The War Room in Dr Strangelove (1964) was obviously a big influence on the interview room aboard the SHIELD heli-carrier (see below). Bottom right: As cool as Goldfinger's Aston Martin was, I think SHIELD had it beat with their flying Porsche 904.

Meanwhile, Fury is welcomed to SHIELD HQ by industrialist and weapons manufacturer Tony Stark. Stark reveals that Fury is needed to head the fledgling SHIELD. Though Fury is doubtful, Stark points out that his lifetime of exemplary service qualifies him as the only man for the job. At that moment, Fury notices a wire protruding from the base of a chair and, ripping the seat from its moorings, heaves it out a handy window. Turning the page, we finally see SHIELD's headquarters - a battleship-sized airborne carrier, hovering a mile or so above the ground. It's one of Kirby's greatest moments and one of my all-time favourite "reveals" in a Silver-Age Marvel comic.

At this point in the story, it seems that Tony Stark (whose Iron Man identity isn't mentioned here) is the principle ambassador of SHIELD. Meanwhile, over at Hydra HQ, it appears that the evil criminal organisation is leading the field when it comes to diversity and equal opportunity ... no glass ceiling at Hydra. And finally, the money shot. Who knew that SHIELD headquarters is actually a giant heli-carrier, stationed at the edge of the stratosphere?

Instinctively, Fury takes charge, barking orders to have the heli-carrier secured so any would-be assassins can't escape. It's this that finally convinces Fury. "Someone has to smash Hydra," he observes. "It might as well be me."

For the most part, the first episode of the SHIELD series feels like a Kirby production. It's brimming with super-cool concepts, taking the best from Bond and UNCLE and giving the whole mix an injection of storytelling steroids. This was both a blessing and a curse. Everyone, including Stan, seems to be in an all-fire hurry to cash in on the spy craze without a clear direction on where to take Colonel Nick Fury next. As a result, the next instalment of SHIELD was a bit of a placeholder.

Strange Tales 136 (Sep 1965), "Find Fury or Die", had finished art by industry veteran John Severin over Jack Kirby layouts. Stan made a bit of a fuss about having Severin back, who'd been one of his mainstay artists at Atlas back in the 1950s. 

WHO THE HECK IS JOHN SEVERIN?

John Powers Severin was born on 26 December 1921 in Jersey City, New Jersey. While at The High School of Music and Art in New York City, he contributed cartoons to The Hobo News (an early version of The Big Issue), receiving payment of one dollar per cartoon. As Severin explained in a 1999 Comics Journal interview: "I was sometimes selling 19 or 20 of them a week. Not every week, naturally. But I didn't have to get a regular job to carry me through high school. It was almost every week—not every week—but almost every week. I didn't have to get a job. I hated to work, I'll tell you. I didn't have to get a job then, because I was in high school." Severin's schoolmates were Harvey Kurtzman, Will Elder, Al Jaffee and Al Feldstein.

Severin graduated high school in 1940 and managed for a while on his income from The Hobo News, but needed an actual income, so took a job making munitions for the British and French war effort. But after the US was drawn into the war, Severin joined up and served initially in the US Army, ending up in the Army Air Corps where he failed the test to be a pilot due to colour-blindness and found himself working in the camouflage unit.

When he got out of the army in 1946, Severin set his sights on a career as an artist. "I had decided to exhibit some paintings of mine in a High School of Music and Art exhibition for the alumni," he told Squa Tront magazine in 2005. "Charlie Stern was in charge of it, so I went to see him at his studio. He was the 'Charles' of the Charles William Harvey Studio, the other two being William Elder and Harvey Kurtzman. They asked me if I'd like to rent space with them there. I did, and started working with them. When Charlie left ... I became the third man, but they didn't want to change it to John William Harvey Studio, so they left the name ... Harvey was doing comics, Willie and Charlie were doing advertising stuff, and I just joined in ... design work, logos for toy boxes, logos for candy boxes, cards to be included in the candy boxes."

But it was actually at Crestwood Comics that Severin started drawing comics. Thinking that comics were easy money, he worked up some samples with Will Elder and went to see Joe Simon and Jack Kirby.

John Severin's first few comics jobs were a strip in Timely's Lawbreakers Always Lose 3, a cover for Justice 5 and a strip in Simon and Kirby's Headline Comics 32, all around the summer of 1948. It's hard to say which was drawn first.

Yet the Grand Comicbook Database has Severin's first strip work as the six-page story "My Hobby ... Murder!" for Lawbreakers Always Lose 3 (Aug 1948), a Timely Comic. The next credit is the cover for Justice 5 (Sep 1948), also Timely. So WIKIpedia's claim that Severin's first published work was for Simon and Kirby at Crestwood looks to be in some doubt - though it's perfectly possible that the story in Headline Comics 32 (Oct-Nov 1948), "The Clue of the Horoscope", was drawn before the Timely jobs.

Severin would continue drawing for both Crestwood/Prize and for Timely/Atlas into the early 1950s, tackling every genre thrown at him - war, romance, western and crime. He drew his last Atlas story of this period for Black Rider 10 (Sep 1950), and a few months later drew his first breakthrough story for the legendary EC Comics for editor Harvey Kurtzman's Two-Fisted Tales 19 (Jan-Feb 1951) ... the terrific "War Story!"

Severin truly came into his own drawing for EC Comics. For a glorious four-year period, he worked tirelessly for Harvey Kurtzman's Frontline Combat, Two-Fisted Tales (issues 37 and 38 were wall-to-wall Severin) plus a few jobs for Mad. And he still managed to find time to contribute steadily to Prize/Crestwood as well.

Severin continued to draw - mostly war tales - for both EC and Prize right through to the summer of 1954 ... contributing his most memorable work for Frontline Combat, Mad and Two-Fisted Tales which he edited for the last six issues of its run (36 - 41). Then perhaps sensing which way the wind was blowing, started drawing for Atlas again not long before EC was going out of business. "Although I considered myself a freelancer, EC had come very close to being home to me," Severin told The Mirkwood Times in 1973. We all felt the loss of camaraderie which we'd had for one another. But most of all losing a bossman like Bill Gaines overnight was a fairly sorrowful event." By the time EC sputtered its last breath in mid-1955, Severin was drawing exclusively for Atlas.

Stan only allowed his best artists to draw covers during Atlas' golden years from 1955 - 1957, and John Severin certainly drew his share of Atlas covers, across all the genres, including for the cult favourite Yellow Claw.

For Stan Lee, Severin worked on staff in the Bullpen, drawing war and westerns, horror and humour in an unbroken stream from 1955 to 1957. "I ended up in this big bullpen sitting next to Bill Everett and Joe Maneely. And across was Carl Burgos, Sol Brodsky," Severin told The Comics Journal. "Joe Maneely and I used to swap artwork back and forth. He would draw a page with all this stuff and leave out the backgrounds ... And I would sit there and draw in the saloons and all this stuff in simple outlines. In the meantime, he's doing the same thing with one of my jobs. Sometimes we'd have the same story! He'd be doing one page and I'd be doing the other. He'd do the first; I'd do the second. He'd do the third, and so on and so forth." Then came the great Atlas Implosion and Severin was out of a steady job again. He must have thought he had the worst luck.

After the Great Atlas Implosion of 1957, John Severin had to scramble for work a bit, drawing romance and westerns for the poverty-row publisher Charlton and a couple of war fill-ins for DC before landing safely at Cracked magazine.

Fortunately, Severin still had his Prize work. In early 1958 he picked up some fill-in jobs for Charlton and DC, then landed his next major client in the Mad knock-off Cracked magazine, to which he would contribute regularly for the next 27 years. 

As Stan Lee's line of comic began to recover from the catastrophe of 1957, Severin was once again contributing covers and interior stories for the pre-Marvel line, but soon stopped working for Marvel to concentrate on his lucrative contract with Cracked.

Then, as 1959 hoved into view, Stan Lee was commissioning work once more for the fledgling "MC" comics he was editing under Martin Goodman. Severin was a natural for the surviving Kid Colt and he did a few jobs for the Marvel Westerns before concentrating his efforts on Cracked magazine into the early 1960s.

In the mid 1960s, Severin branched out again and started working for both Stan Lee on the SHIELD series in Strange Tales and for Jim Warren on the horror mags Creepy and Eerie,  contributing some magnificent stories to Warren's Blazing Combat. Then in 1967, Severin settled in as the regular inker on Sgt Fury, working over Dick Ayers pencils, delivering the best-drawn run on the character. He would go on to ink a marvellous run of The Incredible Hulk (141-157) over Herb Trimpe's pencils and draw Kull the Conquerer with his sister Marie.

Severin brought some class to the titles he worked on as inker for Marvel Comics during the 1970s, then at the age of 83, drew 2003's controversial re-imagining of Kid Colt Outlaw.

John Severin continued to draw for Marvel, Warren, Charlton and most importantly Cracked through the 1980s. "When I win the PowerBall I think I might [retire]," he told The Comics Journal in 1999, "but until then I'll just go right on. No, I enjoy doing things. I don't like to sit around doing nothing. Once in a while, I love to.

"I don't really have any real regrets or anything, but I don't know whether I've accomplished anything or not. Since I can't remember much of the time ..."

Severin received an Inkpot Award in 1998 and was inducted into the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 2003.

John Severin: 26 December 1921 - 12 February 2012

John Severin died on 12 February 2012 at the age of 90. He was survived by his wife Michelina, his six children and his sister Marie.

DON'T YIELD, BACK SHIELD!

Like the first SHIELD episode, the second instalment was another Kirby catalogue of terrific ideas in search of a story. Dastardly agents of Hydra monitor Nick Fury's every move, dogging his steps all the way to his ground-based HQ, a barber shop (a nod to the tailor shop in Man from UNCLE).

While Strange Tales 136 still had Kirby on layouts - and probably plotting - duties, the finished art was by Atlas and EC Comics veteran John Severin, his first work for Stan Lee since the 1950s. The above splash pages looks like it might have more than just Kirby layouts.

Once in the barber shop, Fury alerts the SHIELD operatives that he's being followed, and an elaborate defence protocol is set in motion. Outside, the Hydra operatives are calling for backup, and a squadron of airborne Hydra goons is soon jetting towards the barber shop.

The barber shop scene in Strange Tales 136 manages to channel both The Man from UNCLE, where the entrance to  the secret offices is through a dingy tailor shop, and the James Bond movies, where Bond always tosses his hat onto the hatstand when he arrives in M's office.

But while waiting for the Hydra goons to arrive, Fury and his team capture the trailing agents, hypnotise them, then turn them loose. The hypnotised Hydra men tell the flying goon squad that the real SHIELD HQ is down the road, inside a fake warehouse.

Leaving no stone unturned in his quest to swipe from every contemporary spy series he could, Jack Kirby manages to squeeze in James Bond's iconic jetpack from Thunderball.

The Hydra goons then try to use a truck-mounted laser cannon to cut through the warehouse door, but are trapped inside a giant steel cell that erupts out of the ground.

And while we're at it, let's have the equally iconic laser gun from Goldfinger. We can use it to burn our way into the SHIELD warehouse, just like Goldfinger uses his to burn his way into Fort Knox.

The threat averted, Fury then reflects on how this war isn't going to be over any time soon.

As much fun as the episode is, it really doesn't amount to anything very much. All we're seeing here is Kirby - lacking direction from Stan Lee - filling the pages with ideas swiped from other spy shows and movies. There's no progression of the story. We don't find out anything new about the characters. Even the scene where the failed Hydra operative pays for his failure with his life is taken from the scene in Thunderball where Blofeld electrocutes a subordinate who fails to deliver - and we'd already had that schtick in the previous SHIELD episode.

Strange Tales 137 is the third instalment of SHIELD in which not very much happens. If Stan truly wanted this series to click with the readers, he was going to have to take a hand and do something. Like maybe, have a plot.

Strange Tales 137 (Oct 1965) didn't do any more for progressing the plot than issue 136 did. There's some tradecraft in which some microfilm is passed from SHIELD agent to agent - on a train then on to a car which turns into a submarine - as Hydra goons close the net. The microfilm contained the location of the Hydra base which is due to launch an orbiting bomb, the Betatron, and thus hold mankind to ransom. Then Fury decides to take a hand and fly to the Balkans personally to find and destroy the bomb.

We finally get a glimmer of the plot for the first SHIELD adventure ... Hydra plans to launch an orbiting nuclear weapon - the Betatron - which will give them command over every nation on Earth. Fury and Tony Stark try to retrieve a microfilm that contains the location of the Hydra launch site, but fail. So Fury has to take the fight to Hydra personally.

However, Strange Tales 138 (Nov 1965) picks up the pace a little and we see the bigger plan behind Hydra's seemingly pointless attacks on SHIELD. It's as if Stan had learned his lesson from those first few Captain America solo stories where he'd left Jack Kirby to his own devices a little too long. Fury arrives in the Balkans just a little too late to prevent Hydra launching the Betatron and now is left trying to figure out how to bring the orbiting bomb down without drenching the entire planet in deadly fallout. It turns out Tony Stark has an answer ... the Brainosaur. But before he can reveal its secret to Fury, Hydra goons invade the factory and capture Fury. The episode closes with the intrepid head of SHIELD dragged helpless before the Imperial Hydra.

My suspicion is that Stan had realised that simply having Hydra constantly attacking SHIELD, with SHIELD brushing it off like it's nothing, wasn't the way to generate a sense of danger and get the fans rooting for the good guys. Placing Fury in actual jeopardy feels more like Stan's idea and makes me think that this was the point where Stan started earning his co-plotter credit.

There's a hint that John Severin's departure was sudden and unexpected, as the cover for Strange Tales 139 in actually just a reproduction of the inner splash page with a Marie Severin-render Dr Strange as a framing device. Previous issues had been pencilled by Kirby and inked by Severin.

As I mentioned earlier, Strange Tales 139 (Nov 1965) had been my first experience of SHIELD. And all in all, it's a pretty good place to join the story, if a little confusing. With Fury locked up in a Hydra cell and fed dried rations that fizz like fireworks when exposed to the air, it seems there's no way out. Until Fury uses his exploding shirt (revealed in Strange Tales 137, though I wouldn't have known that) to blast his way out of the cell, and is helped by the Imperial Hydra's beautiful assassin daughter. I was more able to forgive that cliche back in 1966 than I would be today. At the same time that Tony Stark is preparing the Braino-saur - a robot spacecraft that can disarm the Betatron in orbit - the ex-Howlers are invading Hydra's base in an attempt to free Fury. In the final panels, The Imperial Hydra wrestles with his conscience, hoping his own daughter won't be collateral damage in the ensuing battle.

With Kirby again on layouts, John Severin is gone and new addition to the Bullpen Joe Sinnott is providing finished pencils and inks. Sinnott had taken over inking Fantastic Four from Vince Colletta the same month, so Stan was looking to fill his spare moments with additional work, I'm thinking. Stranger was that John Severin didn't stick around, despite the build-up Stan had given him in Strange Tales 136. He wouldn't return to Marvel for two years, when he began inking Sgt Fury with issue 44.

Hydra assassins on skateboards? No, Jack Kirby didn't invent skateboarding. The pastime had been covered in mainstream media as early as 1963. I wonder, though, if it's the safest and most stable way to attack and bunch of angry SHIELD agents.

Strange Tales 140 (Jan 1966) was more Tony Stark's heroic moment rather than Fury's. Piloting the Braino-saur, Stark disarms the Betatron Bomb in space, rendering it so much space junk. Fury, on the other hand, doesn't do a great deal other than keep the Imperial Hydra's daughter - Agent G - company while the Howlers and the Agents of SHIELD clean out Hydra HQ.

In the ensuing confusion, the Imperial Hydra escapes and it's revealed that he's not in reality the CEO and chief stockholder - Leslie Farrington - of Imperial Industries as we've been led to suspect, but actually Farrington's lowly assistant, Arnold Brown. The episode ends with Brown's finger poised over the destruct button of Hydra HQ, even though he knows his daughter is there with Fury.

The Imperial Hydra's poor preparations and the careless lack of a "safe word" means that he's mistaken for an intruder by his own guards and shot. How sad ... But once that plot thread's been resolved, we can crack on with the next adventure, "Operation: Brainblast".

Strange Tales 141 (Feb 1966) is a bit of a strange entry in the early SHIELD adventures. The first half mops up the last few details from the Imperial Hydra saga and the remaining five pages kick off a new adventure, "Operation: Brainblast", introducing SHIELD's ESP Division in the process.

This first SHIELD story arc is nothing special and, despite Jack Kirby back on full art chores on Strange Tales 141, it would only be for a couple of issues and then he'd be back on layouts for another new (to Marvel) artist.

Looking back now, this is probably why back during the 1960s I liked the SHIELD series well enough, but I never loved it. Overall it lacked a cohesiveness, and it desperately needed a firmer hand from Stan to bring it under control and give it some direction. Ironically, it wouldn't be Stan that would later take SHIELD from a "b" series to a world-beater, but that's a story for another time.

Meanwhile, the series would continue with a revolving door of pencil artists for the next few issues ... we'll cover those next time.

Next: More spy stuff and John Buscema's first work for Marvel Comics

Meet the Kid: Marvel's First Cowboy Hero (almost)

THE EARLY 1960S WAS A WEIRD TIME for kids. The effects of the Second World War were all around us. Rationing had only ended a few years earlier, and life wasn't easy growing up in a single-parent family on a south-east London council estate. That said, Woolwich was a great playground, and I had plenty of other kids to play with. Our games were inspired by what we saw on television and at our beloved Saturday Morning Pictures. Chief among our pastimes were playing war, and cowboys and indians (we didn't call them "native Americans" back then).

Marvel Comics got into Westerns as the post-war superhero crash began to take hold. Stan Lee's characters, Two-Gun Kid, Kid Colt and the later Rawhide Kid would go on to be the longest running comic book cowboys of all.

That said, I was never much of a fan of the screen cowboys. A uniquely American institution (I can't think of a single British-made cowboy tv show or movie - Carry on Cowboy doesn't count!) the western drama - also known as "oaters" or "horse operas" - was a massively popular genre for much of the 20th century, with its heyday in the 1930s and 1940s. I know that our Saturday Morning matinees would have regularly shown Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidy movies, but I can't remember any of them. Neither do I remember seeing any of the huge number of comics that featured these stars during the 1960s, though Dell Comics published hundreds of them.

Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidy were staples of the Saturday Morning Matinees when I was a kid. But I couldn't for the life of me name one of their films that I saw at the time.

And the tv shows of my youth that featured cowboys - like Rawhide, Wagon Train and Bonanza - just weren't on my radar. Incredibly, these and other cowboy shows would dominate the airwaves until the end of the 1960s, including:

• Cheyenne 1955 - 1962
• Gunsmoke 1955 - 1975
• Wagon Train 1957 - 1965
• Maverick 1957 - 1962
• Have Gun Will Travel 1957 - 1963
• Rawhide 1959 - 1965
• Bonanza 1959 - 1972

Just about all of Dell/Gold Key's line of comics were based on existing tv or film properties in just about every conceivable genre. They especially focussed on tv shows they thought would appeal to younger readers, with varying degrees of success.

Just as I wasn't interested in the wall-to-wall cowboy tv shows, neither was I much interested in the comics that they spun off. Dell, who built their entire business around licensing tv and movie properties, were probably the biggest purveyors of western titles. Curiously, DC Comics seemed little interested in cowboys, though they maintained two long-running western comics - All Star Western (1951 - 1961) and Western Comics (1948 - 1961) as though just keeping a toe in the water.

I didn't care much for Charlton Comics in general - apart from the few superhero books drawn by Steve Ditko. Much of the Charlton art was by stalwarts like Rocke Mastroserio and Sal Trapani. Quite why a talented guy like Dick Giordano stayed with this poverty row comics producer for so long is a bit of a mystery.

On the other hand, Charlton produced masses of cowboy comics, their longest-running titles being Billy the Kid (1957–1983), Cheyenne Kid (1957–1973), Outlaws of the West (1957–1980) and Texas Rangers in Action (1956–1970).

But by far the biggest booster of western titles was Marvel Comics in all its guises ...

THE KID WITH TWO GUNS

Marvel's first cowboy hero was Two-Gun Kid, aka Clay Harder, who first appeared in his self-titled comic, cover-dated March 1948. There was an earlier Marvel cowboy, the Masked Raider (Jim Gardley), who appeared in Marvel Mystery Comics 1-12 (1939-1940), but I'm not really counting him as his series was so short-lived.

Two-Gun Kid appeared full-blown in his own title in 1948, but the run only lasted 10 issues. When the character got his own title again five years later starting with issue 11 (Dec 1953), readers had to wait until Two-Gun Kid 36 (Apr 1957) to find out how he became an outlaw.

Clay Harder grew up the son of a former sheriff turned farmer in Kansas. One day, young Clay found his father's old Colt and proved to be a natural marksman. But his father caught him and made his swear never to pick up a gun again. A few years later, Harder senior took a job as sheriff in the sleepy town where he lived. When the outlaw family, The Corbetts, start trouble in town, Sheriff Harder is shot. In the melee, Mrs Harder is thrown from a wagon, and also dies. The orphaned Clay promises his father that he will take up the guns and "use them to bring peace to this troubled land". He gained his nickname because of his skill with the two Colts he carried. At least that was the origin given in the much later Two-Gun Kid 36 (Apr 1957). There'd be another, different, origin a year later in issue 41 (Apr 1958).

The stories in these early issues are nothing special - just standard cowboy adventures with a Two-Gun Kid that seems to be able to outdraw anyone he comes up against. There's no sense that the writers - city boys to a man - had any knowledge of what life in the old West might have looked like. It seems certain that their experience of Western life was informed almost exclusively by the movies they saw in New York's picture houses. And there's no sense of continuity from story to story, no suggestion of any ongoing development of the character.

Two identical plots from TGK 3 & 11 - the artist on the first is Syd Shores, who'd earned his stripes at Timely inking Jack Kirby's pencils on Captain America. The artist in the second is Fred Kida, later penciller on Captain Britain in the 1970s. The unidentified writer on both, likely the same person, was saving themselves some effort by "recycling" the storyline.

The character couldn't have been a massive hit with readers, as his first series, Two-Gun Kid 1 - 10 (Mar 1948 - Nov 1949) lasted just over a year. Despite Stan's best efforts, featuring The Kid in just about every other Marvel western comic during that period, including:

• Wild West 1 - 2 (Spr - Jul 1948), becomes
• Wild Western 3 - 12, 32 - 37, 39 (Sep 1948 - Sep 1950, Feb 1954 - Dec 1954)
• All-Western Winners 2 - 4 (Win 1948 - Apr 1949), becomes
• Western Winners 5 - 6 (Jun 1949 - Aug 1949)
• Blaze Carson 4  (Mar 1949)
• Best Western 58 - 59  (Jun - Aug 1949)

... TGK was cancelled as of its tenth issue. The guest slots in the other titles ceased around the same time.

As I was reading through some of the early Two-Gun Kid stories, I found that certain plots would be re-used. For example, the old chestnut of someone impersonating the hero to frame him for a crime he didn't commit. Another curious example had Two-Gun Kid stepping into a boxing ring to substitute for a wounded boxer, which was the basis for the story "Death in the Ring" in Two Gun Kid 3 (Aug 1948) and the untitled but very similar tale in the revived Two Gun Kid title, issue 11 (Nov 1953).

Much of the art for the first run of Two-Gun Kid was by Syd Shores, with a few drawn by Russ Heath. For some reason, the whole of issue 9 (Aug 1949) was drawn by John Severin, which looks a lot like some kind of deadline foul-up. The identities of the writers have long been lost to history.

Atlas continued to publish cowboy comics through the late 1940s and into the early 1950s, yet there was no sign of the Two-Gun Kid. Then, with little fanfare, the character turned up in the Nov 1953 issue of The Black Rider, in a five-page story drawn by George Tuska. The following month, Two-Gun Kid's own title was restored to the Atlas schedule, with issue 11 (Dec 1953) and would continue for a further eight years until its second cancellation.

Though it's likely Stan would have been contributing scripts to the western titles long before this, Two-Gun Kid 40 has the earliest official credit I could find for Stan on the title. These earliest script is thankfully free of the terrible fake western slang that would litter the Marvel cowboy comics in the early 1960s.

Though Stan Lee had been signing the occasional back-up story in Two-Gun Kid, it wasn't until issue 40 (Feb 1958) that he began taking credit the Two-Gun Kid scripts. This would coincide with the first Marvel stories commissioned in the wake of the Great Atlas Implosion of 1957, when Martin Goodman was forced to cancel around 70% of the Atlas titles. In issue 41 (Apr 1958), Stan gave us a new, revised origin of the Two-Gun Kid, drawn by Joe Maneely. This time, The Kid returns to his hometown to visit his father. But the town's been taken over by rancher and thug Bull Yaeger. Harder Senior is killed when Yaeger tries to take over the Harder ranch. Released from his pacifist vow by his father's death, The Kid is freed to defeat Yaeger and turn him over to the sheriff. 

From this issue on it looked as though it would be pretty much Lee and his favoured artist Joe Maneely cranking out the Two-Gun Kid stories. But the untimely death of Maneely in June 1958 cut this plan short, and issue 44 was the last drawn by the artist.

In one of the last comics drawn before his tragic death, Joe Maneely's art for Two-Gun Kid looks a good deal looser than his earlier style. Did Stan have him stretched a bit thin, or was this a deliberate moved towards a more Alex Toth-like style? Included here is a scan of Maneely's 1955 Black Knight, for comparison.

WHO THE HECK IS JOE MANEELY?

Joe Maneely was born in Philadelphia, PA on 18 Feb 1926, to Robert and Gertrude Maneely. While at Northeast Catholic High School he created the school's mascot, The Red Falcon, and featured the character in a strip he drew for the school's newspaper. He dropped out of high school before graduating to join the US Navy. He served three years as a specialist, contributing cartoons to ships' newspapers.

Joe Maneely began at Street & Smith by drawing the feature "Tao Anwar" in Red Dragon Comics 5 (Oct 1948). Very soon after, Maneely joined Timely and began on western titles, drawing "The Kansas Massacre of 1864" in Western Outlaws and Sheriffs 60 (Dec 1949).

Once out of the Navy he trained at Hussain School of Art under a G.I. ticket, then entered the advertising department of the Philadelphia Bulletin. In 1948, he began freelancing for Street and Smith on the features Mario Nette and Red Dragon in Red Dragon Comics.

Towards the end of 1948, Maneely began freelancing for Timely, drawing the story "The Kansas Massacre of 1864" for Western Outlaws and Sheriffs 60 (Dec 1949).

Maneely's second job for Timely was in the first issue of Black Rider (Mar 1950). By 1958, he was drawing just about every kind of feature for Atlas, and he was Stan Lee's go-to artist for reviving the fortunes of Two-Gun Kid, drawing the revised origin of the character in issue 41 (Apr 1958).

Over the next couple of years, Maneely became a favourite of editor Stan Lee, because he could turn his hand to any style and deliver quality work very quickly - he was rumoured to be able to pencil and ink seven pages in a day - war, horror, romance, science fiction, Maneely could draw it all.

A sample of Joe Maneely's prodigious output of art - pencils and inks - created for the June 1955 cover-dated Atlas comics alone. Not pictured, a further 42 pages of comic strip material for Cowboy Action, Navy Action and Wild Western. Click on image to enlarge.

The same month that Maneely was drawing Black Knight 1 (Jun 1955), which contained three stories running to 23 comic strip pages, plus the cover, he also drew:

• Annie Oakley 5 - cover
• Apache Kid 14 - cover
• Battle Action 17 - cover
• Cowboy Action 6 - "No Law in Durado" (7pgs) + cover
• Jungle Action 5 - cover
• Lorna the Jungle Girl 13 - cover
• Marines in Action 1 - cover
• Navy Action 6 - "Battleship Burke" (6pgs) + cover
• Navy Combat 1 "Hit and Run" + cover
• Outlaw Kid 5 - cover
• Rawhide Kid 2 - cover
• Ringo Kid Western 6 - cover
• Rugged Action 4 - cover
• Strange Tales 36 - cover
• Western Kid 4 - cover
• Western Outlaws 4 - cover
• Wild Western 43 - Ringo Kid in "Hutch Hammer" (6pgs)

That's 18 covers, plus the 23 pages in Black Knight 1 and a further 19 pages of comic strip art for war and western titles - a total of 60 pages of drawing, surely some kind of record for comic art.

John Romita told Roy Thomas a story in an interview for Alter Ego magazine that indicates Stan Lee was getting Maneely to help other Atlas artists the way he would with Jack Kirby ten years later on the Marvel books. "Stan calls up Joe Maneely and tells him, 'I'm going to send this guy out to spend a day with you. Give him as many pointers as possible.' And the next day, I went out to Flushing, probably from 10:30 in the morning until about 4:30 in the afternoon. I watched Maneely; and while he's talking to me, giving me pointers, he turned out like two or three pages, one double-spread with an entire pioneer fort in Indian country with Indians attacking from the outside, and guys shooting from the inside.

An example of Maneely's finely detailed inking work, for Battle Action 23 (Jun 1956). Hard to believe he worked from the simplest of pencils. Click on the image to enlarge.

"Maneely is the first guy I realised could put in bone structure with a pen line," Romita continued. "In other words, he didn't make everything round. He had these nice bone structure prominences on people's faces and clothing. The word 'crisp' immediately popped into my mind. He would do the whole thing with a thin pen line; then he would take a big, bold brush and do all the blacks. And for years after that I worked that way. I was a brush man at heart, but I couldn't stop working the way he did for a while.

Marvel artist Herb Trimpe also reported that Marie Severin had described Maneely's pencil work as, "almost nonexistent; they were like rough, lightly done layouts with no features on the faces ... It was just like ovals and sticks and stuff, and he inked from that. He drew when he inked. That's when he did the work, in the inking!"

The Black Knight, co-created by Stan Lee and Maneely, took superhero tropes and transferred them to medieval England. Maneely's art had a classical quality, making it look like etchings rather than ink drawings. It was an interesting experiment, even though the title only lasted five issues.

Maneely is chiefly remembered for co-creating The Black Knight, with Stan Lee and The Yellow Claw, with writer Al Feldstein. He also created The Ringo Kid, and drew every issue from 1-21 (Aug 1954 - Sep 1957).

Interviewed in 2002, longtime Marvel colourist Stan Goldberg remembered Joe Maneely as, "the best artist that ever drew comics. Joe wasn't just a great craftsman; he worked so fast and he was one of the few artists who could go from drawing the Black Knight to drawing Petey the Pest, or a war story. He had an unbelievable knack and he was just one sweet, nice guy."

The Yellow Claw was created by Maneely and writer Al Feldstein of EC and Mad fame. A knock-off of Fu Manchu, the character was drawn by Maneely for just the first issue. Subsequent issues were pencilled by Jack Kirby and the title was cancelled with issue 4 (Apr 1957).

When the Great Atlas Crash of 1957 came along, Maneely along with the rest of the Atlas staff was let go. He'd continue to draw Mrs Lyons' Cubs for the Chicago Sun-Times Syndicate strip, along with some work for DC's House of Secrets and Tales of the Unexpected, as well as Charlton and Crestwood.

The original art for the 23 Mar 1958 Sunday page of Mrs Lyons' Cubs, a newspaper strip written by Stan Lee and drawn by Joe Maneely. After Maneely's death, the strip limped on with Al Hartley art, but without Maneely, the strip lasted only three more months.

On the night of 7 June 1958, Maneely had supper with fellow Atlas alumni John Severin and George Ward in Manhattan. Somewhere along the way, he'd lost his glasses and, while trying to move between moving railway carriages, slipped, fell and was killed on the tracks. 

"Joe [told] me that he'd been in the city the week before and had lost his glasses," recalled Stan Goldberg. "He didn't even know how he'd gotten home that day. So this day came and he went out drinking and went out to get some air between the trains, and he fell off the train. When they found him, he was still clutching his portfolio. I remember Danny Crespi calling me on Saturday morning to break the news. The family had a rough time after he died. The Maneelys had daughters and a lot of bills. They had just bought a big house, too, and didn't have any money put away."

His last published story was a five-page Ringo Kid story for Gunsmoke Western 53 (Jul 1959).

Joe Maneely: 18 Feb 1926 - 7 Jun 1958

Stan has been quoted many times as saying, "he would have been another Jack Kirby. He would have been the best you could imagine." I don't think it's too big a stretch to say that if Maneely hadn't died in 1958, there's every likelihood that Stan wouldn't have needed to hire Jack Kirby to take up the slack. And the course of Marvel Comics might have looked very different indeed.

BACK TO THE TWO-GUN KID

After Maneely's last issue, Two-Gun Kid 44 (Oct 1958), there were a couple of fill-in issues by Jack Davis, one by Matt Baker and another by Al Hartley, then John Severin took over as the regular penciller on the Two-Gun Kid stories, from issues 49 - 57 (Aug 1959 - Dec 1960), working from Stan Lee scripts.

John Severin, brother of famed EC colourist Marie, had enjoyed a stellar career in the mid-1950s as one of Harvey Kurtzman's go-to artists for his historical war comics Two Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat. With the collapse of EC, Severin found himself toiling for much lower page-rates at Atlas

There's no published sales figures for Two-Gun Kid, but I suspect readers were finding the title a bit stale, compared to stablemate Kid Colt Outlaw. Severin's art was very slick, if not quite up to the standard of his EC work. That Stan paid a good deal less than Bill Gaines might have been a factor. So, in an effort to goose the sales, Stan first took John Severin off the cover art chores and assigned Jack Kirby instead. And when this didn't seem to have the desired effect, Stan took the unprecedented step of firing Severin from the title entirely and replacing him with Kirby on the interior art as well. Severin wouldn't work for Marvel again for five years.

"Hey, Stan," said Marty Goodman. "Monsters are selling real well. Have Kirby do a monster story for Two-Gun Kid ... see if we can get that puppy back up on its feet." No wonder Stan was getting frustrated and dejected at Marvel by mid-1961 ...

Kirby had been providing covers for many of the fledgling Marvel's titles since he'd arrived at the company at the end of 1958, a few weeks after the death of Joe Maneely. Because of Marvel's lower rates, Kirby was drawing everything Stan offered him, sometimes just knocking out the art for the money. But not even Jack Kirby could save the title and Two-Gun Kid was cancelled just two issues later, with issue 59 (Apr 1961).

But that wasn't the end of The Two-Gun Kid, at least not of that nom-de-guerre. A year and a half later, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby would revive the character, though not the Clay Harder version, in the all-new Two-Gun Kid. But that's a story for next time ...

Next: The Return of the Two-Gun Kid