William Blake Everett (; May 18, 1917 – February 27, 1973) was an American comic book writer and artist best known for creating Namor the Sub-Mariner, as well as co-creating Daredevil and the zombie Simon Garth with writer Stan Lee for Marvel Comics.
Early life
Everett was born on May 18, 1917, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Everett, a fabulist who spun fanciful stories of his youth, claimed at various points to have graduated from high school in Arizona, or instead to have joined the U.S. Merchant Marine at ages ranging from 15 to 17, among other tales. In actuality, he was born at the Cambridge Hospital (renamed Mount Auburn Hospital in 1947) and raised in nearby Watertown, Massachusetts, with his parents Robert Maxwell Everett and Elaine Grace Brown Everett, and his sister Elizabeth, born in 1915. His 300-year-old New England family included Everett, Massachusetts' namesake, Edward Everett, who after serving as president of Harvard University became governor of Massachusetts and, in 1852, the U.S. Secretary of State.
Everett's father ran a successful trucking business, Both parents supported the artistic talents of their son, whose reading tastes ran to the classics rather than pulp novels or comic strips, and included work by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Jack London.
That same year, his father died of acute appendicitis, and the family, though remaining well-off, moved to an apartment back in Cambridge. Everett knew his father "always wanted me to be a cartoonist, and he died, unfortunately, before he saw that come true. But that was probably in back of the whole thing."
Career
Early work
thumb|Cover of Amazing-Man Comics #7, November, 1939
Everett soon became a professional artist on the advertising staff of the Boston newspaper The Herald-Traveler for $12 a week. I don't know how to explain it, but I was still on a freelance basis. That was the agreement we had. The artists, including myself, at Funnies, worked on a freelance basis."
Sub-Mariner
At Funnies, Inc., Everett created the Sub-Mariner for an aborted project, Motion Picture Funnies Weekly #1, a planned promotional comic to be given away in movie theaters. When plans changed, Everett used his character instead for Funnies, Inc.'s first client, pulp magazine publisher Martin Goodman. The original eight-page story was expanded by four pages for Marvel Comics #1 (Oct. 1939), the first publication of what Goodman would eventually call Timely Comics, the 1940s precursor of Marvel Comics. Everett's anti-hero proved a sudden success, quickly becoming one of Timely's top three characters, along with Carl Burgos' android superhero the Human Torch and Jack Kirby and Joe Simon's Captain America. Everett soon introduced such supporting characters as New York City policewoman Betty Dean, a steady companion and occasional love-interest, and Namor's cousin Namora. When his work was interrupted by military service, stories were drawn by Carl Pfeufer.
Everett entered the U.S. Army for World War II military service in February 1942. He attended Officer Candidate School at Fort Belvoir, during which time he met Gwenn<!--sp OK with 2 "n"s--> Randall, who was working for the Ordnance Department at the Pentagon. His first recorded post-war credit is writing and full art for the 12-page story "Sub-Mariner vs. Green-Out" in Sub-Mariner Comics #21 (Fall 1946) – the third of three Sub-Mariner stories that issue, for which Syd Shores drew the cover. Everett was soon providing Sub-Mariner stories regularly for the solo title as well as for The Human Torch, Marvel Mystery Comics and even Blonde Phantom Comics.
Additionally, he drew the title feature in the three-issue spin-off series Namora (Aug.–Dec. 1948).
Atlas Comics
By now, Timely Comics had evolved into Marvel's 1950s iteration, Atlas Comics. Like most superhero characters in the postwar era, the Sub-Mariner had faded in popularity, and his solo title had been canceled in 1949. But after a nearly five-year hiatus, he briefly returned with Captain America and the Golden Age Human Torch in Young Men #24 (Dec. 1953), during Atlas' mid-1950s attempt at reviving superheroes. Everett drew the Sub-Mariner feature through Young Men #28 (June 1954) and in Sub-Mariner Comics #33–42 (April 1954 – Oct. 1955), which outlasted the other two characters' features. During this time, Namora had her own spin-off series. written by editor-in-chief Stan Lee and published in Menace #5, introduced the character Simon Garth, the Zombie, who in the 1970s would be plucked from this one-shot story to star in Marvel's black-and-white horror-comics magazine Tales of the Zombie.
Marvel Comics
With writer-editor Lee, Everett co-created the Marvel superhero Daredevil, who debuted in Daredevil #1 (April 1964). Comics historian and former Jack Kirby assistant Mark Evanier, investigating claims of Kirby's involvement in the creation of both Iron Man and Daredevil, interviewed Kirby and Everett and found that,
Conversely, 2000s Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada said the cover had been created afterward. When Everett, he said, turned in his first-issue pencils extremely late, Brodsky and Spider-Man artist Steve Ditko inked "a lot of backgrounds and secondary figures on the fly [and] cobbled the cover and the splash page together from Kirby's original concept drawing."
In an interview conducted by Marvel writer-editor and Everett's one-time roommate Roy Thomas, in what the latter recalled as either "late 1969 or in 1970," Everett said of Daredevil's creation five years earlier:
thumb|left|Everett, from photo gallery in [[Fantastic Four|Fantastic Four Annual #7 (Nov. 1969)]]
Within two years, however, Everett began penciling for Marvel once again, first on the character the Hulk, in Tales to Astonish, initially over Kirby layouts, and on Doctor Strange in Strange Tales. Readers during this 1960s Silver Age of comic books also became acquainted with his Golden Age and 1950s stories, which were reprinted first in the book The Great Comic Book Heroes by Jules Feiffer (Dial Press, 1965), and then in the comic books Fantasy Masterpieces, Marvel Super-Heroes, and Marvel Tales.
Editor Roy Thomas explained on the letters page of Sub-Mariner #61,
Despite Thomas's optimistic tone, that would be Everett's last work on the series. His final efforts on the character he created were five pages of pencils, inked by fellow Golden Ager Fred Kida, that appeared posthumously in Super-Villain Team-Up #1 (Aug. 1975).
Death
Everett died on February 27, 1973, at the age of 55.