The Lost EC Stories

Severin Saturdays.

Over the next few weeks I will be showing a set of stories John Severin did for Stan Lee's Timely Comics in the mid fifties. In the late fifties, Severin was a regular at Timely, doing mostly western books, but dabbling in other genres as well. He had worked for Martin Goodman's company and editor Stan Lee before, when he started out as a comic book artist in the late forties. After he joined up with Bill Elder as an inker, he went from one succes to anoter. Forst they did westen stories for Prize. Then they did some romance and crime work for the Jack Kirby and Joe Simon edited books at the same company. From there, they ent to EC where they soon became one of the power pouples at Harvey Kurtzman's war books. After Kurtzman finally convinced Bill Elder to go solo, servin had to do it on his own. He did some work for Mad, but his now looser style didn't mesh with Kurtzman's sensibllities. That didn't prevent Bill Gaines from putting him on the Two Fiste Tales when Kurtzman was unable to edit it anymore due to the pressures of Mad, I guess. While Severin was still producing that title he went to Timely and delivered a couple of stories over a full year period. These stories are often forgotten and it is generally assumed that sverin didn't join Timely until he was done at EC. Dutch comic artist site Lambiek even says: "After EC folded in 1955, Severin started drawing for Stan Lee's Atlas group, initially on westerns like 'Kid Colt', 'Rawhide Kid' and 'The Ringo Kid'." These stories look like they could have been in Two Fisted Tales, with similar captions, titles and themes. They were written by Severin's regular collaborator, Colin Dawkins. Well worth a look, I will be presenting them over the next few weeks. After a year or so, Severin started working for Timely regularely and it can be assumed that the stories he did were no longer ritten by Dawkins or self produced like these first ten or so seem to have been.