Number 2239: Der Zub-Mariner himszelf!

In my opinion Bill Everett was one of the top artists of the earliest days of comic books. His drawings were excellent, full of action. He fully understood the advantages of the format, where he could tell a story.

This is one of his early adventures of his creation, Sub-Mariner, from 1941. Everett also had a sense of humor; not gut-busting laugh-out-loud funny, but a bit more subtle. The panel where he buys fuel at a filling station for his homemade jeep — "Five gallons of alcohol and five of water!” — makes for some light humor as well as verisimilitude. Anybody who drives a car from Salt Lake to Oregon would need to stop for a refill, and it is likely they would need to use the restroom. We assume that bit of business is between panels.

I caught something Everett missed in the story. On page 6 Sub-Mariner is tied up, but the ropes have disappeared by the next panel, even though the caption says he is “securely bound.” They don’t reappear on the next page, either. Everett’s editor must have been taking a nap when Everett turned in the artwork for this story from Marvel Mystery Comics #23 (1941):