Comic book artist who helped create Spider-Woman

Born: August 21, 1929;

Died: August 29, 2018

MARIE Severin, who has died aged 89, was that rare thing in the 1960s: a woman working the comic book industry and she was a highly influential one. Not only did she design the original costume for Spider-Woman, she worked on some of the most popular Marvel titles including The Incredible Hulk and Doctor Strange.

Severin initially entered the industry as a colourist, the artist that is responsible for adding colour to black and white drawings, for EC Comics when her older brother, John, who was already working for the company, needed someone to colour his pages. Marie Severin's main responsibility was working on romance comics, horror stories, and war adventures.

It was the beginning of her career in the industry and she would go on work on titles across the company’s line until it folded. She then moved to Marvel Comics in the 1950s just before it found its later big success. Initially, she worked as a production, paste-up artist and colourist before going on to draw stories in her own right. By the early 1970s, she was head colourist at Marvel before she concentrated on creating original art.

Born in East Rockaway, New York, she showed an interest in art from an early age. "My father always gave us paper," she remembered. "My brother would always be drawing and when I was little I just picked up the pencil and started drawing. It was a man with raggedy pants, I don't know why. That's my first remembrance."

She took cartooning and illustration classes while in High School, and after she graduated in 1948, continued to pursue art as a hobby while taking an office job on Wall Street.

In addition to her interior artwork, she designed the original costume for Spider-Woman, and designed and illustrated merchandise for Marvel’s special projects division. In the 1980s, she was one of the core artists on the short-lived “Star Comics” line, aimed at younger readers. Later in her career, Severin worked on Marvel’s toys and books, and stayed at the company into the 2000s.

Speaking about she worked her work, Severin spoke about the power of different colours. "If somebody just killed somebody, disemboweled them, whatever, or if fury is building up in the story, I use deep reds and stuff like that for the violence in the background," she said. "It's like music in the background. I think of colouring as the music in comic books. It gives that little oomph to it."

Away from Marvel, she contributed to titles for DC, Claypool Comics and Fantagraphics. She was named the Best Humour Penciler in 1974’s Shazam Awards and won the Inkpot Award at 1988’s San Diego Comic-Con.

She was inducted into the Will Eisner Comics Hall of Fame in 2001 and named a Comic-Con International Icon in 2017.

Severin had been in a hospice after a second stroke; she suffered her first in 2007.