Featuring: Sub-Mariner
Release: March 20, 1949
Cover: June 1949
10 cents
By: Bill Everett
12 pages
I can’t find any credits in the comic, but it seems to pretty clearly be by Bill Everett, and the internet seems to agree.
This is the end of the Sub-Mariner’s story. After a decade, he’s getting cancelled along with all the other superheroes. Romance, humor, crime, western, horror… that’s all the company that will become Marvel is publishing come April 1949.
For his final issue, they look backward. This story tells of the origin of Namor. The next story in the issue covers the same events as Namor’s first story in Marvel Comics #1.
The story begins with a ship which has lost its Captain. Commander Leonard McKenzie is injured and lost. His ship has to abandon him. He is saved by his new wife, a woman they rescued who turns out to be more than she appears. She is Fen, Princess of the Sub-Mariners.
The Sub-Mariners wish him put to death for the crimes of humanity, but she is in charge in the absence of the Emperor and insists he live.
They get married in the Sub-Mariner tradition as well, and she eventually helps him escape aboard the next human ship to pass nearby, but not before becoming pregnant with his son.
Her son, Namor, spends the first 10 years of his life in exile before returning to his people.
One other thing stands out to me about the issue. Dr. Jean Thompson is credited as editorial consultant.
And there is a rather defensive editorial explaining that she reviews all their comics for their appropriateness for children, which seems to be practically pleading with parents that their comics are actually good for children to read. Comics had a very famous outcry against them 5 years after this spurred by Dr. Frederick Wertham. But this editorial suggests parental concern about comics had been going on a while at that point.
Rating: ★★★☆☆, 50/100
Characters:
- Namor
- Commander Leonard McKenzie
- Princess Fen
- Brother Narvick
- Emperor of Sub-Mariners
Minor characters:
- Clancy (on McKenzie’s crew)
- Rad (a Sub-Mariner)
- Naka (a Sub-Mariner)
- Tarot (Sub-Mariner, war secretary to Narvick)
- Sigor (Sub-Mariner, war secretary to Narvick)
- Sergeant Tor (a Sub-Mariner)
- Doctor Bangal (a Sub-Mariner)
- Jada (a Sub-Mariner)
- Nelson (from the other ship)
Story notes:
- Brother Narvick is the Supreme Elder.
- Namor speaks: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Polish, Greek, Egyptian, and others.
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