Marvels Snapshots, a new series from comics legend Kurt Busiek celebrating the greatest moments of Marvel’s 80-year history, kicks off this week with World War II hero Namor, Prince of Atlantis in Sub-Mariner: Marvels Snapshots #1. In Sub-Mariner, best-selling writer Alan Brennert and renown artist Jerry Ordway collaborate on a Golden Age flashback-sequence featuring Namor, his love Betty Dean, and the All-Winners Squad in postwar drama at seaside Palisades Park. Using stylistic techniques to capture a vintage aesthetic and a narrative approach that helps contextualize the period-piece, Brennert and Ordway craft a modern classic in “Reunion,” Sub-Mariner: Marvels Snapshots #1.
For Marvels Snapshots, curator Kurt Busiek has brought together some of the comic book industry’s most talent writers and artists including Howard Chaykin, Mark Russell, Barbara Randall Kesel, as well as creators from television’s L.A. Law and Twilight Zone writer Alan Brennert, Space Ghost: Coast to Coast and Superman: The Animated Series writers Evan Dorkin and Sarah Dyer, and Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men podcaster, Jay Edidin. Busiek assembled these unique creative team for “eight standalone, double-sized issues showcasing Marvel’s most beloved characters from the Golden Age to today.” In an approach akin to the 1994 Marvels series from Busiek, Marvels Snapshots capture a point of view from ordinary people swept up in the exploits of superheroes and scheming supervillains, and the series' cover art features the awe-inspiring work of painter Alex Ross.
An imaginative pairing of Emmy award-winning TV writer Alan Brennert and DC artist Jerry Ordway, famous for Crisis on Infinite Earths, Superman, and The Power of Shazam, leads off Kurt Busiek’s artist-alley of comics luminaries. Human Torch and Toro, and Miss Liberty trounced the Nazis in wartime adventures overseas. Artist Jerry Ordway channels the seminal style of Bill Everett, famed illustrator of the premier issue of Marvel Comics from October 1939, in his aquamarine seascapes and depictions of the briny deep. Drawing similar inspiration from art forms of the past, Ordway’s Palisades Park in Sub-Mariner: Marvels Snapshots is designed as a vintage postcard, rendering the amusement park like a souvenir illustration from the Luna Park Promenade at Coney Island.
Novelist and entertainment writer Alan Brennert seems as at home in the pages of Golden Age comics as he does pitching scripts in the writers’ room of a broadcast studio. The Marvel period-piece, Sub-Mariner: Marvels Snapshots chronicles an episode in the lives of reporter Betty Dean and her brothers, all veterans of World War II, and presents Betty’s tumultuous romance with Namor, the Prince of Atlantis. Betty’s brother Lloyd, haunted by the war, falls into the depths of alcoholism and the pragmatic Betty struggles to understand this perceived failing. Brennert examines the aftermath of conflict through the addictions of a former soldier and in the psychological trauma that leads to substance abuse, hinting that “the war’s not over for everyone.”
Scenes of intimacy and domesticity are brought to life with unadorned dialogue and rustic charms, particularly as Betty’s heart-to-heart conversation with Miss America about life, love, and Namor, in Everett’s Tavern (a wink to the Sub-Mariner creator). And Brennert contextualizes the era with relevant allusions to the GI Bill, war bonds, and in his representations of Lloyd’s combat fatigue and emerging trends in psychiatric care at the time. For his part, Brennert asserts, “I'm enormously proud of ‘Reunion’ and honored to be the first story published in Marvels Snapshots.”
Take a step back in time with Sub-Mariner: Marvels Snapshots #1, available now at a comic shop near you.
