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The Origins of Subby
But did you know the origin of the Sub-Mariner appeared in Motion Pictures Funnies Weekly #1, a proposed giveaway, before the same origin appeared in Marvel #1? It was early 1939, and the Sub-Mariner was a far cry from other types of comic characters of the time when he first appeared in the promo issue of Motion Picture Funnies Weekly #1. Bill Everett's Prince Namor, with his streaming, coiffed hair and pointy-ears, was an “ultra-man of the deep” who could both fly in the air and breathe underwater. He was also of mixed race (part white Earth-man and part royalty from Atlantis) and had the strength of 1000 men (we'll bet even your most devoted comic collecting pals don't know that one). His mother was a blue-skinned Atlantian princess who wore a skimpy red dress, his father an Antarctic explorer clad in white fur. All of this really made the Sub-Mariner quite strange. And a close look at the back cover of Motion Picture Funnies Weekly #1 is also strange. See, the idea behind Funnies was to publish a comic to be used as a children's design giveaway at the movie theatres. Theatres would purchase the books in bulk, give them away to children, and hopefully get them excited for what would be a weekly comic book serial with the Sub-Mariner as the lead. But only 9 copies of Motion Picture Funnies Weekly #1 have ever been discovered, 8 of them in a deceased publisher's home in 1974. And of the 9, each had the same back cover: an ad directed at the theatres that featured the bulk price of the books. This sort of information would never have been published on the actual giveaways - leading to the theory that Motion Picture Funnies Weekly #1 may never have made it to the giveaway point. Why? We have an idea. The Sub-Mariner was one of the most violent characters of his era. He could stop a ship in its tracks by grabbing the spinning propellers with his bare hands, then send it to shore to split in two. In his origin issue, he also had no qualms about crushing men's skulls or stabbing them repeatedly. Was this really something theatres wanted to be giving away to kids? Imagine the parental uproar they'd be faced with if they did. Even behind the goofball cover of the promo of Motion Pictures Funnies Weekly, they were still dealing in risky business. Thus, the plan to make Motion Picture Funnies Weekly a regular part of children's movie-going experience may have been foiled before it even took off. Why, then, was the Sub-Mariner featured in Marvel #1 without a second thought? Well, the publisher behind much of the marketing and financing of the story for Marvel #1, Martin Goodman, came from the pulps. And the sort of lurid violence of the Sub-Mariner was far more acceptable in the world of the pulps than in the world of children's cinema. The last panel of the Sub-Mariner's origin story perfectly illustrates this, with the “avenging son” defiantly wielding a knife in preparation for “what promises to be mortal combat!”
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