Who is Namor? // Comics 101
The newest MCU project Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has been released to the predicted fanfare. What was shocking to many comic fans was that the character of Namor the Sub-Mariner was used as a major player in the movie, with his past and historical context drastically altered to the underwater city of Talokan rather than Atlantis. Even more surprising, the role was played to perfection by Tenoch Huerta Mejía. As it turns out, adaptations can totally change up a character and still keep them true to their core self.
But where did Namor first come from?
For that answer, we actually have to stretch back to the earliest days of superhero comics.
Artist Fred Schwab did the cover for this piece of comic history.
Namor the Sub-Mariner first showed up in the pages of Motion Picture Funnies Weekly issue 1 in April of 1939. This comic was a planned giveaway to all the kiddos who went to the movies and would be crammed into an 8-page black-and-white story alongside other comics. Bill Everett was the creative force behind the story, covering writing and all art aspects. However, Motion Picture Funnies Weekly fell through despite a few prototypes being made.
In fact, the comic was completely lost to time until intended publisher Lloyd Jacquet’s estate discovered a copy in 1974. A few more copies of the book have been found since, but that’s not where Namor was introduced to the masses.
Despite the Motion Picture Funnies Weekly deal falling through, Bill Everett took Namor around to the other comic book companies in New York City. By chance, it fell to one Timely Comics and would make the first issue of their newest comic in 1939. This would be a stab at what National Comics’s own Action Comics had made absurdly popular almost overnight: superheroes. The comic?
Frank Paul is credited with this iconic work of genius.
Why, Marvel Comics of course.
Left to Right: The Human Torch, The Angel, The Masked Raider, Jungle Action, and Ka-Zar
Namor was one of an ensemble cast to make the first issue of Marvel Comics. Taking the cover spot was the Human Torch. While he is not related to Johnny Storm of The Fantastic Four, the classic Human Torch would be a human-like robot whose skin would burst into flame when exposed to oxygen. Despite being inhuman, he would fight the forces of evil. Another hero was the Angel. Despite wearing a blue and red outfit that looked like he belonged to a circus or could fly, the Angel was a very rough-and-tumble hero who tended to punch out thugs like Batman and The Shadow before them. Or maybe he could fly: the art was very, very unclear at the time.
The Masked Raider was the prerequisite western story of the day, featuring a masked cowboy much like the Lone Ranger. The Jungle Terror was a story of three white guys finding a diamond cache in the Amazon Jungle, which was remarkably less racist than you would expect for 1939. Ka-Zar would be a tale of the African jungles inspired by Tarzan that, coincidentally, featured absolutely zero people indigenous to the area in importance to the plot. There would also be a few pages of a text story to round out the page count, making for a remarkably impressive offering for a dime.
But Namor was quite different.
For one, he was what could be considered the first anti-hero of comic books. You see, Namor was the focus of the story, but his goal was to wipe out all mankind!
Digging how Bill slipped his signature onto the trunk there.
Our story opens with Namor being described as an underwater Superman (no relation), and how incredibly strong and quick he is. However, the story instead begins on a salvage ship. The crew have themselves a bit of a mystery. They have a new salvage job, a ship that sank three years ago. No one claims to have salvaged it, and there’s been no one there for the last week, but the ship’s safe has been broken into. The knife that looks to have been used to do so isn’t even rusted.
It gets weirder when hatches on the ship begin opening by themselves.
As a side note, I utterly adore how Bill Everett has chosen to show the world underwater. It’s weird, it’s dark, it’s dim, and it perfectly limits the visibility of the reader in a way that doesn’t feel cheap. Many comics of the day would cheat by using blank backgrounds in close-ups or during action, but the layering of the sea makes that feel incredibly accurate. The entire story has a completely different art feel than the rest of the book, and I can’t help but wonder what this story looked like in black and white.
Two of the divers explore the wreck and catch sight of a nearly-naked man swimming through the wrecked ship! They give chase, but the swimmer escapes them quickly. Talking to himself, the swimmer figures these suited men must be robots and cuts what he assumes are control wires.
Namor is cold-blooded, albeit unintentionally. The two divers shut their air valves, leaving them with a dwindling supply of oxygen at the bottom of the ocean. They don’t suffer long, though.
This is genuinely feeling less like a superhero comic and more like an old-fashioned horror story. Almost like something out of a horror movie, if said movie was about speedo-wearing supermodels rather than the undead or Michael Meyers.
The salvage crew sends a third diver to rescue the first two. Having no clue about the dreaded Sub-Mariner, he wanders right into a nightmare.
The third diver survives his risky rise to the surface and warns the captain of the monster below. The ship takes off, but the Sub-Mariner uses his bare hands to cause damage to the ship’s rudder and propellers. Helplessly, the entire crew seems to be wiped out when it crashes upon the shore.
Golden Age comics really were something else. There was no regulatory group like the Comics Code Authority, and they got away with a ton of stuff that is astounding to see today. Crooks were often killed off, minorities were often shown as inhuman monsters or subhuman creatures, and then there was the time the Human Torch burned a man’s arm off on the very cover of his book.
Yeeeeeah. America was astonishingly racist back in the day. We still have a lot of issues to work through, but the concept of representation for humans being given basic respect has taken some drastic steps forward since 1943.
Meanwhile, the Sub-Mariner returns to his home, dragging the two corpses alongside him. It is a massive underwater city that we do not see, but there is a large chamber, and a religious leader welcomes Namor home. Opening up the robots, Namor is shocked to find out that the robots are actually human. However, Namor isn’t sure why man is actually evil, or why he needs to kill them. After all, he took them out in seconds.
As it turns out, Namor is half-human!
Half what else, though, we’re not really sure. The underwater peoples Namor interacts with range from inhuman Lovecraftian monsters to someone like his mother, who looks almost human.
Namor demands to know why it’s good to kill humans since he is half-human. His mother relates how, back in 1920, Namor’s people were forced from their home at the South Pole. An expedition of men set up camp on an ice floe above their old civilization and accidentally killed many of the undersea citizens with explosives and explorative drilling. Namor’s mother, whose name is revealed to be Fen, was sent to the surface to see what the savage Earth men were up to. She came across Leonard McKenzie, the leader of the humans. She learned their language and even married Leonard… only to report back to their leader that the White Man was too mighty.
Eesh.
It’s been 20 years since most of their people were wiped out, and Namor is to lead the fight against mankind. Because he is both Man and Sub-Mariner, he can survive in water and air, and he can somehow fly through the air. And now is the time for Namor to strike at those who nearly killed an entire species: the White Man!
Fun note: This is where the original comic ended. You can see the narrator blurb that would originally declare to come back next week left blank.
Namor strikes out against the White Man by bringing his cousin Dorma with him. She also closely resembles a normal human but is explicitly just his cousin. Dorma asks if they should take equipment with them, but Namor decides that extra things will only slow them down. Their first deed of terrorism? Knocking out the Cape Anna Lighthouse.
Admittedly, a lighthouse is fairly small time compared to “nearly wiping out an entire species,” but this is also Bill Everett adding on four pages to make his original eight-page introduction into a story that would fit into Marvel Comics issue 1. It’s just large enough to work for an action piece but small enough to be slipped onto four pages without making it feel rushed.
Namor’s grand plan to take out this bastion of surface dwellers? Knock on the door.
The crazy part?
It works.
Namor goes what can only be described as “beast mode” on the men stationed at the lighthouse. This includes wailing on the machinery, throwing a man down the staircase inside the tower, and even hurling some poor soul miles out to sea. This one is my favorite, honestly.
Backup arrives, and the renegade pair of Namor and Dorma are trapped atop the lighthouse. Luckily, a seaplane flies overhead, so Namor and his cousin make the leap into the air to steal the plane. As for the airman, the narration makes it seem like Namor made him hit orbit.
After they fly out to sea, Namor decides Dorma should find a way to ditch the plane and dives into the ocean, abandoning her to her fate. Presumably, Dorma does survive the intentional wreck of the plane, as she is a fairly major recurring character. Meanwhile, Everett himself declares that Namor will go on to further adventures in his crusade against White Men!
No, seriously.
Namor would be a pure villain for several more months, striking out against the surface dwellers of America multiple times in the pages of Marvel Mystery Comics. Weirdly, they changed the name of the comic after the first issue, but it still had the wild adventures everyone grew to love. The third issue would have Namor fight against the universal foe of the day, the Nazis. Reluctantly, Namor would attempt to fight the Nazis while still parsing out his feelings for the rest of the world. A human girlfriend/close friend named Sandy would try to help the arrogant prince during this time, and Namor would also take up a traditional costume of sorts.
It didn’t last long.
Namor also shares the title for what could be the first-ever superhero crossover in published comic books, at least for the American market. The Human Torch and Namor were astoundingly popular, and Marvel claims kids would write in letters demanding to know who would win between the two. It didn’t take long, and the two would meet a little over a year later in the 8th issue of Marvel Mystery Comics.
Even though both shared pages in the same book, and would have their own solo titles with a cast of supporting heroes in their own tales, crossovers were still something that didn’t happen. Each character was generally run by their creator, or someone hired to work after them. Even a direct, action-packed fight was rare. When All-Star Comics was published in 1940 as a co-publication between National Comics and All-American Publications (both of whom would later merge to become DC Comics), the heroes just narrated solo stories to one another that had vague connections in the early issues.
But this would be a massive all-out brawl that took place across New York City and even took multiple issues to tell. While it’s not the best of the early Golden Age crossovers, it’s hard to beat the thrill of the first one.
Namor would go on to continue fighting Nazis alongside Timely’s other heroes of the day, like the Human Torch and even Captain America himself. Timely would even publish a team-up comic for them to have group adventures in, the All-Winners. Weird name aside, this was just a collection of Timely’s most popular heroes in one book: Captain America, the Human Torch, and Namor the Sub-Mariner. A few other heroes would join alongside them, such as the ill-fated speedster in a bright yellow costume named The Whizzer.
Yeah, I feel like a kid again looking at that name too.
Eventually, someone would also name Namor’s people the Atlanteans, using the royalty-free legend of old. This was changed for his movie adaptation, as Marvel had a feeling that someone would call Namor a “wannabe Aquaman” for having a similar history… even if he premiered two years after Namor. Casual fans aren’t going to pay attention to that.
Namor would suffer the same fate as most superheroes in the 1950s, falling into obscurity as superhero comics quickly lost their popularity after World War II. However, he would be resurrected alongside some of the other Timely library of characters in 1962. That, however, will have to be for another day.
As for Namor himself, he may not be as popular as his star-spangled counterpart anymore, but he still remains a core character of the Marvel Universe. Namor has allied himself with the Defenders, the Secret Defenders, the X-Men, the Avengers, the Invaders, and more… while also finding the time to try and steal Sue Richards away from the Fantastic Four. A constant throughout the decades, you can always rely on Namor to be a loyal ally, but one who always has the best interest of his people and himself at heart. And he will be utterly ruthless when it comes to keeping his people safe.
Yeah, sounds about right.
