Sub-Mariner #19
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeSub-Mariner #19 marks the costumed debut of Stingray (Walter Newell), one of Marvel's most enduring aquatic supporting heroes, completing a two-year character arc that began when Newell was introduced in Tales to Astonish #95 (1967) as a surface-world oceanographer. The issue also stands as a delightful piece of Marvel house culture: its splash page, drawn by Marie Severin and inked by Johnny Craig, embeds caricatures of the entire Marvel Bullpen — including Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Roy Thomas, John Romita Sr., Bill Everett, Herb Trimpe, Don Heck, Sol Brodsky, Larry Lieber, and others — into the beachside crowd surrounding Namor, a self-referential in-joke that Roy Thomas later documented in a letters column in issue #24. As a late-Silver Age key, it demonstrates the era's practice of rewarding close readers who had followed a supporting character across titles before granting him a superhero identity of his own.
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The story was scripted by Roy Thomas, who had co-created Walter Newell two years earlier with artist Bill Everett during their run on the Sub-Mariner feature in Tales to Astonish. For this issue, Thomas handed the art duties to Marie Severin, who both penciled and colored the main story, with veteran EC-era inker Johnny Craig finishing her line work — an attribution that required later correction by researcher Nick Caputo, as original indexes had credited Mike Esposito. Stan Lee served as editor. The Bullpen splash page appears to have been a playful collaboration between Thomas and Severin, with Thomas subsequently confirming the identities of all the caricatured colleagues in a reader Q&A published in Sub-Mariner #24.
Trivia · 8 facts
- First appearance of Stingray: Walter Newell dons his armored exosuit and adopts the Stingray identity for the first time, cover-dated November 1969.
- Walter Newell had previously appeared without a costume in Tales to Astonish #95 (September 1967), created by Roy Thomas and Bill Everett — making Sub-Mariner #19 his costumed debut rather than his absolute first appearance.
- Story title: 'Nothing Can Stop the Sting-Ray!' / 'Support Your Local Sting-Ray!' — two connected chapters in the same issue.
- Creative team: script by Roy Thomas; pencils and colors by Marie Severin; inks by Johnny Craig (confirmed by researcher Nick Caputo; original index credited Mike Esposito); letters by Artie Simek; editor Stan Lee.
- The splash page features caricatures of the full Marvel Bullpen as beachside bystanders — including Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, John Romita Sr., Bill Everett, Herb Trimpe, Don Heck, Larry Lieber, Sol Brodsky, Gary Friedrich, and others; Thomas identified them all in Sub-Mariner #24.
- Supporting characters present: Triton (Inhuman ally of Namor) and Diane Arliss (who later marries Newell and is introduced here in the broader narrative).
- Stingray's suit is depicted as a self-designed armored exoskeleton built for deep-sea scientific exploration, not originally intended as a combat weapon — a characterization that persisted throughout decades of Marvel continuity.
- The issue has been reprinted multiple times: in Mexican (El Príncipe de la Atlántida #27, 1971), Italian (I Fantastici Quattro #75, 1974), and French (Eclipso #56, 1975) editions, as well as in Marvel Masterworks: The Sub-Mariner Vol. 4 (2011) and Namor, the Sub-Mariner Epic Collection Vol. 3 — 'Who Strikes for Atlantis?' (2022).
Cast · 17 characters
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Key issues in Sub-Mariner
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