Early Life
John Severin was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, and was a teenager in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, New York City, when he began drawing professionally. While attending high school, he contributed cartoons to The Hobo News, receiving payment of one dollar per cartoon. Severin recalled in 1999:
- I was sometimes selling 19 or 20 of them a week. Not every week, naturally. But I didn’t have to get a regular job to carry me through high school. It was almost every week—not every week—but almost every week. I didn’t have to get a job. I hated to work, I’ll tell you. I didn’t have to get a job then, because I was in high school.
He attended the High School of Music & Art in New York City, together with future EC Comics and Mad artists Harvey Kurtzman, Will Elder, Al Jaffee and Al Feldstein. After graduating from the High School of Music & Art in 1940, he worked as an apprentice machinist and then enlisted in the Army, serving in the Pacific during World War II.
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