Victor “Vic” Carrabotta, one of the last surviving comic book artists to have worked for Marvel in the 1950s, including a story in the very first issue of Journey Into Mystery, has passed away at the age of 93.
Carrabotta was born in New York City, and attended Manhattan’s High School of Music & Art and then the Cartoonists and Illustrators School (now called the School of Visual Arts). After a stint in the Marines, Carrabotta tried to break into comics in 1951. One of the first places he went to try to get work was Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s studio. Simon and Kirby produced comics for a few different companies at the time. Carrabotta would later recall how Kirby gave him his big break, “Jack was very nice. I was just a kid back then, only 21. As he walked me out, I said, ‘By the way, this is my wife, Connie.’ Connie stands up and Jack does a double-take up and down because she’s pregnant…. He said, ‘Sit here a minute, I need to go back to my office.’ He writes a note and seals it, and tells me to go back to Stan with the note. … [Upon doing so,] Stan said, ‘Jack says you’re a good artist.’ I said, ‘Oh, I don’t know. Would you like to see my samples?’ He says, ‘No, that’s OK. Jack says you’re a good artist. I’ll tell you what,’ and he throws this script across the desk. He says, ‘I want this back in a week.'”
Carrabotta’s first assignment for Marvel (up until the 1960s, the company that we now know as Marvel didn’t really have a set name, as its owner, Martin Goodman, liked to use multiple names for his companies. The name most commonly associated with the 1950s, though, is Atlas. For the sake of ease, we’ll just say Marvel) was a short horror story, “The House on the Hill,” in Astonishing #13 in early 1952.
The next month, a Carrabotta story, “Haunted!”, appeared in the first issue of a new anthology called Journey Into Mystery (82 issues later, the series would introduce Thor)…
Carrabotta became a regular presence at Marvel, although he would also do work for Fiction House and Lev Gleason, among other comic book companies. Like his contemporaries at Marvel at the time, like Bill Everett and Joe Maneely, Carrabotta was adept at moving from genre to genre depending on what was hot at the time. He did science fiction, horror, fantasy, westerns and war comics.
In the late 1950s, though, the comic book industry suffered a major downturn, with Marvel practically eliminating its freelancers entirely, and like many other comic book artists, Carrabotta had to move into another industry. And also like many comic book artists, he found work in advertising.
Carrabotta would have a very successful advertising career over the next thirty/forty years, including serving as an art director for some major advertising companies. Carrabotta had moved to South Carolina in the 1950s, and while he had moved back to the Northeast at some point during his advertising career, he returned to South Carolina in the early 2000s. He had been a regular fixture at comic book conventions in the South for the last two decades.
