Early life and career Image:BlackKnight Atlas1.jpg|left|thumb|upright|
Black Knight #1 (May 1955). Cover art by Maneely. "The Black Knight was [his] signature character and the graphic image most associated with him." Joe Maneely, born and raised in
Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, was one of at least five children born to a poor couple, Robert and Gertrude Maneely. He attended Ascension BVM Elementary School and
Northeast Catholic High School; at the latter, he created a
school mascot, the Red Falcon, that also starred in a
comic strip in the
school newspaper. He began his
comic book career freelancing for
Street & Smith in 1948, drawing such features as "Butterfingers", "Django Jinks, Ghost Chaser", "Dr. Savant", "Mario Nette", "Nick Carter", "Public Defender", "Roger Kilgore", "Supersnipe", and "Ulysses Q. Wacky" in comics including
The Shadow,
Top Secrets,
Ghost Breakers and
Super Magician Comics. His earliest known credits are that company's
Top Secrets #4 (Aug. 1948), for which he
penciled and
inked the eight-page
crime fiction story "The Ragged Stranger"; and
Red Dragon #4 (Aug. 1948), for which he drew the eight-page story "Death by the Sword" and the one-page featurette "Tao's Small Sword Box", both starring the hero Tao Anwar. Other nascent work includes the seven-page story "Washington's Scout" in
Hillman Periodicals'
Airboy Comics vol. 6, #10 (Nov. 1949), and a small amount of work on the
Catholic comic-book
Treasure Chest. Maneely soon hit his stride at Atlas, for which he freelanced before going on staff "in about 1955." Until 1953, when Maneely and his family moved to the
Flushing neighborhood in the
New York City borough of
Queens, he traveled from Philadelphia to New York three times weekly to pick up scripts. With speed to match his style, he became a favorite of editor-in-chief
Stan Lee, who assigned Maneely covers and stories throughout virtually the entire range of Atlas comics. With superheroes experiencing a lull in popularity, Maneely drew Westerns,
war,
horror,
humor,
romance,
science fiction,
spy,
crime, and even period-adventure stories — that last most notably with the
medieval series
Black Knight, co-created by Maneely and writer and editor-in-chief Lee, Marvel artist
Herb Trimpe said fellow artist
Marie Severin, who had worked with Maneely at Atlas, had described "his pencils [as] almost nonexistent; they were like rough, lightly done layouts with no features on the faces ... It was just like ovals and sticks and stuff, and he inked from that. He drew when he inked. That's when he did the work, in the inking!" Stan Lee confirmed that "Joe almost inked without penciling." Other Atlas work reprinted widely by Marvel in the 1960s and 1970s include
Yellow Claw #1 (Oct. 1956) — starring a
Fu Manchu-inspired villain and the Asian FBI agent pursuing him, created by Maneely and writer
Al Feldstein The covers of
Sub-Mariner Comics #37, 39 and 41 (December 1954, April and August 1955) were Maneely's only superhero work for Atlas, during the company's short-lived mid-1950s attempt to revive superheroes. Maneely's talent, range and prolificity impressed fellow Atlas artists.
Stan Goldberg in 2002 recalled "the all-time great Joe Maneely, ... who I thought was the best artist that ever drew comics. ... Joe wasn't just a great craftsman; he worked so fast and he was one of the few artists who could go from drawing the Black Knight to drawing
Petey the Pest, or a war story. He had an unbelievable knack and he was just one sweet, nice guy." Goldberg recalled in 2005, "He worked so fast, we used to call him 'Joe Money'." Maneely's distinctive style, wrote historian Vassallo, was, "Crisp, uniquely inked, busy, and action oriented. Not necessarily pretty, but
vivid. It was a style unique to comics and difficult to imitate." By 1955, "Maneely's inking had stylized itself to a precision 'etching' effect, and he would enter a fruitful year that would see him turn out his most diverse and prolific work." By the summer of 1957, Atlas was experiencing difficulties and began shedding freelancers. Shortly afterward,
Martin Goodman stopped distributing his own titles and switched to
American News Company, which soon closed, temporarily leaving Atlas without a distributor and resulting in all staff, other than Lee, being fired. Maneely continued to work with Lee on the
Chicago Sun-Times-
syndicated comic strip ''Mrs. Lyons' Cubs
, which debuted in newspapers February 10, 1958. He also did a limited amount of freelancing for DC Comics during this time, including for the supernatural / fantasy anthologies House of Secrets and Tales of the Unexpected'';
Charlton Comics; and
Crestwood Publications. and another for the same agency, "A Farm and a Family." He did not have his glasses with him, and was killed when he accidentally fell between the cars of a moving commuter train on his way home to New Jersey. Fellow Atlas artist
Stan Goldberg recalled that on the night of Maneely's death, His last original published story was the five-page
Ringo Kid tale, "One Bullet Left," in
Gunsmoke Western #53 (July 1959), and his final published comics work was the cover of
Gunsmoke Western #55 (November 1959), featuring
Kid Colt and
Wyatt Earp. Historian Ger Apeldoorn believes Maneely's last drawn work was published earlier: the first page of the eight-page story "The Revenge of Roaring Bear" in
Two-Gun Kid #45 (Dec. 1958), which was completed by a different artist (
Jack Davis), and bears the highest published job number (T-67) of Maneely's work. Marvel editor-in-chief
Stan Lee opined in the early 2000s that had Maneely lived, "he would have been another
Jack Kirby. He would have been the best you could imagine." ==Personal life==