William Blake Everett (/ˈɛvərɪt/; May 18, 1917 – February 27, 1973) was an American comic book writer and artist best known for creating Namor the Sub-Mariner, as well as co-creating Daredevil and the zombie Simon Garth with writer Stan Lee for Marvel Comics.

Everett was born on May 18, 1917, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Everett, a fabulist who spun fanciful stories of his youth, claimed at various points to have graduated from high school in Arizona, or instead to have joined the U.S. Merchant Marine at ages ranging from 15 to 17, among other tales. In actuality, he was born at the Cambridge Hospital (renamed Mount Auburn Hospital in 1947) and raised in nearby Watertown, Massachusetts, with his parents Robert Maxwell Everett and Elaine Grace Brown Everett, and his sister Elizabeth, born in 1915. His 300-year-old New England family included Everett, Massachusetts' namesake, Edward Everett, who after serving as president of Harvard University became governor of Massachusetts and, in 1852, the U.S. Secretary of State. It also includes Edward's son, Massachusetts Congressman William Everett; and the poet William Blake.

Everett's father ran a successful trucking business, and when Everett was young the family bought a large summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine. Both parents supported the artistic talents of their son, whose reading tastes ran to the classics rather than pulp novels or comic strips, and included work by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Jack London. He would later find artistic influence in such commercial magazine artists as Mead Schaeffer, Dean Cornwell, and especially Floyd MacMillan Davis.

At 12, in 1929, Everett contracted tuberculosis, and was pulled from sixth grade to go with his mother and his sister to Arizona, to recuperate for four months. They then returned to Massachusetts, but a recurrence of the disease sent the trio back West, first to Prescott, Arizona, and then to Wickenburg, 60 miles away. There, taking his first drink, Everett began the path to teenage alcoholism. Nonetheless, he became well enough by 16 to return home with his mother and sister to the Boston area, where his father, unscathed by the Great Depression, had a large house in West Newton. His alcoholism and natural rebelliousness caused his parents to remove him from high school at age 16, in his second year, and enroll him in 1934 at Boston's Vesper George School of Art. His inability to focus, however, led him to drop out in 1935, after a year-and-a-half of the program.

That same year, his father died of acute appendicitis, and the family, though remaining well-off, moved to an apartment back in Cambridge. Everett knew his father "always wanted me to be a cartoonist, and he died, unfortunately, before he saw that come true. But that was probably in back of the whole thing."

Everett soon became a professional artist on the advertising staff of the Boston newspaper The Herald-Traveler for $12 a week. Soon afterward, he left to become a draftsman for the civil engineering firm The Brooks System, in Newton, Massachusetts. From there he pursued work in Phoenix, Arizona, and Los Angeles, California, without success. He then returned east to New York City, where he again did newspaper advertising art, for the New York Herald-Tribune. He next became art editor for Teck Publications' Radio News magazine, then assistant art director under Herm Bollin in Chicago, Illinois. Fired for being, as Everett described, "too cocky", he returned to New York where he sought employment as an art director. With no luck at this and desperate for work, he ran into an old Teck colleague, Walter Holze, who was now working in the new field of comic books. As Everett recalled in the late 1960s, "He asked me if I could do comics. I said, 'Sure!!' At that point I was starving. I wasn't interested in the comics business; I was talked into it".

Freelancing for Centaur Publications, Everett "sold my first page for $2 – writing, penciling, inking and all. 'Skyrocket Steele' was my first strip." Soon he was getting $10 and then $14 a page, a respectable sum during this late-1930s period near the beginning of what historians and fans call the Golden Age of comic books. Everett co-created the superhero Amazing-Man at Centaur, working with company art director Lloyd Jacquet, and drew the first five issues.

Everett and other creators followed Jacquet to his new company Funnies, Inc., one of the first comic-book "packagers" that would create comics on demand for publishers. Everett recalled