February 1, 2006

Tiger-Man #2 [1975]

Ditko did a lot of work for the short-lived Atlas-Seaboard line, penciling for three different books, seven issues total in their only year of existence (and was announced as doing work for their even shorter-lived black&white mags, the "Wrecage" story that he later re-worked as "Recage" a few years later).

Tiger-Man was drawn by Ernie Colon in his initial stories, and Ditko takes on the artwork with #2. The lead character is a New York based doctor, Lancaster Hill, who got his powers while working in Africa, experimenting on an imported Indian tiger (I suspect when they originally created the character they didn't realize that there aren't any tigers in Africa and had to do some backtracking on that).

"Stalker In A Concrete Jungle" has Tiger-Man confronted by the Blue Leopard, a costumed character from Africa just as agile as him who has pursued Hill from Africa to avenge the death by starvation of hundreds of his tribe that he blames on Hill for some unspecified reason. The Leopard actually has a nicer design, or at least more compatible with Ditko's art, and the scenes with the two of them fighting on the rooftops are the highlight of the issue, reminding me of similar stuff from the Spider-Man/Blue Beetle/Creeper days.

There's no inker credited on the 19-page story. Various sources give Ditko himself, Frank Giacoia and Larry Lieber. I'm leaning towards Giacoia of those choices, although I don't know of any other Ditko/Giacoia stories to compare.



1 comment:

  1. I'm fairly certain that's Giacoia on inks, perhaps with assistance from Joe Giella, who did a lot of uncredited assistance for Giacoia.You can compare Giacoia's inks over Ditko on one of the Hulk stories from Astonish (issue 69, I think, off the top of my head).

    Nick Caputo

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