Warp #2 [1983]

WARP was a fantasy comic book published by First and based on a stage play. Ditko did a three part back-up series featuring "The Faceless Ones" concept from the main story, written by frequent collaborator Jack C. Harris. "The Perils of Paragwen" is the first of these back-ups.

It's been a long since I've read the non-Ditko WARP stuff (the main story was drawn by Frank Brunner, interestingly an artist who made his name on Doctor Strange), so I don't know how this ties in to the main story, but this story deals with the Princess Paragwen and her search for the Masque of Mottagamma. After her lover vanishes in the quest, she's given a group of robot-like Faceless Ones by the mystic Lugulbanda and sent to find the Masque on Earth, where it's transformed itself into a gun and falls in the hands of a hit-man. With the help of a copy who lost his partner to the hitman Paragwen is able to track down the gun, but along the way one of the Faceless Ones mysteriously grows a pair of eyes while Paragwen is temporarily blinded.

No doubt this makes more sense if I refreshed myself on the whole WARP thing first, but even without that it's not a bad little fantasy story, and it has some of my favourite Ditko artwork of the early 1980s among his non-creator-owned stuff.

Ditko pencils and inks the 10-page story. Of note, the text page giving brief bios of the creators mentions that he did the art "twice up" from the printed size, which was the standard size in comics up to the late 1960s, but one-third larger than what was standard in 1983.