This issue reprints "Take A Chair" from JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #82 [1962], one of the most interesting of the many 5-pagers Ditko did from that era. The art is the usual fine stuff, but what I find most fascinating is how similar the structure and theme of the first half of the story is to a lot of Ditko's own work of later years, setting up the contrast of the nobility of hard work against the lazy man stealing the work of others. Even a lot of the names (Gorgi Gruff, Mr. Vort) sound like the kind of things you get in Ditko's writing.
Unfortunately, after the interesting set-up the story kind of veers off into a less interesting sci-fi twist ending, where it turns out the creative chair-builder is in fact an alien in disguise investigating humanity, and his chairs are spy robots. Cute, I guess, but doesn't quite live up to the set-up of the first few pages.
According to Ditko, he worked from a synopsis from Stan, even on these short stories. It does not preclude the possibility that Ditko occasionaly came up with a plot/names that Lee used.
ReplyDeleteNick Caputo