July 24, 2008

Beyond The Grave #4 [1976]

Couple of unusual things for Ditko among the nearly 2000 pages he drew for Charlton from 1968 to 1978. First off there are three "Ditko" illustrations for the text story "Dead Slumber". From the information I have there are about six such stories where Charlton reused Ditko drawings for text stories (in this case from "A Grave Mistake" in BEYOND THE GRAVE #2 [1975]), sometimes straight, sometimes heavily retouched. Nothing too spectacular visually in this particular one, though the writing is a bit better than you usually find in this text stories, of the few I've actually been able to bring myself to read.

A few pages later we have Ditko drawing a single page story, also something you only see about a half-dozen times in this era, and again around 1976. "Potion Of Youth", written by Joe Molloy is about a pirate who decides he wants to stop ageing, and what happens. A pretty cool condensed version of the same kind of story you see in the longer pieces in these anthologies, and Ditko does a good job establishing the setting and characters quickly. A lot of these other 1-pagers aren't really stories, more anecdotes or vignettes.


1 comment:

  1. Love that colorful scan--makes me wish someone would do collections of Charlton comics in color (Yes, I've already got the 160-page Package that reprints some of Ditko's Charlton stories in b/w), or at least put them on a cd.

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