Battlemania #5 [1992]
This is the final issue of Valiant's licensed WWF wrestling comic, Ditko having drawn one of the two stories for every issue. In this case, "Justice For All" is a 20-page story featuring Sid Justice, a good-natured farm-boy type, going up against the vile Jake "The Snake" Roberts. Laura Hitchcock writes and Charles Barnett III inks.
The story opens with Justice settling down for some milk and catching up on the Arkansas Farm Journal. His apartment is pretty funny in the opening page, with a butter churn, some gardening equipment, a basket of vegetables, a bookcase with a gaslamp, what appears to be a lot of moonshine, various models of farm equipment and animals, some family photos and for some reason a TARDIS model (okay, a police box, but I don't think they actually make models of those that aren't tied-in to Doctor Who, and I don't think they have them in rural Arkansas). Anyway, his housekeeper opens a package, which turns out to be a cobra, which Justice makes short work of. Since his housekeeper broke her glasses in the commotion, and refuses to accept a handout from Justice to pay for them, Justice goes to get the money from the man logically responsible, Jake "The Snake" Roberts.
The resulting quest for remuneration takes Justice to battles with The Snake at the gym, a rooftop (with, hey, a water-tower!), the streets and finally the snakehouse at the zoo before justice finally prevails.
This is surprisingly good, maybe the best of Ditko's BATTLEMANIA stories. The faces lack a certain Ditko-ness, presumably to keep them on-model to the actual wrestlers, but the body language is all there, the story structure follows the classic Marvel formula that Ditko had a hand in defining, "The Snake" is very much shown as a Ditko villain in the style of Kraven, and the fights in the various locales are very well done, especially the rooftop and the zoo. Not a masterpiece by any means, but you could do far worse in looking to sample Ditko's late-period for-hire work.
From Charlton's RACKET SQUAD IN ACTION #11 [May-June 1954] comes "Botticelli of the Bangtails", an 8-page police/crime story by Ditko. The detectives in this story are J. J. O'Malley and Steve Pryor, who were on-going characters in the book, though this would be the only time Ditko drew them (his only other contribution to the title would be the 
From Charlton's STRANGE SUSPENSE STORIES #19 [1954] comes this 6-page crime-suspense thriller, "A Nice Quiet Place", featuring two bank robbers who head to a remote cabin to lay low until the heat is off, but of course meet their fate due to the all round lack of trust.
Steve Ditko draws the 8-page story "Star-Trakker", written by Stan Timmons, in this issue of what was DC's then-quickly dwindling line of genre anthology titles. The fact that this is a science fiction story in one of the ghost/mystery titles suggests that they were using up the various inventory they had from cancelled titles like MYSTERY IN SPACE.
This is a rather unusual story among the work of Ditko's first few years in comics. Appearing in Charlton's SPACE ADVENTURES #11 [1954], along with two other Ditko stories and under a Ditko cover, "Moment of Decision" is the only one page story Ditko did in the era. It's pretty good for all its lack of space, with a good space-ship design and alien landscape in the first panel, some creepy aliens in the second panel and then some tense action with a wrap-up where the art supports the story point. An excellent job all around.
Ditko draws "Gremlin in the Cockpit", an 8-page story by Joe Molloy. An American plane is shot at during WWII, with most of the crew bailing out as the pilot takes it down in the mountains. The crew go to find the plane, which has landed perfectly, but inside find the pilot dead at the controls with a broken neck. One of the crew spouts some nonsense about Gremlins, but the others don't believe it, fix the plane and take off. As they fly into a storm, the Gremlin suddenly appears and attacks the crew, only to be killed by the ghost of the captain, brought back by his love for his crew.
This issue contains a reprint of the 5-page "He Waits in the Dark" from TALES TO ASTONISH #24 [1961]. In a run-down tenement building in Europe, a janitor laments the sorry state of repairs, and quits when the landlord, who lives in luxury, refuses to spend any money fixing the place. A mysterious new man takes over the job, and makes some repairs on his own, then gives the landlord a chance to change his ways. That doesn't happen, of course, so the new janitor sends the tenants away and waits in the cold and dark until the landlord, in his quest for his rent, enters the building and is condemned to stay with it forever as both blink out of existence.
This issue features the debut of Starman, the last regular feature Ditko would draw for DC. Created and written by Paul Levitz and designed and penciled by Ditko and inked by Romeo Tanghal, the creative team for all 12 chapters of the story.
Ditko writes and draws a 6-page story for this issue of William G. Wilson Jr.'s SF/fantasy magazine, this time debuting "The Destruction Agent". It's a frantic and dense little story about the attempt of Spago, an agent of the dictator Zenek, trying to get the security codes to the planet Atn, using his traitors he has on the inside. Young Captain Brash is fired from the security unit for voicing suspicion that there's a traitor and gets some experimental devices from Dr. Veg that enable him to follow Spago to his base and then defeat Zenek's armada.
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