Dennis O'Neil, R.I.P.

Wanted to note the passing of Dennis O'Neil, long time comic book writer and editor with a long list of accomplishments. Among other things, he worked with Ditko several times over the years (as well as doing a lot of notable work on characters Ditko created).

Early in his career, O'Neil scripted the last two published Doctor Strange stories by Ditko over in STRANGE TALES, which I thought were pretty good.  Shortly after that he was also working at Charlton under the pen-name "Sergius O'Shaugnessy", and Ditko drew at least two of O'Neil's stories (a lot of stories in that era have no credits, so there might be more with both of them).  One credited one is the middle chapter of a time travel epic in SPACE ADVENTURES #2 [1968], in between chapters by Jim Aparo and Pat Boyette, which is a pretty great selection of artists.  The other one is uncredited originally, but credited in a later letter column and in the SD Publishing reprint, an entertaining horror story hosted by Mr. Dedd appearing in GHOSTLY TALES #69 [1968].  Around the same time O'Neil was brought over to DC by editor Dick Giordano, where one of his first assignments was scripting Ditko's BEWARE THE CREEPER series following the SHOWCASE story scripted by Don Segall. And then years later, back at Marvel, Ditko drew most of O'Neil's story in IRON MAN #160 [1982], which had some fun scenes (there's some interesting behind the scenes on Ditko not drawing the splash page, but that's for another post).

(I post about some of O'Neil's other work here and here)