Sidebar Poll - Reprint Wishlist

For no particular reason, another poll over on the sidebar. Sure, you can get all of Ditko's 1960s Marvel super-hero stuff in multiple formats, and his Charlton Action Heroes stuff has been reprinted recently, and his 1950s stuff is well represented in various reprints from Marvel and other publishers for the public domain stuff, and quite a bit of his creator owned work is readily available.

No shortage of Ditko stuff in print, but that still leaves a lot of stuff eventually needing reprinting in a nice bookshelf friendly format. Eventually I'm sure we'll see them all, but which would you like to see sooner rather than later? Assume all collections will be complete (Shade including the unpublished #9, Creeper including the unpublished Showcase #106, Speedball including all the scattered short stories). If I somehow missed the one book you'd most like to see, yell at me in the comments.

A convention tale...

So, I'm at a comic convention, which is probably always a mistake, but anyway, I'm digging through some bargain bins, which is what I do (Ditko finds were minor, but included some of his 1980s Marvel work (some INDIANA JONES, a Speedball short), the last WORLD'S FINEST with a Creeper story I needed, a few Charltons. I was hoping for a lot more 1970s Charltons, after finding a stack of them for $1 each last year, but no dice).

Anyway, just as I find a few early issues of BADGER I need, a light shines in my face, and I glance around and see it's a TV crew. So I go back to checking which issues of BADGER I need. Well, what would you do? Then the TV guy for some unfathomable reason decides to interview me. And I'm not even dressed as a Jedi Knight! Seriously, bizarre, you few reading this who have met me know I'm sort of the exact opposite of telegenic. Anyway, I don't think I really did too well with the interview, was a bit distracted, and probably should have gone with my first instinct and just asked them to get that camera out of my face, so I doubt it'll make it to air. For the most part I rejected the premise of every question I was asked (comics as an investment, fantasy as the main appeal of comics, the Batman movie having anything to do with anything). They seemed kind of surprised by the fact that I had a list of every comic I own on an electronic device (which I geekily call Mother Box, though I didn't think to call it that on camera, which I regret), and that I have about 13,000 comics, all of which I've read or intend to read.

But the reason I'm posting this on the Ditko weblog? The reason I was distracted? Because I kept wishing I had a dog so I could re-enact this scene from the DITKO PUBLIC SERVICE PACKAGE...

I love that book, so, so much.

--Link-- A few pieces here and there

Blog Kobek sounds like a Ditko character, maybe one of the mob guys in The Mocker, but it's actually Jarett Kobek's blog, where he has some thoughts on Ditko well worth reading.

I mentioned it before, but I got a chance to sit down with the first four issues of the recently revived Ditkomania recently, and it's a really enjoyable old-school fanzine but with all the improvements that modern desktop publishing allows. The latest, #67, has some fascinating stuff on Shade that has me re-reading the series, a great article by Rodney Schroeter on fantasy and objectivism and some worthwhile contributions from Dave Sim, including a backcover of Spider-Ham (who kind of looks like Spider-Aardvark) and a very perceptive review of the new Bell/Fantagraphics book on Ditko. Go here for ordering info.

And I continue my look at some Ditko related minutiae and the conventional wisdom about it that gets under my skin over here. Second in a series, collect them all!

It Stalks the Public Domain - Range War

BLAZING WESTERN #1 [1954] was the first issue of a short-lived series from a publisher called Timor, which from some casual research seems to have some shared ownership with Gillmor and Stanmor (the company which published this and the one that appears to have bought and later sold this), Whatever the details, it has the 8-page story below, "Range War", that makes a trio of scattered early stories by Ditko in three genres, horror, romance and western. Before his first year in professional comics was up, he'd get some experience in science-fiction, crime, fantasy and even a touch of super-heroes (if you count inking backgrounds in CAPTAIN 3-D). Looks like it would take him a while to hit war comics, but he'd get there, along with some humour work. Funny animals would take a bit longer.

Anyway, westerns are another genre that Ditko isn't really associated with, although he did quite a few more of them than he did romance, mostly for Charlton, some for Marvel. As I've said before, I think it's a shame, as he does some really nice work in the genre, and a lot of the morality of his independent work would fit nicely in the traditional setting (see the end of this story).

Anyway, again a very over-written story. It features the Utah Kid and his sidekick Golden Eagle, although it's pretty clear from the lettering that it wasn't "Utah" originally. Don't know what it was, something five or six letters, from the looks of it. Don't know if this was a pre-existing character. Looks like the he continued in later issues, though not by Ditko. Anyone with an encyclopedic knowledge of third-tier comic book gunfighters out there?

And oddly, while they changed the name of the lead, they didn't change the character "Ed Begley" (and I just checked he was a pretty well established actor by then). Anyway, the story has the Kid and Eagle coming across a poisoned watering hole and getting in the middle of a conflict between cattlemen, led by Silas Black, and the sheepherders led by Ed Begley, and figuring out that there's something else under the surface driving the conflict.

A pretty good little story, Ditko's art has some really good moments, though a few other bits are overdone, and some of the staging doesn't quite work (but that might be a problem in the script, like how the jailbreak works). Printing seems pretty awful, unfortunately.

Scans adapted to my personal tastes from those found, and available for free download with registration, at the Golden Age Comics Download site. To buy Ditko comics and things on paper, go over here for ordering info on some amazing creator-owned works and over here for info on recent and upcoming releases from all publishers, good and bad.

Click to enable the embiggening.

Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe #13 [1986]

The last of seven issues of Marvel's Handbook series to feature a Ditko illustrated entry, this one seems be to picked at random. Toad is, of course, a very early villain of the X-Men as an underling of Magneto from the Jack Kirby comics of the 1960s. If Ditko had ever drawn him prior to this, it manages to elude me, as I don't even think he appears in the AVENGERS ANNUAL Ditko drew around that time with the rest of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Help me out here people, am I missing some major Ditko Toad action? Oh well, it's not a bad illustration, with a nice sneering face and some great Ditko hands.

The ever-versatile Josef Rubinstein handles the inking chores on this and the rest of the book.

And because this weblog prides itself on absurd completeness, you can pick up reprints of this edition of Marvel's handbook, with the Ditko artwork (maybe not with the ROM page, for rights issues. Anyone know?) in this book and this book.

Tales of the Mysterious Traveler #15 [1985]

Original material from Steve Ditko appeared in Charlton comics until 1978, and from then on it was a steady stream of reprints, usually two or more a month, for as long as Charlton was a going concern.

Then, late in the company's run, there was some new Ditko stuff printed in their pages again in 1985, only this time it was material owned by Ditko.  Two issues of CHARLTON ACTION FEATURING STATIC presented revised versions the first two chapters of Static previously published by Eclipse, along with some other new and revised Ditko stories, and after reviving the 1950s series TALES OF THE MYSTERIOUS TRAVELER with an all reprint #14 they included a new Ditko story among the reprints in #15, which turned out to be the final issue.

The issue opens up with a reprint of the 5-page "The Desert" from TALES OF THE MYSTERIOUS TRAVELER #4 [1957] (though with the first page edited to remove the title to make room for the indicia). A decent little story about two men trapped for months in an remote Arctic outpost until the younger man gets cabin fever and decides to brave the elements.  Nothing too special, but the giant floating head of the Traveler watching the proceedings is always interesting.

The new story follows, "Deadly Shadow", an 8-page story written and drawn by Ditko. The Traveler only appears at the beginning and end.  Clever little morality play about a down-and-out inventor who comes up with a device that turns him into a living shadow, and uses it for criminal purposes.  A series of double crosses and betrayals and hasty actions leaves him with a serious dilemma in the end.  A solid example of Ditko's work of the era, finding different ways of exploring a theme to keep it visually interesting for the length of the story.

"Mister Evriman" from TALES OF THE MYSTERIOUS TRAVELER #4 [1957] has always been one of my favourite of these 1950s Charlton shorts.  The 6-page suspense story starts with the Traveler musing about that impact of this new-fangled "television" thing on American society, with a nice symbolic urban background dominated by antennas on every building.  A pollster doing some research finds some disturbing correlations about the negative impact of game shows, and how they're setting the world up for tyranny and destruction, until a game-show contestant named Homer Evriman shows up, who everyone sees as a reflection of themselves, setting the cosmic balance straight. Sure, it makes little sense, but it's a tale well told.

THIS MAGAZINE IS HAUNTED #16 [1958] is the source for the 4-page "The Night Was Strange", a science fiction drama narrated by Dr. Haunt, who we're supposed to believe is someone other than the Mysterious Traveler. Actually, he's slightly re-drawn and coloured here to make him seem even more like the Traveler, not that it takes a lot. This science fiction story has an astronaut returning from a two year mission on an experimental rocket, only to find himself in some totalitarian future. A nice little twist at the end improves the story somewhat, and as usual Ditko does a better job with the storytelling than the story needed.

While all-Ditko in the middle, the story opens and closes with some non-Ditko, a very strange Alex Nino cover and a Henry Boltinoff gag page that could have come right out of a 1950s DC comics.

Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe #11 [1986]

Ditko's lengthy run on ROM, wrapping up the series with writer Bill Mantlo and a variety of inkers, had concluded a few months before this issue of Marvel's Handbook series came out, so he appears here with the primary illustration in the space hippie form that he ended the book with (um, spoiler alert). Of course, no one would recognize that, so a proper ROM figure appears behind.

Joe Rubinstein provides the embellishing. Man, he must have been getting sick of this series by this point...

--Link-- Bissette on Ditko topics

You should be reading Steve Bissette's blog in general, especially with lots of posts about Charlton movie monster comics of the 1960s (Ditko and otherwise) in recent weeks, but in particular some recent posts are of interest.