The Incredible Hulk #235 [1979]

THE INCREDIBLE HULK #235 [1979] is one of the first published pieces for this stint at Marvel, following a cover for an Avengers reprint the previous month. It's one of the rare cases of Ditko inking another artist, working over the pencils of Al Milgrom. It's also a good bridge between his 1960s stint at Marvel and the one just beginning, as he did some major work developing the Hulk in the 1960s and Machine Man would be his regular assignment starting a few months later. He'd also do a few more Hulk stories in the future.

It's a pretty good cover of a dynamic meeting between the two Jack Kirby creations. The Hulk figure is especially good. Pretty unlikely it'll ever happen, but I'd be fascinated to see the original pencils to this to see how closely Ditko followed it.

Machine Man #15 [1980]

This issue starts the second half of Ditko's ten issue run on the Jack Kirby created Machine Man series, with Tom DeFalco taking over the writing.  The 17-page story "Kill Me or Cure Me" includes the Thing and Human Torch from the Fantastic Four, as well as a brief cameo from the rest of the FF. Ditko's version of the Thing always seems a bit off, but I do like his Torch.

Anyway, MM is working for an insurance company and gets sent to an industrial accident at a lab exploring alternative energy.  He uses his powers to help in the rescue, including a nice sequence where he takes off his leg to use it to jack up some debris, and then encounters a scientist who has been turned into a gaseous form and seems to have gone insane from the loss of her humanity.  While MM is damaged and getting some repairs from "Gears" Garvin, an inventive mechanic he fortunately crashes in front of the battle is taken to the Baxter Building, and when MM catches up we get the usual Marvel misunderstanding and fight between heroes when they first meet.

Enjoyable little issue.  Ditko comes up with a lot of really good visuals for Machine Man's powers and designs a cool little one-shot villain for the story. 

Ditko does full art on the story and also does the cover for this issue.

Marvel Comics Presents #10 [1989]

Almost a decade after he drew ten issues of the series featuring the Kirby created hero, Ditko returned to plot and pencil an 8-page adventure of Machine Man for this anthology title. "Machine Man Meets the F. F... ...Failure Five" is inked by Dave Cockrum and scripted by Mike Rockwitz.

"Failure Five" is a robot made from scraps by a low-level government scientist which has gained intelligence and wants to steal Machine Man's body. This leads to first the kidnapping of MM's friend Peter Spalding and then a confrontation between the two robots (with MM series regular Colonel Krag also showing up).

It feels like Ditko might have had something else planned for this story that didn't make it into the script. The art, however, is really nice. Cockrum was a really good fit for Ditko (I think this is the only time Cockrum inked Ditko), the robot villain design is nicely wacky and the mixture of that and MM's stretching arms makes for some good stuff in the fight scenes.

Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe #7 [1986]

Not surprisingly, having drawn ten issues of this Jack Kirby creation's solo series, Ditko was called upon to provide the illustration for Machine Man's handbook entry, with the usual Joe Rubinstein inks. Good solid illustration, although I always preferred the more freaky giant bug-eyes that Kirby designed the character with than those smaller ones in the Ditko re-design.

Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe #6 [1986]

Hey, a character who actually debuted in a comic book that Ditko drew, and that Ditko presumably might have had a hand in designing. Go figure. Anyway, the character first appeared in Ditko's final issue of MACHINE MAN some years before this, and subsequently became a Spider-Man villain. Pretty cool design, overall. I always did wonder, though, given the similarities in design, if there was some intention to use the Green Goblin in that story, changed for understandable reasons. The comparison isn't helped by the character subsequently becoming an even more blatant Green Goblin derivative, the Hobgoblin (a fact which made his first appearance harder to find at a reasonable price back around the time I was first getting Ditko MACHINE MAN back issues).

As usual for this series, Joe Rubinstein provides the inks.

Machine Man #12 [1979]

Machine Man was a Jack Kirby creation, cancelled when he left Marvel in 1978. It was revived less than a year later, this time with newly returned to Marvel Steve Ditko drawing and Marv Wolfman writing.

I'm looking forward to reading and re-reading these. A few of them were among my earliest Ditko back issue buys, but I only recently got the last few (they were absurdly expensive in one of those odd comic book marketplace things where books become "hot" for a guest appearance that no one cares about a year later (Jack O'Lantern?), but the price never goes down).

"Where Walk The Gods" is a 17-page story, starting with Machine Man patrolling the streets of New York at night, and getting increasingly disenchanted with humanity. For no well explained reason, his frustrated electrical discharge ends up instantly hyper-evolving five humans, who appear just as Machine Man is about to kill a criminal who shot a young boy's father. A rather odd dialogue on ethics ensues, as the cosmic beings debate whether Machine Man will prevent humanity from reaching its destiny. One amusing anti-Ditko note, when the young boy pleads on MM's behalf he also says of the shooter "there's gotta be a way to help him without hurting him". Oh, Mr. A would be so disappointed...

Actually kind of some ambitious, if unsuccessfully done, ideas in here for a mainstream comic about a robot from 1979. Maybe if there had been a fuller explanation of what exactly happened, or a follow-up of some sort.

Pretty standard Ditko art from the era. Solid, but nothing too eye-opening. In some ways his Machine Man is a bit too visually restrained at times.

Ditko also draws the cover.

"Where Walk The Gods" LG718