Murder #1 [1986]

In the last days of Charlton, there was a revival of the TALES OF THE MYSTERIOUS TRAVELER book for which Ditko did some new stories. Only one was published, in #15, but a few more showed up the next year in books Robin Snyder packaged for Renegade Press. "The Big Man" is one of those, an 8-page story both written and drawn by Ditko, which has the Mysterious Traveler in the background on the first and last page, but without any dialogue.

The story is one of those goofy Ditko things, about a strange giant who appears and kills a few businessmen with his bare hands, appearing to vanish into thin air before the police show up. An investigator finds a connection between the men in an old failed toy business venture, with various allusions to big ambitions, tiny minds, big hate and all that. Eventually it's revealed how the toymaker who felt he as cheated in the business by the others is the killer, designing an inflatable suit with expanding legs and arms, and he meets his end thanks to his own devices.

Ditko could be pretty funny on these little stories when he wasn't trying to make odd philosophical points that bogged down the scripts. A lot of neat visuals in the Big Man design as well.

Supernatural Law #27 [2000]

This issue has a reprint of one of those rare instances of Ditko inking someone else's pencils, in this case Batton Lash for a 4-page story featuring Lash's "Wolff & Byrd" characters. It was originally published in colour in SATAN'S SIX #1 [1993] from Topps, reprinted here from Lash's own Exhibit A Press with some tonework added in place of the colour. It's a pretty appropriate pairing, since Lash is among the most directly Ditko inspired cartoonists working in comics today, and among other things "Wolff & Byrd" is often a humourous take on the short fantasy/horror stories Ditko did for Marvel and Charlton.

This particular story starts very much in the vein of a STRANGE TALES yarn from 1960, with a teacher mocked by others learning to summon a demon, and using the powers of the demon to gather riches and take revenge on his enemies. Soon he finds himself party to a lawsuit brought on by Wolff & Byrd, lawyers specializing in the supernatural, and he goes to trial as his own lawyer, and you know what they say about that.

It's a very funny story, and the artwork is a perfect blend of Lash and Ditko's styles (and even includes a joke about those wonderful Ditko "magic gesture" fingers). Well worth picking up in any of its printings (I think it's also in the collection THE VAMPIRE BRAT AND OTHER TALES OF SUPERNATURAL LAW [apparently not, but still a book worth getting]). And of course if you like Ditko you'd be well advised to check out Lash's other work, including his new online strip version of Supernatural Law.

New Ditko - Marvel Milestones special

Now out, MARVEL MILESTONES: DRAGON LORD, SPEEDBALL & THE MAN IN THE SKY, a one-shot reprinting three Ditko stories from various eras, MARVEL SPOTLIGHT #5 (March 1980), SPEEDBALL #1 (September 1988) and AMAZING ADULT FANTASY #14 (July 1962), all under a non-Ditko cover.

Black Magic #28[v4n4] [1954]

"Buried Alive" is one of the earliest Ditko stories, and really shows off his young talent. This is extraordinarily good work for anyone, much less someone who only had a couple of dozen published pages prior to this, still showing some of his main influences (a few clear bits out of the Eisner playbook here) but already distinctively Ditko. Click below for a bigger scan and look at all the little bits that he put in this page, like the small gargoyle on the house, the details in the trees, the shadow of a rat in the mausoleum, the coffin. It almost seems that Ditko's early training as an artist was learning what details not to include given the print quality and page rates (especially the print quality from his other publishers. The Prize books I've seen from the era do seem to be better printed than the Charlton or Marvel books of a few years later. I can't imagine a lot of this linework surviving in those books).

This is a solid 6-page story about a man, Carl, who has a family history of people being mistakenly presumed dead and waking up to find themselves buried alive. He's justifiably paranoid, so he rigs a coffin with an alarm that'll go off in his room, and asks his friend Abel to hang around in the house for a week if he dies so that he can be rescued it he's buried alive.

Abel agrees, but is worried about what this death obsession is doing to both Carl and Carl's sister Angela, and tries to get Angela to leave. Unfortunately she suddenly dies soon after and is placed in the alarm-rigged coffin. Carl refuses to sleep, sure that she'll wake up, but finally falls asleep and has a nightmare about the alarm sounding and being unable to go help her. He checks the coffin and finds out she was alive and struggling in the coffin before dying, leaving Abel feeling guilty as he had slipped Carl a sleeping pill that prevented him from waking up to help her.

Cracked #226 [1987]

Ditko was a regular contributor to Globe Communications' CRACKED briefly in the mid-1980s, usually doing just one or two page stories in a series called "Robot War" (which seems to be Spy vs. Spy, but with robots). He also did a few longer parody stories, such as this 5-page version of the cartoon Thundercats called, naturally enough, "Blundercats". The story, by Mike Carlin, is no great shakes, might make more sense if I was familiar with the characters at all, and does get a few points for featuring a Krazy Kat reference. Ditko does make the best of it, doing that great ink-wash style that he often did when working for black&white magazines, and his characters are nicely expressive and animated, and some really creative use of sound effects to direct the eye and add to the humour.

I haven't seen them, but a bit later Ditko also did several short stories for Globe's MONSTERS ATTACK title.

Hall of Fame Featuring the THUNDER Agents #2 [1983]

Ditko somehow managed to do original THUNDER Agents work for four different publishers over the years. First of course for the original Tower series with Wallace Wood. This one was for JC Comics, on a series reprinting some of the original 1960s Tower stories. No Ditko reprints in this particular issue, but he pencilled the NoMan cover, with inks by Willie Blyberg. The same image, with slightly different colouring, appeared on the backcover of the issue without logos and such.

Ditko would later do a new NoMan story intended for JC Comics' original THUNDER AGENTS book, but wound up in an Archie comic instead. Then he'd also do a couple of stories for Deluxe's WALLY WOOD'S THUNDER AGENTS.

Magnus Robot Fighter #18 [1992]

Ditko briefly worked for Valiant in their early days, first on some of their BATTLEMANIA books about WWF wrestlers and then on their super-hero line, doing pencils or breakdowns on seven issues of four different titles published in a six month period. I suppose if things worked differently he might have settled in for a long run at the company, but right about then Jim Shooter was gone and Ditko's work stopped appearing at Valiant.

This was the first of two issues of MAGNUS that Ditko pencilled, and he's also credited with co-plotting it. I never read the previous issues, so I don't entirely know the set-up or what's going on, but there are robots, and Magnus fights them, so all is right in the world (robots seem surprisingly common in Ditko's work, with Machine Man, Rom, a few Spider-Man villains, Robot Wars, Go-Bots, etc). "Inside The Metal Mind" has Magnus living somewhere called Goph Level, in need of some money, so he takes a job which ends up involving fighting robots. Meanwhile, some robots who have developed free will are also experimenting with bodies that mimic humans, and their leader E7, a top-hat wearing robot, is trying to find out how to create more robots with free will.

It's a bit silly, but actually not that bad, and Ditko's art works pretty well with the various robots (though nothing can make E7 look less than ridiculous).

Ralph Reese inks the 22-page story. The cover also appears to be Ditko/Reese, although Reese's inks seem even heavier there.

Imagine #4 [1978]

IMAGINE was a fantasy anthology published by Mike Friedrich's Star*Reach Productions in the 1970s. This issue includes Ditko's only contribution to the title, an 8-page story printed as a colour section on glossy paper, I think the first time a Ditko story would have seen better than standard newsprint.

Paul Levitz, who Ditko had worked with before on Stalker and would work with again on Starman, writes the story "The Summoning", a sort of odd fantasy/sci-fi story about the last survivors of a race and how they attempt to persuade some metaphysical being to follow their own visions of the future of their race. The scripting has kind of a strange air of pretentiousness that I don't really associate with Levitz, but then he was a college student at the time, so who knows what sort of substances he was ingesting. Very oblique dialogue which can be tough slogging at times, although I thought it picked up a bit on the last page and is pretty effective there. Ditko's art suits the odd atmosphere of the story, using similar visual motifs as what he used in Doctor Strange and Shade, and I don't know if it's the superior reproduction or what but this does seem to be a bit better than most of the DC/Charlton short stories he was doing around the same time.

Ditko also draws the cover of the issue.