Gorgo Loves His Mama

Ditko Monsters: Gorgo: edited by Craig Yoe; written by Joe Gill and others; illustrated by Steve Ditko and others (1961-64; reprinted 2013): This grand, tabloid-sized volume reprints all of comic-book legend Steve (Spider-man, Dr. Strange) Ditko's work on the Charlton Comics adaptation and continuation of the giant-monster movie Gorgo.

Gorgo was a British attempt in the early 1960's to match the success of Toho Studios' Japanese giant-monster movies, especially Godzilla (nee Gojira). Thus was born Gorgo, a giant monster with an even more giant mother. Like King Kong, Gorgo gets captured and exhibited by some remarkably stupid showmen. Unlike King Kong, Gorgo has a mother who seems to be several hundred feet tall. England takes a beating.

After adapting the movie, Charlton continued the adventures of Gorgo and Mama Gorgo. Ditko and his long-time collaborator at Charlton, writer Joe Gill, combined on several issues of the title over a three-year period, with Ditko also providing several covers to issues he didn't otherwise illustrate.

This volume really highlights Ditko's two almost paradoxically opposite skills as a comic-book artist. He's great at drawing really weird things, and he's great at drawing people and settings that look far more normal and believeable than that of any other mainstream American comic-book artist in history. Giant monsters and ordinary people: it's the Robert Redford/Godzilla movie you always wanted!

In between depopulating the ocean for their out-sized caloric requirements (Gorgo's mother can gulp down sperm whales whole), Gorgo and his mother sleep on the ocean floor and occasionally get into adventures. They're not the villains of the series -- far from it. Instead, they end the Cuban Missile Crisis (I'm not joking), save Earth from an alien invasion, rescue an American nuclear submarine from the ocean floor, and inspire men and women to get married wherever they go (again, not kidding). For giant, destructive monsters, they sure are swell.

Throughout, Ditko juxtaposes the mundane and the fantastic with the same sort of skill he exhibited on his far more famous work on Spider-man and Dr. Strange, two characters he was drawing for Marvel pretty much simultaneously with several of the stories in this volume. Ditko enjoyed working for Charlton, pretty much the cheapest of the comic-book publishers to survive through the 1960's and 1970's, because he had pretty much carte blanche. Charlton was too cheap to exert editorial control, which meant Ditko didn't have to tailor his style to the publisher or have his stories micro-managed by an editor.

It's all a lot of over-sized fun on over-sized pages. This is Ditko near the height of his mainstream artistic powers. The scripts by Joe Gill are loopy in that Silver-Age science-fictiony way. The historical material contextualizes both the movie and the comics. Really, a fine piece of work. Gorgo loves his mama! Highly recommended.

Atom Heart Brother

DC Archives: Action Heroes Volume 1, written by Joe Gill, Steve Ditko and others, illustrated by Steve Ditko and others (1961-1966; reprinted 2004): Charlton Comics was pretty much the lowest of the low when it came to American comic-book publishers of the 1950's, 60's and 70's. But the company did have one major asset: artist Steve Ditko (co-creator of Spider-man and Dr. Strange for Marvel) liked working for them because while they paid badly, they left him pretty much alone to do as he pleased.

DC bought the Charlton Comics stable of super-heroes in the early 1980's, a purchase that nearly led to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen series being about those same heroes -- Moore initially pitched his dystopian, revisionist superhero series as being about the newly purchased Charlton heroes. DC decided to instead integrate the heroes into the DC Universe, and Moore revised Watchmen so as to be about new but similar heroes.

Captain Atom (who would become Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen) stars in this first collection of notable Charlton superhero comics of the 1960's and 1970's. With Charlton, 'notable' almost universally means 'Steve Ditko.' Ditko does full art on some of the earlier Captain Atom adventures before being inked indifferently by others on the latter adventures. It's Ditko at the height of his career as an artist, and the early 60's stories look especially good, with fine linework and some lovely, weird cosmic vistas.

Captain Atom gains his powers of flight, super-strength, and nebulous, atomicky other things after getting blown up by a nuclear bomb and then somehow reassembling himself. Now highly radioactive, he wears a containment suit so as not to irradiate everyone around him, and battles a hodgepode of Communist spies and alien menaces. Well, and a space dragon in one off-beat story that seems like it was cribbed from some of the odder adventures of Captain Marvel or Marvelman.

Joe Gill's writing is, for the most part, a combination of lead-footed dialogue, ridiculous scientific explanations, and Silver-Age bombast. Apparently Gill wrote 150 script pages a week for Charlton at his height of production, so one can't expect much. Ditko makes the whole thing sing, however, his normal characters looking extraordinarily ordinary, his action sequences fluid, his weirdness, well, weird. Doctor Spectro is an especially odd villain from the later issues in this volume, a light-wielding mad scientist who gets split into five light-wielding midgets. Riveting and totally ridiculous at times, this is nonetheless a lot of fun. Recommended.