Dial 'K' for 'Ditko'

Rorschach

HBO's WATCHMEN series (which should really be called AFTER WATCHMEN) gives us a White Supremacist Group calling itself The Seventh Kavalry. That's a reference to Custer's doomed Cavalry. The change from 'C' to 'K' in 'Cavalry' is a reference to the Ku Klux Klan.

The Seventh Kavalry wears masks based on deceased original WATCHMEN hero Rorschach.

WATCHMEN creators Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons based Rorschach on a character created by Steve Ditko (himself creator of Spider-man, Dr. Strange, and many others). That character was The Question.

Rorschach's real name was Walter Joseph Kovacs. That 'K' was a nod to Ditko's love of K's.

A fairly astonishing number of Ditko creations had either a 'K' or the K sound created by a hard 'C' in their names. 

These characters include but are not limited to the following characters: Vic Sage (The Question, whom Rorschach parodies), Ted Kord (Silver Age Blue Beetle, whom Nite Owl parodies), Peter ParKer, Rac Shade, Mocker, Doctor Strange, Doctor Octopus, Mac Gargan (Scorpion), Electro, Doctor Spectro, Jack Ryder (Creeper), Chameleon, Clea, Clown, Curt Connors (Lizard), Hank Hall (Hawk), Tinkerer, Karcilius... OK, you get the idea. You'll note that the 'K' sound even lurks in The Question and Rorschach.

So the Seventh Kavalry is also a nod to the Ditko 'K.'

Hey, there's a 'K' in Ditko!

Imagine that!

Marvel 2016 Again!

Captain America: Civil War (2016): based on characters and situations created by Joe Simon, Jack Kirby, Mark Millar, Stan Lee, and others; written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely; directed by Anthony and Joe Russo; starring Chris Evans (Captain America), Robert Downey Jr. (Iron Man), Anthony Mackie (The Falcon), Sebastian Stan (The Winter Soldier), Elizabeth Olsen (Scarlet Witch), Paul Bettany (The Vision), and Scarlet Johansson (Black Widow): 

Fast-moving, crowded film pits lots of Marvel super-heroes against lots of other Marvel super-heroes. The movie stays moderately zippy as it leaps from location to location. It also manages to bring Spider-man into the Marvel Cinematic Universe in fairly rousing fashion. Well, rousing if you enjoy seeing the increasingly dickish Iron Man practice child endangerment! It's really not a Captain America movie but rather a third (at the time) Avengers movie.

Black Panther gets introduced too, and ends up being one of the few voices of reason. All hail Wakanda!

Things go on about one super-hero battle too long, in part because the best part of the whole movie occurs during that second-to-last battle as the movie goes all-out comic book. Boy, though, the Vision's costume is terrible. If nothing else, the film suggests that Marvel's Damage Control comic, in which super-powered cleaners clean up the aftermaths of super-battles, should be turned into a movie franchise. Stat. Recommended.

Doctor Strange (2016): based on the character created by Steve Ditko; written by Jon Spaihts, Scott Derrickson, and C. Robert Cargill; directed by Scott Derrickson; starring Benedict Cumberbatch (Dr. Stephen Strange), Rachel McAdams (Rachel Palmer), Chiwetel Ejiofor (Mordo), Benedict Wong (Wong), Tilda Swinton (The Ancient One), and Mads Mikkelsen (Kaecilius): 

A bit of a boiler-plate Marvel Movie (think Iron Man with magic instead of technology and you've pretty much got it) enlivened by some ambitiously loopy visuals, albeit some of them riffing on Inception and not anything in the Dr. Strange comic books themselves.

The changes to Dr. Strange's character make him a twin for Robert Downey Jr.'s snarky Tony Stark. That's faithful to the original comics version of pre-magic Dr. Strange, not so much for post-magical-training Dr. Strange, possibly early Marvel's least quippy hero -- even Reed Richards (or Sue Storm, for that matter) got off more zingers than Dr. Strange in the 1960's. 

Created by writer-artist Steve 'Spider-man' Ditko, Dr. Strange's non-quippy gravitas probably makes him the Marvel character who would most benefit from a trade to DC Comics for, say, the Legion of Super-heroes.

Benedict Cumberbatch is fine as Dr. Strange, though his American accent is all kinds of weird. Chiwetel Ejiofor does nice work as a seriously reworked Mordo. Mads Mikkelsen plays the least interesting Marvel Movie villain since Mickey Rourke and Sam Rockwell in Iron Man 2. Rachel McAdams is stuck playing Natalie Portman in the Thor movies, only moreso.

The movie's visuals fail spectacularly at the end even as they also succeed admirably in translating Ditko's surreal comic-book visuals of the Dark Dimension into the movie world. To say that the visual redesign of Dr. Strange's greatest foe is regrettable is about the most praise I can offer. The poor bugger has been biggie-sized into a giant floating head that looks an awful lot like what would happen if you painted the Tron visuals for the Master Control Program onto an accordion.

As to the white-washing in regards to Asians... yep, one of Marvel's first prominent, 'good' Asian characters is no more. Doc's mentor, the ancient Asian known only as the Ancient One, is now the surprisingly spry Tilda Swinton, a.k.a. The Whitest Actress Ever. And the other tweaks made to the Ancient One's character don't help much either. 

In other areas, the magic training Strange endures now has all the length and rigor of selecting icons off a computer screen. Really, it makes the Harry Potterverse seem like a world teeming with educational rigor by comparison. Doctor Strange just has to make funky Kung Fu moves -- no pronouncement of spells required. 

And the mystical doodad Strange and friends need to travel through space-time? It's there to be dropped at a crucial moment, as these things always are. And it's called a 'Sling Ring,' thus recalling one of the lowest of low points in adaptations of Marvel comics to other media -- the laughable Thing animated show of the 1980's and the cry "Thing ring, do your thing!" On the bright side, the Wand of Watoomb makes a cameo and the Cloak of Levitation gains the personality of  loyal dog. Lightly recommended.

Spider-Man 3 (2007)

Spider-Man 3 (2007): based on characters created by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee; written by Sam Raimi, Ivan Raimi, and Alvin Sargent; directed by Sam Raimi; starring Tobey Maguire (Peter Parker/ Spider-Man), Kirsten Dunst (Mary Jane Watson), James Franco (Harry Osborne), Thomas Haden Church (Flint Marko/ Sandman), Topher Grace (Eddie Brock/ Venom), Bryce Dallas Howard (Gwen Stacy), James Cromwell (Captain Stacy), Dylan Baker (Dr. Curt Connors), Rosemary Harris (Aunt May), and J.K. Simmons (J. Jonah Jameson):

11 more years of superhero movies have made Spider-Man 3 seem a lot more charming now than it did at the time. The studio forced director/co-writer Sam Raimi to shoehorn 1980's Spider-Man villain Venom into a story that already had Sandman and Harry Osborn as antagonists for Peter Parker's spidery alter ego. And oh boy, what a clumsy shoehorn it is!

The result does strongly suggest that Sam Raimi pretty much said 'To hell with you!' at this point, forced to give us a tale of Peter Parker briefly 'going bad' under the influence of the alien symbiote/black costume. While he's bad, Peter Parker looks and acts like a sort of Emo Beatnik. He dances. He snaps his fingers. He plays the piano. Wow!

Sam Raimi's desire to be done with superhero movies also seems to be in full evidence. Spider-Man 3 opens and closes with a musical number. The motivations of villain Sandman are murky. A retcon of the murder of Peter's Uncle Ben has been inserted because everything has to be personal for superheroes. The Sandman himself generally looks and acts a lot like the sandstorms in the first two Brendan Fraser Mummy movies.

Oh, well. Tobey Maguire is still mopey and perky as Peter and Spidey. Kirsten Dunst's Mary Jane is now a thankless wet blanket of a role. James Franco just looks stoned all the time as Harry Osborn. As in Spider-Man 2, the action climax ends on a note of forgiveness rather than all-out punchiness. In today's superhero world, that last choice still seems fresh and important, and the makers of Spider-Man: Homecoming seem to have realized that with the ending of their NuSpider-man movie. In all, lightly recommended yet almost incongruously entertaining.

Spider-man: Homecoming (2017)

Spider-man: Homecoming (2017): based on characters and situations created by Steve Ditko, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, and Don Heck; written by Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley, Erik Sommers, Chris McKenna, Christopher Ford, and Jon Watts; starring Tom Holland (Peter Parker/ Spider-man), Michael Keaton (Adrian Toomes/ Vulture), Robert Downey Jr. (Tony Stark/ Iron Man), Marisa Tomei (May Parker), Jon Favreau (Happy Hogan), Zendaya (Michelle), Jacob Batalon (Ned), Laura Harrier (Liz), and Chris Evans (Captain America): 

Spider-man: Homecoming because Spider-man: Prom lacked the metaphoric level of Spider-man's 'homecoming' to the Marvel Cinematic Universe after five movies in his own playground at Sony.

The movie is surprisingly funny and light on its feet. Spider-man: Homecoming gets Peter Parker's urgent need to save people just right. It also does the right thing by having Peter be an underclassman in high school. 

Tying Spider-man so thoroughly to Tony Stark/Avengers is a bit of a bummer, though. We're told repeatedly by assorted characters that Peter is "the smartest kid" they know. But the elements that made this true in the comics only remain in Peter's creation of his web-slinging fluid and web-shooters. And Tony Stark even improves on them. Peter doesn't have to create the finished version of the iconic costume, the Spider-Beacon, the Spider-tracer.... oh, well. The whole thing almost acts as metacommentary on Spider-man now being part of a vast, shared, corporate movie universe.

Tom Holland is good, as are most of the actors. As Spidey's newly minted best pal Ned, Jacob Batalon steals the show on several occasions while also demonstrating why maybe superheroes need to preserve their secret identities. He's definitely a plus. 

Peter Parker isn't the socially ostracized misfit of the comics, though, and that was always part of the point of Peter's high-school experiences: Spider-man is willing to help people who treat him badly. Here, socially awkward Peter has trouble asking a Senior girl to go to the Prom... sorry, Homecoming... but it turns out she has a huge crush on him! The angst and awkwardness of Peter Parker has been mostly muffled. It seems like Marvel missed a chance to use Spider-man to address issues of bullying et al. Spider-man's miserable high-school existence has been defanged.

So too his reciprocal, self-sacrificing pas de deux with Aunt May, who is now Marisa Tomei, her hotness much commented upon, her elderly comic-book nature replaced by a sort of hippie Earth Mother. I'm not sure Aunt May should turn out to be Stacy's Mom!

Still, it's a genial movie. Michael Keaton's Vulture is surprisingly low-key -- he's supposed to be a working-class joe who moved into high-tech after being screwed over on a contract he had to clean up some alien debris lying around after the Avengers' battle with the Chitauri invasion of New York that occurred at the end of Avengers (2012). As motivations go, it dovetails with the movie's treatment of Spider-man as a working-class hero who needs to give up his desire to join the Avengers full-time and save "the little people." Oh, those little people. Recommended.

Unstranger Things

Dr. Strange (2016): based on the character created by Steve Ditko; written by Jon Spaihts, Scott Derrickson, and C. Robert Cargill; directed by Scott Derrickson; starring Benedict Cumberbatch (Dr. Stephen Strange), Rachel McAdams (Rachel Palmer), Chiwetel Ejiofor (Mordo), Benedict Wong (Wong), Tilda Swinton (The Ancient One), and Mads Mikkelsen (Kaecilius): A bit of a boiler-plate Marvel Movie (think Iron Man with magic instead of technology and you've pretty much got it) enlivened by some ambitiously loopy visuals, albeit some of them riffing on Inception and not anything in the Dr. Strange comic books themselves.

The changes to Dr. Strange's character make him a twin for Robert Downey Jr.'s snarky Tony Stark. That's faithful for pre-magic Dr. Strange, not so much for post-magical-training Dr. Strange, possibly early Marvel's least quippy hero -- even Reed Richards (or Sue Storm, for that matter) got off more zingers than Dr. Strange in the 1960's. Created by writer-artist Steve 'Spider-man' Ditko, Dr. Strange's non-quippy gravitas probably makes him the Marvel character who would most benefit from a trade to DC Comics for, say, the Legion of Super-heroes.

Benedict Cumberbatch is fine as Dr. Strange, and Chiwetel Ejiofor does nice work as a seriously reworked Mordo. Mads Mikkelsen plays the least interesting Marvel Movie villain since Mickey Rourke and Sam Rockwell in Iron Man 2. Rachel McAdams is stuck playing Natalie Portman in the Thor movies, only moreso.

The movie's visuals fail spectacularly at the end even as they also succeed admirably in translating Ditko's surreal comic-book visuals of the Dark Dimension into the movie world. To say that the visual redesign of Dr. Strange's greatest foe is regrettable is about the most praise I can offer. The poor bugger has been biggie-sized into a giant floating head that looks an awful lot like what would happen if you painted the Tron visuals for the Master Control Program onto an accordion.

As to the white-washing in regards to Asians... yep, one of Marvel's first prominent, 'good' Asian characters is no more. Doc's mentor, the ancient Asian known only as the Ancient One, is now the surprisingly spry Tilda Swinton, a.k.a. The Whitest Actress Ever. And the other tweaks made to the Ancient One's character don't help much either. 

In other areas, the magic training Strange endures now has all the length and rigor of selecting icons off a computer screen. Really, it makes the Harry Potterverse seem like a world teeming with educational rigor by comparison. Doctor Strange just has to make funky Kung Fu moves -- no pronouncement of spells required. And the mystical doodad Strange and friends need to travel through space-time? It's there to be dropped at a crucial moment, as these things always are. Lightly recommended.

Mystical Question, Rorschach's Dad

The Question: Devil's in the Details: written by Rick Veitch; illustrated by Tommy Lee Edwards with Don Cameron (2004-2005): Since the late 1980's, the Question has been much less famous than the character modeled on him, Watchmen's Rorschach. It's sort of a shame, especially since the Question seems perfectly suited to a live-action TV show in a way that a lot of superheroes aren't.

Why? Because other than the blank, flesh-coloured mask that hides his identity, the Question's wardrobe is about as basic as it gets -- suit, trench-coat, gloves, fedora. Created by writer-artist Steve Ditko (Spider-man, Doctor Strange) for Charlton Comics in the 1960's and subsequently purchased by DC Comics in the 1980's along with the rest of the Charlton superhero line, The Question has mostly survived on the fringes of the superhero universe. 

A grim and gritty DC version by writer Denny O'Neil and artist Denys Cowan ran for several years in the late 1980's, but other than that the Question has been a creature of miniseries and guest appearances in the comics. His most-seen version, by far, was as a conspiracy-obsessed hero voiced deliciously by Jeffrey Coombs on the Justice League Unlimited cartoon of the early oughts.

Ditko's original version allowed the writer-artist to espouse some of his libertarian beliefs in the guise of a super-hero book. Shock-jock radio host Vic Sage rails against various things on his show; then, with the donning of the mask and a quick spritz of chemicals that change the colour of his clothing and hair, Sage becomes the Question so as to put his beliefs in action.

This version, by Rick Veitch and artist Tommy Lee Edwards, is a much-different bird. The Question now has a mystical, shamanistic connection to cities. Indeed, cities can talk to him. And Chicago warns him that something bad is up in Metropolis -- something aimed at Superman. So the Question goes to Metropolis.

Various shenanigans ensue. Tommy Lee Edwards does some interesting, somewhat avant-garde (for superhero comics) things with the art, using 3-D models and playing with dual-narrative streams and hallucinogenic visions. Veitch offers a number of clever bits and bursts of stream-of-consciousness internal narration, though turning the Question into a vision-guided urban mystic takes a bit of getting used to. The whole plot revolves around a Metropolis-sized plan by Lex Luthor involving the application of Feng Shui to urban planning. How weird is that?

The whole thing is an enjoyable enterprise, and certainly better than an awful lot of superhero comics that get collected into trade paperbacks. This one seems to have never been collected, which is a shame: Veitch is always interesting, even when he's not working at the height of his own powers, or drawing his own stuff. Recommended.

Eerie...

Eerie Archives Volume 1 : edited by Archie Goodwin; written by Archie Goodwin and others; illustrated by Wally Wood, Steve Ditko, Reed Crandall, Gene Colan, Johnny Craig, Alex Toth, Angelo Torres, and others (1966-67/collected 2009): Warren Publishing's magazine-sized, black-and-white comics anthologies survived from the 1960's to the early 1980's. Their creative heyday came early, however, when a young Archie Goodwin edited and wrote an awful lot of stories for Creepy, Blazing Combat, and Eerie.

One can see the over-worked Goodwin grow as a writer in this collection of the first five issues of Eerie. However, it's the art that's the star here (and throughout the Warren anthology books, at least during the 1960's). 

Eerie was one of the places Steve Ditko (co-creator of Spider-man and Dr. Strange) landed after he left Marvel in the 1960's. He plays around with washes in his work for Warren, and it's lovely stuff, adding a new dimension to the work of one of the ten finest artists produced by American comic books. 

Veteran artist Reed Crandall also found work at Warren, and his meticulous, fine-lined artwork worked best on period pieces. There's a somewhat silly story about a mummy in Victorian London included here that's elevated by Crandall's artwork to the status of a minor masterpiece. Crandall's work on adaptations of stories by Poe and, perhaps most memorably, Bram Stoker's "The Squaw," is wonderful stuff that merits a Crandall-specific reprint anthology.

Other artists also found ways to express themselves at Warren, free of the choke-hold of super-heroes and lousy colour reproduction. Gene Colan's stories in this collection demonstrate that he was always better when he didn't have to worry about super-heroes but could instead be moody and demotic. Angelo Torres, perhaps unjustly neglected, also did fine work on these short tales of horror.

And as a bonus, Wally Wood produced some one-page bits, while that towering force of paperback covers, Frank Frazetta, produced a number of covers for Eerie. One of the covers in this volume gives away what seems to have been intended to be a surprise in the story it was drawn for. So it goes. 

Eerie and Creepy tried to emulate the great EC horror comics of the 1950's. The writing may not have always been top-notch -- Archie Goodwin and the other writers simply weren't capable of the extraordinary heights of the EC writers, though Goodwin's work on Blazing Combat was far superior to his horror work. The art, though, is terrific. You may not want to pay full list price for this or other Warren horror volumes (I know I didn't), but they're certainly worth a look if you can avoid bankrupting yourself on them. Recommended.

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.

Rise and Fall

The World's End: written by Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg; directed by Edgar Wright; starring Simon Pegg (Gary King), Nick Frost (Andy Knightley), Martin Freeman (Oliver Chamberlain), Paddy Considine (Steven Prince), Eddie Marsan (Peter Page), Pierce Brosnan (Guy Shephard), and Rosamund Pike (Sam Chamberlain) (2013): Even more fun upon a second viewing. The movie gleefully subverts cliches from dozens of science-fiction sources while nonetheless making more sense than most 'serious' summer movies.

As with previous films Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz from stars Pegg and Frost and director Wright, The World's End strikes a fine balance between dialogue comedy and often uproarious slapstick. And as goofy as the fight scenes are, they're still better choreographed than those in the vast majority of action movies. The soundtrack offers a time capsule of late 1980's/early 1990's BritPop, with an appropriate Doors song (appropriate to a pub crawl, that is) thrown in for good measure.

There's a certain amount of seriousness floating around just beneath the surface, especially concerning addiction and free will, but the filmmakers wisely don't bash the viewer over the head with it: they know when to jump back to comedy. Highly recommended.

The Steve Ditko Archives Volume 3: Mysterious Traveler: edited and introduced by Blake Bell; written by Joe Gill, Steve Ditko and others; illustrated by Steve Ditko (1957; collected 2013): The great Steve Ditko, co-creator of Spider-man and Dr. Strange in the early 1960's, can be seen herein becoming a great comic-book artist less than a decade into his illustrious career. The character work, panel composition, and experimentation with layout are those of a mature artist approaching the peak of his powers.

The weirdness of Ditko is that all this rising greatness comes on short horror and science-fiction stories for the lowest of the low of 1950's comic-book publishers, Charlton Comics. Charlton paid the least of the major publishers. However, they also didn't care what appeared in their comics, just so long as it passed the scrutiny of the new Comics Code Authority and then made a profit on the newsstands. That freedom set Ditko free, and he knew it -- that's why he worked for Charlton. He was doing a graduate course in comic-book illustration. And creative freedom has always been one of Ditko's needs.

Most of the stories here are competently written, though there are some stinkers. But Charlton's desire for 5-page and 6-page stories so as to give them flexibility in assembling comic books also means that even the worst story ends quickly. And you've got Ditko to watch. Many of the stylistic choices that would make Spider-man, Dr. Strange and many other later Ditko work so appealing and idiosyncratic find their first expression here.

The character work, especially with faces and with body poses, is already exquisitie and quintessentially Ditko. While Ditko was a poet of the ordinary-looking, he was also a master of the weird, and that too finds expression here. And as usual, editor Blake Bell does a fine job in assembling the material and in penning the autobiographical introduction to the volume. Highly recommended.

Ditkopalooza

The Steve Ditko Omnibus Volume 1 featuring Shade the Changing Man: all stories plotted and illustrated by Steve Ditko with additional writing by a cast of thousands (Collected 2010); The Steve Ditko Omnibus Volume 2 featuring Hawk and Dove: all stories plotted and illustrated by Steve Ditko with additional writing by a cast of thousands (Collected 2010):

Writer-artist Steve Ditko's quixotic nature was only amplified by the cruddy state of mainstream comic books for the people who actually created characters for the companies. His two most notable co-creations for Marvel Comics were Spider-man and Dr. Strange, though he also did character-defining work on Iron Man and the Hulk. Tired of Stan Lee's scripting and editing choices, Ditko left Marvel for more than a decade in the late 1960's. For the last 15 years, he's pretty much done his own, self-published thing, with very occasional short work for DC. He's famously reclusive.

Prior to his fame-creating Marvel superhero work, Ditko did thousands of pages of horror and monster work for many companies, honing his skills until he'd pretty much reached his impressive peak in the 1960's at Marvel and on B&W horror stories for Warren, and superhero work for DC and Charlton in the late 1960's.

These two omnibuses collect all of Ditko's output for DC other than his work on The Creeper in the 1960's and 1970's. In total, the collection spans several decades, offering the great, the good, and the very occasional indifferent sides of Ditko. He plotted many of the stories here (though not all), wrote a few, and either fully illustrated or pencilled the rest. It's a really great, broad look at one of the most important, influential, and fascinating American comic-book creators.

Ditko's unique ability to depict ordinary looking people in fantastical environments was at its best in Dr. Strange, but the Shade stories reprinted here are a very, very close second. They're utterly bizarre and engaging, and Ditko finds in dialogue-writer Michael Fleisher a kindred spirit when it comes to odd dialogue and description. Many of the pieces fully scripted by others take advantage of Ditko's strengths as well.

The pieces penciled but not inked by Ditko offer a fascinating look at how different artists approached Ditko's art. Romeo Tanghal, an excellent inker of George Perez on New Teen Titans in the 1980's, does a really solid job on the Starman adventures reprinted herein. The masterful Wally Wood doesn't always completely work on the four issues of Stalker he and Ditko did together, sometimes overpowering Ditko's distinctive faces, but it's still worth looking at.

There are a few duds in the inking department, but they're few and far between. And while Ditko's Legion of Super-heroes stories aren't an artistic high-point for him, they do accomplish something that a lot of artists on LSH failed at: they make the characters look like teen-agers.

The peaks collected here are really high, and the valleys (mostly horror shorts) still offer some of that Ditko magic. One also gets the only time Ditko drew Batman in a comic-book story (albeit as a guest-star in the first issue of the short-lived Manbat series), and Ditko's crouching, weirdly endearing take on Jack Kirby's Demon. Highly recommended.

Charlton Chews

Unexplored Worlds: The Steve Ditko Archives Volume 2: edited and with an introduction by Blake Bell (1956-57; collected 2010): This second volume of the Fantagraphics Steve Ditko Archives takes us through a year in which Ditko recovered from tuberculosis and drew like a fiend, racking up over 400 pages of work, mostly for bargain-basement Charlton Comics. The co-creator of Spider-man and Dr. Strange strove to develop a personal style very early on, as this volume shows. The art is distinctly Ditko from the get-go.

But it's also a Ditko experimenting with what works in terms of storytelling. He plays with detailed rendition and exquisite linework, especially on covers and in opening splash panels. And the broad nature of what Charlton was publishing -- very short stories in a variety of genres, all of them terribly written -- gave Ditko pretty much free rein to work on everything from how to draw a horse's legs (he still doesn't have it at this point, though I'm not sure he ever did; Kirby didn't either) to how to draw fantastic vistas of space and time and other dimensions.

A story about a painting that's a gateway to another dimension shows us the Ditko who will be, less than ten years later, on Marvel's Doctor Strange. On that great character's adventures, Ditko would become one of a handful of the greatest depictors of the weird and uncanny in comic-book history. It's a bit of a paradox.

Ditko was (and is) perhaps the most humanistic and normative of superhero illustrators, his characters not puffed up like steroid-addled beachballs, their faces and clothes lived in and life-like. But he also had a penchant for action conveyed through body language and positioning, and an eye for the weird and unusual conveyed in a few simple lines. He was the comic-book world's version of Magritte with his surreal juxtapositions and commonplace elements arranged in impossible ways.

The writing on almost all of these stories is pretty terrible, as noted -- Charlton was the Yugo assembly line of American comic books of the 1950's and 1960's. But the sheer volume of pages required by Charlton (and the sheer volume required by Ditko to survive at Charlton's miniscule page rates) did give Ditko a chance to develop, experiment, and become the artist he soon would be. Highly recommended.

Strange Spiders

Spider-man/Dr. Strange: Fever: written and illustrated by Brendan McCarthy with an additional story written by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko and illustrated by Steve Ditko (2010/1965; collected 2010): Enjoyable, wonky, slight and psychedelic team-up of Marvel's two biggest heroes co-created by the occasionally trippy pen of Steve Ditko.

That Ditko was amazingly good at conjuring up the weird magical vistas of sorcerer Dr. Strange always seemed a bit paradoxical, as Ditko's other strength lay in making his characters look realistically proportioned -- and New York realistically lived-in. Nonetheless, Ditko made magic look somehow effortless and cool and disquietingly surreal, and forty years of other Dr. Strange artists have struggled to approach the surreal-yet-grounded vistas and creatures of Ditko's realms of magic and mystery.

McCarthy has earned a name as a somewhat surreal comic-book artist, often more for his cover painting for books like Shade, The Changing Man (itself a revival of a trippy 1970's Ditko creation for DC Comics). Here, he grounds his magical dimensions in Australian aboriginal art, among other things, in this tale of Dr. Strange and Spider-man fighting spider-demons in another dimension.

McCarthy wisely keeps Strange and Spider-man believably human-proportioned and muscled, and some of the effects he achieves are quite lovely and strange. He's no Ditko, as the bonus reprint of the first Ditko-plotted-and-drawn Spider-man/Dr. Strange team-up shows, but he's definitely not your average 21st-century comic-book artist. Recommended.

Bitten by a Radioactive Ayn Rand

DC Archives: Action Heroes Volume 2, written by Steve Ditko, Roger Stern, Steve Skeates, and others; illustrated by Steve Ditko, Alex Toth, Frank McLaughlin, John Byrne and others (1965-68; collected 2007): This collection contains a pretty clear moment at which comic-book great Steve Ditko, co-creator of Spider-man and Dr. Strange for Marvel, crossed the line into Ayn Randian propagandist. It occurs towards the end of the Charlton Comics 'Action Heroes' line from which these archives take their name.

It's a mind-boggling moment because it marks one of the few times that mainstream Ditko and self-published Ditko would merge into one angry, Objectivist loudspeaker. Ditko's two streams of output -- one for himself and one to pay the bills -- would pretty much permanently diverge after the demise of the Charlton superhero line, and others would pretty much handle all the scripting on his mainstream superhero titles.

Ditko helped revamp or create most of the always lame-duck Charlton Comics' superheroes, co-creating Captain Atom, Nightshade, and The Question and revamping Golden-Age crimefighter Blue Beetle into a nifty mix of Spider-man and Iron Man. This archive collects his later work on those Charlton superheroes. Captain Atom is a lot of fun, especially once inker Frank McLaughlin comes on board, and it's mostly free of cant. Blue Beetle is also jolly, zippy fun until the aforementioned Rand Moment, at which point the Blue Beetle becomes a Ditko mouthpiece. Not for long, mind you -- cancellation of the entire superhero line loomed.

And then there's the Question, a visually inspired Ditko creation whose main costuming as a superhero was a face made perfectly blank by a special mask. Alan Moore would base Rorchach in Watchmen on this guy, and you can see why. While the Question begins life as a fairly normal urban vigilante (albeit one wearing a suit, tie, and hat), he rapidly turns into Ditko's spokesperson for his Ayn Rand-derived ethics.

And boy, does he speak. A lot.

The Question's only book-length adventure from the 1960's, from the pages of Charlton's Mysterious Suspense, is one of the wordiest slogs you'll ever encounter in comic books of this or any other time. The sheer volume of verbiage crowds out much of Ditko's visual dynamism, leaving us with talking heads and the Question demonstrating that, for a brief time, he was the stuffiest of all stuffed shirts on the superhero scene. And his hatred of hippies was positively Cartmanesque.

The Blue Beetle also develops advanced Randitis and, in a memorable two-story team-up, he and the Question battle both evil, non-heroic Art and an evil, non-heroic Art critic. I kid you not. It's like Philosophers at Work played straight. Fascinating stuff. Come for Ditko's visual excellence, stay for the interminable lectures. 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.

Yellowbelly

The Creeper Omnibus, written by Steve Ditko, Dennis O'Neil, Don Segall, Sergius O'Shaughnessy and Michael Fleisher; illustrated by Steve Ditko, Jack Sparling, Mike Peppe, and Mike Royer; introduction by Steve Niles (1968-69, 1975, 1978; collected 2010): Artist and occasional writer Steve Ditko co-created Spider-man and Dr. Strange at Marvel in the early 1960's. By the late 1960's, fed up with Stan Lee, Ditko left Marvel to work at a variety of comic-book companies that included Marvel's arch-rival DC Comics.
　

Similar to its later handling of fellow Marvel defector Jack Kirby was DC's handling of Ditko -- they shunted him into his own corner doing his own sometimes inspired, sometimes oddball creations rather than being put to work on any of DC's major titles. If you thought a Ditko Batman would be a natural...well, then you don't know DC in the late 1960's and early 1970's. While Marvel caught up to it in sales, DC flailed around, the short-lived hit Batman TV series being one of the few bright spots for the company as the turn of the decade approached.
　

As a character, the Creeper is both odd and inspired. For one thing, he's got the most garish costume in superhero history, with yellow dominant and the other two colours being red and green. He looks like a jaundiced Christmas tree. His origin is severely odd, even for a medium in which heroes can get their powers from mongoose blood, hard water, or a soft drink.
　

A multi-tasking scientist manages to create both a super-soldier serum and a dimensional shifter kind of thingie. Shades of Walter Bishop! Former reporter and current TV-station security-guy Jack Ryder, disguised for a Hallowe'en party in leftover clothes and makeup that include a red-dyed fur wrap and a yellow body suit, gets mortally wounded while trying to save the aforementioned scientist from Communist collaborators at that fateful party.
　

Before he dies, the scientist injects Ryder with the only vial of the super-serum and, um, hides the dimensional shifter thingies (sans its control pad, which he leaves with Ryder) inside Ryder's mortal wound. The wound heals almost immediately thanks to the super-serum, which also gives Ryder superior strength and agility. And so is born the Creeper, whose costume will no longer come off when Ryder uses the shifter's control pad to phase into Creeperdom. But he can always phase back to normal just so long as he doesn't lose that remote control.
　

This volume collects all of Ditko's work on The Creeper, whom he created for DC and worked on for short runs in the late 1960's and late 1970's. Ditko was still a strong artist in the late 1960's, and there's a certain bizarre charm to an urban vigilante who's as brightly coloured as a neon sign. The villains, though, are mostly terrible and indifferently designed, continuing a Ditko trend from his last few issues of Spider-man.
　

By the time we get to the 1970's material, Ditko is well into his decline. It's still interesting work from an old master, but the balloony bonelessness that characterizes Ditko's post-1960's, non-creator-owned work is on full display here, though it wouldn't become painful to look at (even when heavily inked by others) until Ditko's brief return to Marvel in the 1980's.

I'm not sure this is essential stuff, but it entertains and occasionally exhibits flashes of Ditko's importance to the superhero genre. An introduction that places The Creeper in historical and artistic context would have been nice, rather than a brief bit from 30 Days of Night writer Steve Niles, who wrote a Creeper reboot series a few years ago. Recommended.

Angry, Dizzy Hulk

Marvel Masterworks: The Incredible Hulk Volume 1, written by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko; illustrated by Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Paul Reinman and Dick Ayers (1962-1963): Of all the classic Marvel characters created in the early 1960's, the Hulk was the least fully realized in his early appearances. He started off grey and surly and possessed of a full, albeit thuggish, vocabulary.

Over the course of the six issues collected here, the Hulk turns green, changes from Dr. Bruce Banner to Hulk only at night, can't change back into Banner at all, is briefly mind-controlled by teen sidekick Rick Jones, changes between Hulk and Banner only when bombarded with gamma radiation, and gets cancelled with issue 6. Whew!

Banner is clearly the hero in most of these issues, with the Hulk playing a supporting role that alternates between grumpy menace to humanity and two-fisted saviour of humanity. Indeed, Banner and not the Hulk saves the entire Earth from the invading space armada of the Toad People, and it's Banner and not the Hulk who convinces misguided Communist super-scientist the Gargoyle to turn against his Commie masters in the Hulk's first issue. Banner's mind also (sort of) controls the Hulk for a couple of issues, though growing more surly and (early) Hulk-like by the panel.

The first few issues are a lot of fun partially because of the protean nature of the Hulk: it's like reading Lee and Kirby workshopping what would eventually become a very popular character, trying stuff out and discarding that stuff almost as quickly. Two of the most defining traits of the Hulk in the broader popular imagination -- his child-like personality and Banner's transformation into the Hulk when under emotional stress -- wouldn't appear until the Hulk was brought back from cancellation to star in his own stories in Tales to Astonish a couple of years after the stories collected here. Lee, Kirby and Ditko do their usual fine early-1960's work. As a bonus, Ditko inks Kirby on a couple of issues here, a penciller/inker combo as rare as it is awesome. Highly recommended.

Giant-Size

Giant-Size Marvel, written by everybody, illustrated by everybody else (1970's; collected 2007): Bad comic-book art in the 1970's had a very distinctive feel: it tended to look simplistic in a bad way, and it was often inked by Vince Colletta. Colletta may have been a terrific guy, but as an inker he really should have been kept away from, well, almost everybody. Steve Ditko apparently used to visit the Marvel offices and give Stan Lee the Royal Stink-eye when he found out that Lee had again assigned Colletta to ink Jack Kirby on Thor.

And Kirby's pencils were robust enough on Thor and New Gods to mostly withstand the reductive inks of Colletta, who had the super-power to make every male character's face look exactly the same regardless of what the pencils looked like. Still, New Gods inked by Joe Sinnott would have been eight kinds of awesome. WHY DID EDITORS KEEP PUTTING COLLETTA ON KIRBY?!?!?!

As you can see, I really don't like the inking of Vince Colletta. And I swear, he inks almost every story in this anthology of 'Giant-Size' Marvel specials from the 1970's. Only the late, great, idiosyncratic Frank Robbins (on Giant-size Invaders#1) really survives the Colletta Blandification process relatively unscathed, probably because Robbins looks to have been a pretty tight penciller, and he didn't really draw like anyone else at Marvel at the time. Still, some of those patented Colletta plastic-mannequin heads still manage to find themselves grafted onto Robbins characters on the occasional page. Ugh!

Otherwise, this anthology is pretty much a dog's breakfast of the good (the aforementioned Invaders piece by Roy Thomas and Frank Robbins; the first appearance of the new X-Men by Len Wein and Dave Cockrum); the passable; and the unfortunate. I'm pretty sure I can live the rest of my life without reading another Tigra/Werewolf by Night crossover. Or another appearance of Man-Wolf. 'Giant-size' referred to the fact that these comics were 64 pages long (with ads) as opposed to the standard 32 pages with ads format of regular books. Not recommended unless you pay $5 for it like I did.

Esperanto A-Go-Go

Movie:

Incubus, written and directed by Leslie Stevens, starring William Shatner (1965): Original Outer Limits creator Leslie Stevens decided to do a horror movie after the cancellation of that seminal anthology show, with cinematographer Conrad Hall and composer Dominic Frontiere coming along with him. The result was Incubus, starring a pre-Star Trek William Shatner and no one else I've ever heard of. A small town in a vaguely unreal setting is menaced by succubi serving the Devil. They send bad men to their damnation. But can one of them corrupt saintly war hero Shatner?

Oh, and everyone speaks Esperanto, the constructed language that was meant to help bring about world peace through everyone speaking a global language. There are sub-titles. Still. Esperanto? Leslie Stevens had balls! Esperanto's synthesis from a number of other 'real' languages makes it either eerily off-kilter or eerily goofy, depending on your POV.

The movie, a short one (78 minutes), nonetheless drags in the middle: it might actually have made a pretty interesting 50 minute episode of The Outer Limits, but feels padded at its running time. Either because there wasn't money for stunt men or because Stevens was aiming for an otherworldly feel, the concluding fight scenes between Shatner and the Incubus are languid and unconvincing. Nonetheless, Incubus is worth at least 45 minutes of your time -- some scenes work quite well at evoking an other-worldly feel, and Esperanto does sort of work as an unsettling mechanism, as familiar words jostle with unfamiliar ones. Recommended.


Books:


The 5th Witch by Graham Masterson: Fast-paced action-horror novel about criminals using witchcraft to seize control of Los Angeles. The gangs have four witches from different magical backgrounds, including one who's pushing 400 years old and was supposed to have been burned at the stake centuries earlier. The police have one detective who realizes what's really going on and his friend, yet another practicing witch. Who will win and what will be left of them?

There are a lot of nice moments in this breezy, fast read. Most of them involve various forms of witchcraft and superstition which, in the world of the novel, are really real. Things wrap up a bit too quickly for my liking, but I was certainly never bored. Recommended.



Live Girls by Ray Garton (1987): The boredom caused me by about 95% of all vampire novels was lifted by this early novel from the prolific Garton. If nothing else, Live Girls demonstrates that Ramsey Campbell has good taste in the novels he blurbs. (Relatively) traditional vampires stalk the New York sex trade, both in a seedy nude show (the eponymous Live Girls) and an upscale club catering to people who want to be bitten and the vampires who bite them.

Nebbishy protagonist Davey Owens' lack of spine drives a lot of the action (or the inaction and bad decisions that cause bad things to happen to a number of good people). Garton manages to tuck a bildungsroman for Davey in among the other elements of the novel, and it's a pretty good one. Live Girls also manages the difficult feat of combining the occasionally erotic nature of vampires with their murderous, abject reality. Unlike Ann Rice's bloodsuckers, these vampires are not wish-fulfillment figures, though at times they briefly appear to be. After all, who doesn't want to live forever? Highly recommended.



Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko by Blake Bell (2008): Along with Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, writer/artist Steve Ditko pretty much created the Marvel Universe of super-heroes in the 1960's. Ditko co-created (with Lee) Spider-man and Dr. Strange, and had influential runs on the Hulk and Iron Man. Like Kirby, Ditko was pretty much frozen out of any level of decent profit-sharing as Marvel rose to become the most popular US comics firm, leading Ditko to leave the company in the late 1960's. He would return in the late 1970's to do fairly basic work-for-hire pencilling on titles that included Rom: Space Knight, but he'd keep his creativity to himself, with his more personal work coming out from an almost bewildering array of small publishers and fanzines.

Ditko's two, somewhat paradoxical, strengths as an artist were the ability to convey normality and the normative (the original Peter Parker is scrawny, a convincing high-school nerd; Ditko populated all his work with ordinary-looking people striving to be extraordinary), and an unprecedented ability to depict the fantastic (the worlds and dimensions of Dr. Strange are truly alien and magical looking). Ditko's five years on Spider-man as sole artist (except for a couple of covers) yielded pretty much the entire mythology of Spider-man, a supporting cast still used today, and most of Spider-man's major villains. Lee's bombastic dialogue and captions certainly helped shape the Spider-universe, but it was Ditko who gave it its odd, realistic yet fanciful soul.

Bell's main task in this biography seems to be to help the reader understand how Ditko's increasing fascination with the philosophy and writings of Ayn Rand helped shape a career that, weirdly un-Rand-like, moved farther and farther away from money-making as the decades went by. Like many of Rand's characters, Ditko would withhold his 'true' creations from the publishers who would have unjustly profited from them, instead trying to release them in ways that would avoid editorial interference and selling out to a large company.

However, Ditko's idiosyncrasies made him progressively more difficult to work with, and his writing progressively more impenetrable: by the 1980's, Ditko's 'real' work was almost impossible to purchase even when it managed to be published, and his disagreements with those trying to publish him generally ended most projects after only a handful of issues, and sometimes less.

Unlike Kirby, Ditko never had a family to support. His decisions could be made in a near-vacuum of responsibility to others, so he pursued his own odd path. Many of his creations for Charlton Comics and DC have proved fairly successful in the long term (Captain Atom, a revamped Blue Beetle, The Question, Hawk and Dove) while others yielded short but intriguing Ditko runs that are now being collected into hardcover editions for the first time (the weird Creeper and the even-weirder Shade, The Changing Man). Bell's book does a fine (and abundantly illustrated) job of explaining Ditko's odd career and enduring genius. Highly recommended.