Ditkomania Month!

This month the Dojo wraps up a year-long look at the work of the late great Steve Ditko by filling up this month with Ditko-related posts. In fact, every post this month deals with the work Ditko in some shape form or fashion. We'll take a look at his later work at DC such as Stalker, Shade the Changing Man, The Demon, and Man-Bat. Then there's the work he did late in his career at Marvel on such characters as Captain Universe, Captain Marvel, and of course his last great work for the company --Speedball. I won't have time to deal with all of the many, many characters and concepts he put his hand to. 

And that's not even mentioning his parade of great work for the up-and-coming Indy marketplace such as Static, The Missing Man, and the Mocker among others for publishers such as Pacific, Eclipse, Renegade, Defiant and others. Finally, I need to carve out time to look at Ditko's purest work such as Mr. A and The Question among a cavalcade of other heroes. Add to that the many essays Ditko wrote expressing his strong, vibrant and quite biting opinions, there is more than enough to fill a month. Below are just a few of the things I hope to turn my hand to this month of total "Ditkomania". 

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Ditko At Charlton - 1975!

Ghostly Tales - Ditko at Charlton: 1975 gives us more Ditko stories, but his long partnership with Joe Gill gets interrupted many times as new names offer up scripts for Ditko's pen. This volume gets the page count up again at around two hundred and seventy-five pages, but there are fewer covers. That is the case despite there being more Charlton ghost host books this year. Added to Ghostly Haunts, Ghostly Tales, Haunted, The Many Ghosts of Dr. Graves and Ghost Manor would be Beyond the Grave, Creepy Things, Monster Hunters, Scary Tales and Midnight Tales. (The latter had been around, but Ditko hadn't contributed until issue twelve.) 

(This drawing by Tom Sutton of the classic ghost hosts is not in this volume.)

New ghost hosts in addition to Winnie the Witch, Mr. Bones, Dr. Graves, and Mr. Dedd are Dee Munn, Mort Tishin, Baron Weirwulf, Baroness R. H. Von Bludd, as well as Professor Coffin and Arachne. The truth is we see little of the hosts in this volume as the stories have more of a generic flavor, at least the ones by Ditko. In addition to Joe Gill, we are treated to scripts by Joe Molloy, Gary Petras, Michael Pellowski, Britton Bloom, Brock J. Hanke, and Nick Cuti. One cute touch is that Gill signed one of his stories as "Hiram Walker".

(Surprisingly this cover by Ditko is not included in this tome.)

In addition to the ghost stories, we get a two-part Captain Atom story which had been mostly prepared but never published before the CPLGang did so in Charlton Bullseye #1 and #2. This one had been plotted but it was up to Roger Stern to provide a script and John Byrne to provide inks. Also from Charlton Bullseye is an unpublished Gill-Ditko effort called "Moonshot". 

It was in this year that Charlton began to use painted covers quite a lot in place of the classic look. This is most likely why we get so few Ditko gems. Here they are. 

And that wraps up my Halloween special look at SD Publications Famous Comics collections. I would anticipate that we will see at least one more for 1976 and personally I'd love to see one for Gill and Ditko's late 60's work as well. Some of those stories can be found in the two Yoe Books collections The Art of Steve Ditko and The Creativity of Steve Ditko. 

Happy Halloween! 

The Dojo is not done with Ditko yet. Next time we get into the hard stuff. 

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Wayne Howard's Midnight Tales!

Wayne Howard is one of those eccentric talents who tapped into something special. An acolyte of Wally Wood, there's no denying Howard's debt to the work of Wood. He was an assistant to the great man himself for a time. But then he went and took that "Woodesque" approach and carved out his own niche.

At Charlton he found a place he could thrive. His earliest work has a really full-bodied character to it. In later years his work became a bit flatter in its way, losing some of the vitality of the early days. But he never lost the charm that infused his characters. They always had distinct qualities that enlivened them.

Howard found some small success as an inker for the Big Two, but his work is mostly found at Charlton where he even created his own title, the reasonably successful Midnight Tales. For eighteen glorious issues he oversaw a ghostly book like few others. Talents like Joe Staton and Don Newton contributed regularly and along with Howard gave this book its own distinctive flavor. But what set this book apart were the tremendous gags used for the detailed covers. They are one-offs and not necessarily connected to any particular story inside the book.

Here the beautiful niece of Professor Coffin, the lovely Arachne. She was the eye-catching hostess of Midnight Tales alongside her academic uncle Professor Cyrus Coffin, the Midnight Philosopher. This tempting double-spread poster was included in the fifth issue of Wayne Howard's Charlton tour de force. I found it here.

Wayne Howard passed away in 2007, too young. He'd left comics behind and avoided talking about them. But those of us who are his fans will never forget them. Here's what Mark Evanier had to say about this talent. Here's a link to a site where you can read some of those great stories.

 

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The Many Ghosts Of Joe Staton!

Joe Staton has always been one of my favorite artists in comics. His work was always vivid and lively and attractive. He knows how to tell stories, and now he has done so for decades working for DC primarily, yet also working on his own here and there. He was for quite a time the artist on the comic strip Dick Tracy, bringing a great look to a strip which has languished artistically for too long. He announced his retirement a few years back. 

I first became a fan of Staton's when he was a workhorse for Charlton Comics, doing E-Man, Space 1999, Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch, and other projects. He created many an inviting and evocative cover for the company too, some of them gracing the ghost books.

 Here's a gallery of his creepy covers.

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