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 Also from Charlton Bullseye is an unpublished Gill-Ditko effort called "Moonshot".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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Scooby Doo...Where Are You?

Scooby-Doo (in its myriad forms) is without doubt the most successful cartoon franchise of the 1970's and might Hanna-Barbera's most successful of all time. Others are famous, but time has put a shadow on Boomer faves like The Flintstones, The Jetsons, and though I will always love Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, and that lot, but they are nostalgia. Scooby-Doo is still generating new versions of the show and spinning off characters. The original Scooby-Doo...Where Are You? show ran for just two seasons, but it ran in one form or other throughout the succeeding decades. The early shows are still the best, with some truly creepy creations such as the Creepy Clown and the Skull-Faced Alien. We all know that in the Scooby-verse such ghosts are merely the creations of criminals and scallywags, and though the supernatural might seem to be seeping into the reality, it will be reason which will rule the day, if only just. 

The second Scooby-Doo show was in fact The New Scooby-Doo Movies which ran for an hour and guest-starred such pure 70's sensations as Sonny and Cher, Phyllis Diller, Jerry Reed, Jonathan Winters, and Sandy Duncan among others. None of the above were in danger of getting Emmys for their voice work. Alongside these we got repeat visits from The Three Stooges and The Harlem Globetrotters. Most famously, the Dynamic Duo of Batman and Robin appeared in two episodes. The classic Scooby formula was screwed up by the addition of the guests and the extension of time. For some reason no additional twists and turns were usually added, and we just got more running around for no reason. 

The factory that was Hanna-Barbera was always more committed to getting their cartoons delivered on time than getting them good. For a time, the team managed both, but by the late 70's they were in a mad dash to keep animation on the continent and on Saturday mornings, a timeframe which was losing its punch as the Boomers aged out. But technically we got a third season of Scooby-Doo, though the shows got back to basics, the need to scare seemed to be absent. Too many fretful parents were on the prowl, and cartoons were getting gutted all over TV. 

Goober and The Ghost Chasers from 1973 was perhaps the most overt copy of the Scooby-Doo formula, but like the aforementioned hour-long episodes suffered from too many guest-stars such as the inane Partridge Kids and for some strange reason Wilt Chamberlain. What they got right was the length, running at a brisk half-hour Goober, a Saluki to match Scooby's Great Dane was a hat-wearing fourth-wall breaking doggie who for reasons never explained could turn invisible. Unlike the Scooby-verse there were real ghosts in this universe along with unscrupulous villains. When the show was just Ted, Tina, Gilly, and Goober things were pretty decent, but add a guest-star things went to smash. 

The Funky Phantom from 1971 was the first Scooby clone show and featured three teenagers named Skip, Augie and April along with a bulldog named Elmo. They hook up with Mudsy, "The Spirit of 1776" and his ghost cat named Boo. It's a crowded dune buggy indeed, but their misadventures uncover fake ghosts all across the United States and criminals as well. The show never loses its energy, though indifferent mixing made my disc set at times a bit frustrating to listen to. 

Scooby-Doo...Where Are You came to Charlton Comics in the mid-70's and despite some indifferent artwork, I enjoyed it okay. Charlton would never win awards for its Hanna-Barbera work, but artwork by veteran Bill Williams was acceptable. Joe Gill wrote the thing as one might expect. Here's a cover gallery of the entire Charlton run. 

A few decades later DC would start the whole comic book thing over again and make quite the run with it. I even checked out a few issues as Joe Staton was the artist for many of the issues. (More on Mr. Staton tomorrow.) The answer the question asked now for some decades of Scooby-Doo...Where Are You? is not very far at all. 

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