Dare You Enter The House Of Ditko!

One of the things most admirable for me about Steve Ditko was his work ethic. Sadly artists who work regularly sometimes get tagged as "hacks", as if only sharpening your skills in private was appropriate. Ditko worked and developed in public and that can be seen in the mystery and science fiction stories gathered together in the first volume of The Steve Ditko Omnibus. Apart from Shade the Changing Man and Stalker this tome offers up around two hundred pages of Ditko work from three decades. There was just one cover for these mystery magazines and that you can see above. 

The first items are from the middle 60's and are part of material he produced in tandem with Sal Trapani for DC, ACG, and others. A decade later he's back at DC for stories appearing in House of Secrets, House of Mystery and Ghosts among others. In the 80's he turned out some dandy tales for Time Warp, Weird War Tales, and even Plop!. With one exception he works from the scripts of others such as Steve Skeates, Arnold Drake, Jack Harris and many more. Often his work was inked by Ernie Chan, Mike Royer, Wally Wood and an old Charlton mate Wayne Howard. But the best stories are those he did the full art for such as the page above. 

These are not the greatest stories in many instances, full of time-worn plot twists often, but many are clever little fables of what happens when people misbehave. Steve Ditko was best when he was drawing common folk and these genre stories give him an ideal chance to do just that. Not a hack, just a working artist. 

Rip Off