The Return Of Gorgo - Ditko At Charlton 1961!

This collection titled The Return of Gorgo gathers together all of the fantasy work by Joe Gill and Steve Ditko produced during 1961. This is the year in which both Gorgo and Konga were launched. The team produced three Gorgo stories in this time as well as three Konga stories. Ditko drew three Gorgo covers and one Konga cover in that year. 

In addition, there are the remaining Captain Atom stories produced by the team, the last until the good Captain's revival some years later. (Much more on that next month.) We also get a nifty assortment of fantasy tales, most with a whimsical flavor. Ditko was working for Marvel at this same time, so his output in 1961 was incredible. It was about to get even more so in the coming year. But more on that later still. The volume also includes a biography of Joe Gill and an informative timeline of the work of Steve Ditko, some of it by Ditko himself. 

Below are the covers reprinted in this handsome volume from Famous Comics.  

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Kongo And Gorga Strike!

Konga and Gorgo make a cameo of sorts in 1990 in Marvel's Web of Spider-Man Annual #6. That appearance is Steve Ditko's final take on these two monsters in a story by fan of those 60's comics Tony Isabella. Renaming the two monsters "Kongo" and "Gorga", Isabella has the two Charlton giants appear as a product of the nigh unlimited power of Captain Universe, a power that endows various individuals with that power. This time in a story titled "Child Star" it's a kid who gets the power and he uses it to save the world from two demons. The page above shows the appearances of the Charlton monsters in their Marvelized forms. 

 

I read this story in the Captain Universe collection Marvel issued some years ago. 

Steve Ditko drew several Captain Universe stories. The character was a spin-off of The Micronauts series. 

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Ditko's Monsters!

Konga and Gorgo is a pretty nifty trick for two monsters who each starred in one-off feature B-movies over fifty years ago. They survive because each of them luckily fell into the nimble hands of Steve Ditko and Joe Gill, two yeoman talents who worked for the little comic company that could, Charlton. The latest package is a flip-cover affair from Yoe Books.

The two monsters met (sort of) for the first time when in celebration of the great Ditko, Charlton promoted him atop the two monsters in a special issue dubbed Fantastic Giants, another incredible one-off. That comic was one of my earliest acquisitions and no doubt contributes to my abiding love of monsters to this very day. That  special issue brought together the debut appearances of Konga and Gorgo alongside some spectacular horror short-stories drawn by Ditko.

Sadly the new package does include Gorgo #1 but for some reason doesn't give us Konga #1. We get some darn fine Konga stories from issues six and thirteen but the lack of the debut for me makes this handsome two-cover flip book a tiny bit of a disappointment. But that's very very tiny. This one is pure old-fashioned monster-loving fun.

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Charlton's Fantastic Giants!

Fantastic Giants #24 (t is a continuation of the numbering of Konga) was one of the earliest comic books I ever got my little mitts on and it's a book that has at its center not a character but an artist. Steve Ditko (shown enigmatically as a quasi-human ink bottle) is what this book is about, his artwork on some vintage projects as well as two new stories by the maker of so many fascinating Charlton yarns. 

Konga was of course once upon a time a movie and then Charlton adapted it to comic book form. Ditko drew the adaptation and many of the better Konga stories from the reasonably long run of the title. This volume showcases that wonderful Joe Gill written and Ditko drawn debut story. 

On the other side we have Gorgo, another very successful giant monster flick adapted by Charlton using the same team. The oddly touching tale of an enormous monster and her giant offspring taking a walking tour of London is exceedingly well told. Given the price of special effects, both the Konga and the Gorgo stories add to the luster of the cinematic renditions. 

In addition to the classic giant monsters we get a then-modern Ditko tale called "Mountain Monster" which might've fit into Ghostly Tales or The Many Ghosts of Dr. Graves, but is given special prominence here. This story written by Dave Kaler gives us Ditko at the top of his powers just as the lead character of this story is at the top of that mysterious mountain. 

And finally, there's the secret gem of this set, the other new story scripted by Dave Kaler called simply "With the Help of Hogar" which set in the depths of Africa offers Ditko the chance at a splash page, one of his best. Ditko didn't create impactful splash pages like his colleague Jack Kirby and but for Kirby might never have done. But when he was given the nod, he created some of my favorites such as the outstanding splashes in the first Spider-Man Annual and the debuts of the redesigned Captain Atom and Blue Beetle. This image above really lives up to the book's title, and gives us a "fantastic giant", a creature which seems to lumber out of the pages of a Lovecraft story brimming with utter weirdness. All this heady stuff indeed for a youngster just shaping his initial impressions of what comic book art should be. A Steve Ditko special indeed and the true "fantastic giant" in this tome is the artist himself.

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Charlton Classic Covers - Reptisaurus #8!

Reptisaurus #8 was published in 1962. You can read the issue at this link. The cover art is by Bill Montes and Ernie Bache. 

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Charlton Classic Covers - Reptisaurus #5!

Reptisaurus #5 was published in 1962. You can read the issue at this link. The goofy cover art is by Joe Sinnott and Vince Colletta. 

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Charlton Classic Covers - Reptisaurus #3!

Reptisaurus #3 was published in 1962. It is a continuation of the Reptilicus series with modifications to the creature's color and name. You can read the issue at this link. The cover art is by Sal Gentile and Nick Alascia. 

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Charlton Classic Covers - Reptilicus #2

Reptilicus #2 was published in 1961. You can read the issue at this link. The cover art is by Dick Giordano. 

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Monarch's Reptilicus!

Charlton also was associated with the paperback imprint Monarch and they too adapted Reptilicus using the writer David Owens. Pink took issue with some of the scenes created for the novel version which are reputed to have a somewhat lascivious quality. I've never read it, so I cannot speak first-hand about it. But apparently it upset Pink who pulled the license from Charlton.

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The Lonely One!

Konga is a name to conjure with. The movie, a bit of schlock from the 50's featuring a mad scientist (played to hilt by Michael Gough -- more on that tomorrow) who uses jungle potions to make things grow to vast proportions experiments on a monkey and gets Konga, a giant ape who prowls the streets of London before meeting his apparent doom. And that's the end. No sequels, no need. Konga the movie is a strange but oddly compelling flick

Konga the comic book series from Charlton is the same and different too. Konga survives the end of the first story and becomes something akin more to Godzilla than King Kong, his obvious inspiration. Konga of the comics can survive nuclear blasts and seems to wander the globe with great speed, impervious to the elements for the most part. He is at once part of the world and apart from it. Hence The Lonely One as the title of this Robin Snyder produced collection of some of Joe Gill's and Steve Ditko's most curious Konga stories. This was the very first Konga collection I ever purchased way back when. 

The first story in the collection is "The Monster Hunter" from Konga #11. It tells the tale of world-famous hunter E. Kellington Trent and his romantic partner Miss Lovejoy who want to trap the greatest game of all, and that happens to be Konga who is at once a real creature and almost a thing of myth. The pair stalk the great beast but become charmed by him, and the story ends much differently than expected.

"The Land of the Frozen Giants" from Konga #8 has Konga travel to the great white vastness of Antarctica where he gets frozen, becoming a living statue. He is discovered but before he can be captured and he falls into a sub-world filled with dinosaurs where he must fight ceaselessly for his life.

"The Peacemaker" from Konga #13 has Konga get a bad cold and then invade a southern clime where he finds healing mud in the steamy swamps. While taking the cure, he finds himself at odds with a tinpot dictator who is kept in power by nefarious foreign powers. Konga saves people from broken train tracks and battles the full force of the dictator's military.

Finally, there is "The Lonely One" from Konga #12 a story which reprises Konga's origin story from the movie adaptation, then has the great beast become stranded in the snow in the alps after a mighty avalanche. There mankind must decide whether to save or slay the beast and bring two of the humans who first cared for Konga back again to deal with his current situation.

Also on hand in this collection are two one-page gag comics from Henry Boltinoff and a Ditko short about the origins of mankind.

To say this is an idiosyncratic package is to understate it. But oddly the Konga stories themselves have a neat cohesion. The stories published in the order that they are, have something of an arc to them as Konga prowls the world looking for peace and companionship, and all too often finding only strife and combat. The stories stand on their own well enough, but when taken together to seem to work even better. The ending is a happy enough one.

Konga stories have a humor and a charm not found in just every comic, at least these by Gill and Ditko do. Konga is an absurd character who seems to absorb atomic blasts, yet at the same time remaining an identifiable personality. He's big but not beyond the scope of human character. These are wonderful little morality fables with more to say about the human condition than might at first be surmised.

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The Charlton Reptilicus!

Reptilicus was the least successful of Charlton's monster trio, likely because the monster is the least identifiable of the three monsters. It's just an animal, large and often ferocious, but still difficult to get any sense of what Reptilicus is thinking. Also, Reptilicus never was graced with the artistic power of Steve Ditko, instead had to deal with the competent but less exciting duo of Charles Nicholas and Nick Alascia. And besides that, there are only technically two issue of "Reptilicus", because Charlton lost the rights to the name. 

Sid Pink was not happy with the sexual elements added to the novelization of the movie story published under Charlton's Monarch brand. He pulled the rights I assume, and Charlton was left with only two comics titled Reptilicus. 

The first issue featured a great Rocke Mastroserio cover while the second featured the artwork of Dick Giordano with the Nicholas and Alascia combo still on board between the covers. Reptilicus revives and threatens areas of Africa in the sequel. As far as I can tell Joe Gill wrote all the issues of the run. 

With the third issue the title of the comic is changed to Reptisaurus and the artwork is by Bill Molno. Sal Gentile and Nick Alascia supply a less than satisfactory cover. Reptisaurus is red where Reptilicus was green and gets a mate and a family. But don't wait to see what happens as continuity on this comic is pretty much nonexistent with each issue seeming to start from scratch. 

The artwork is then taken over by the team of Joe Sinnott and Vince Colletta and their work here is even less impressive than it was on Gorgo. Part of that is that Reptisaurus is hard to draw in any way which allows the reader to get a sense of his feelings. The rendition by the team makes him quite comical in places. 

Eventually like all the other monster series, the art team of Bill Montes and Ernie Bache take on the book toward the end of its run and they redesign the monster quite a bit, making him much less like the original Reptilicus. This is not a bad idea and we get some decent storytelling in the final issues of the original run. 

Following the cancellation of the original run after a meager eight issues we are treated to a special edition which puts a wrap on the character sort of.

Reptilicus the movie is a guilty pleasure of mine and I watch it on the regular, and I was pleased to finally get to read all the Reptilicus/Reptisaurus comics despite the meager quality. I am always curious and like a bad movie, even bad comics can be entertaining in their own way if you adjust your expectations. 

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