In the late 1970's and early 1980's Steve Ditko turned his attention to work at DC. Charlton was drawing back from the marketplace and Ditko needed places to draw comics, and despite his independent work, DC was a good place to get a check. In addition to some creative series which we'll get around to next month, Ditko also drew many stories for the myriad horror and science fiction comics that DC produced during this era. In comics such as House of Mystery, House of Secrets, Ghosts, Weird War Tales, Secrets of Haunted House, Mystery in Space, Time Warp and Unexpected Ditko brought to life many a monster and creepy crawler. These stories are collected in The Steve Ditko Omnibus Volume One. Actually, the first two short stories in this collection are from 1964 from two issues of Strange Adventures. Then we leap to the later material written by such DC stalwarts as Jack Oleck, Jack C. Harris, Len Wein, Paul Levitz, Michael Fleisher, Arnold Drake, Steve Skeates among others. Ditko even writes the last story in the volume himself, a wacky yarn named "Em the Energy Monster".
Sadly, Ditko only drew one cover for DC's haunted books during this era, for House of Mystery #277 seen above. Below are the comics in which Ditko stories appeared and the covers are by a host of talents such as Jack Sparling, Mike Kaluta, Berni Wrightson, Neal Adams, Dick Giordano, among others. But most are by the great Joe Kubert who was the master of DC covers during this time.
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Above is the cover for The Steve Ditko Omnibus Volume One. With Shade the Changing Man getting the cover attention, you'd never realize wealth of weird tales inside by one of the genre's finest.
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Some amazing non Ditko covers here. I picked up Weird War Tales # 95 (shown above) a few weeks ago and it contains a very nice Ditko illustrated tale (600 Heads of Death). Ditko's return to DC was a mixed bag for me, I loved Shade but was less impressed by his later work on titles like the Legion of Superheroes etc.
ReplyDeleteAgree. I have a review of Shade coming, but I found the Legion material too bland to bother with. He was ill-suited to that title.
DeleteNice work if you can get it, and Ditko certainly did that at DC. While there were some gems, I don't know if many of his assignments were the greatest in enabling him to express his imagination and talent. Still, it's Ditko, fer cryin' out loud!
ReplyDeleteMediocre Ditko is better than many others when they swing for the fences.
DeleteI recently had the thought that if Ditko had proposed SHADE somewhat later, in the era of the mini-serials, we might have got a good, 12-issue series out of it, rather than an open ended series that was cut off too soon.
ReplyDeleteHaving just read Shade again, I have to agree with you. Too many decent stories were cut short by DC's implosion.
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