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.)
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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