DC Ditko Mystery Tales!

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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Ditko At Charlton - 1974!

The year 1974 is a bit of an anomaly in the history of Charlton Comics. There was a severe paper shortage in late 1973 which pushed into the following year and caused the small publisher to go into something of a hiatus for several months. The result is that Make My Dreams Come True - Ditko at Charlton: 1974 is a slimmer tome than its predecessors. It comes in at two hundred pages or thereabouts, one hundred pages short of the 1973 volume. But it can be well argued that the variety is far greater. In addition to ghost stories by Joe Gill (among others) and Steve Ditko from titles Ghostly Haunts, Ghostly Tales, The Many Ghosts of Dr. Graves, and Ghost Manor we get three "superhero" stories from the pages of E-Man and The Charlton Portfolio from the CPLGang. 

We get the second of two Killjoy stories by Ditko working alone. This one came from E-Man #4 and once again Ditko's voiceless anarchist gives the "looters" and "criminals" what for. This one is less varied than the previous episode, but it might be funnier. As with the earlier Killjoy story, we get a black and white version in the back of this volume. 

Next from E-Man #5 we get Liberty Belle by Gill and Ditko, their first new superhero in some years. Liberty Belle is in actuality Caroline Dean who operates a modeling agency and in her spare time undertakes missions for the United States government in the guise of Liberty Belle. The story gave me an impression of those wonderful James Coburn Flint movies from the 60's. If you want to read the story of how Liberty Belle saves the space program from the Commies check out my post for July 4th from this year where the story is available in its totality. 

Other writers in this volume are Jane Giddens, Tom Peterson and Nick Cuti. Amusingly Gill signed two of his stories "Jack Daniels" and "Johnny Walker". (Whatever it took to choke down those meager Charlton rates I reckon.)

Ditko only created four covers in this year, actually only three since was created years before. It is noted that Ditko-drawn images of the ghost hosts decorated most of the covers of that ilk during the year. Here those covers are with more on Blue Beetle below. 

Blue Beetle #6 both written and drawn by Steve Ditko was advertised but scratched from the publication list despite being ready to go six years earlier. It would be up to Roger Stern and the other gents of the CPLGang to get that book into print in The Charlton Portfolio which also featured great art by a range of Charlton talents as well as articles on E-Man, Yang, and many others. This story has been reprinted by DC in its Archive series in color but here appears in black and white as it did in the original Portfolio. 

And that's it for Ditko in 1974. Things get a little bit back to normal next time, but with lots of changes too. More on Halloween. 

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Ditko's Monster Menace!

Back in the 90's when Steve Ditko was winding down his mainstream career in comics you had a hard time telling when he'd pop up next. One place was in a nifty four issue reprint series edited by Mort Todd called Monster Menace. Of the four issues Ditko drew two of the covers including the one above featuring not only himself and Stan Lee hard at work but an avalanche of monster mugs from the mighty Atlas/Marvel monster years. 

Here's a look at a raw version of the artwork Ditko turned in before it was menaced itself by logos and branding imagery. 

And here it is again with some of that identifying copy in place. Notably missing still is the little Jack Kirby blurb at the bottom. 

Ditko also did the cover for issue three of Monster Menace and this one is bit more typical of the work he was doing at the end of his career in the halls of Marvel. Dismayed and frightened regular folks (Ditko's bread and butter) are scared of an oozing green gelatinous monster as it appears on the sidewalk. The copy at the bottom announced the monster "Zuztak", but this is no Zzutak my friends. 

 

Zzutak was a delightful monster penciled by Kirby and inked by Ditko who appeared in an issue of Strange Tales and some years later in the third issue of Fear where I first encountered him. He's always been a favorite. He was an ancient Mayan monster recreated by an artist given three dimensional paint by a mad Mayan priest who lusts for power and an army of Zzutaks. The artist instead paints up an enemy to do battle with Zzutak and the Mayan priest's plans are foiled. It's one of my favorites. 

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Clipping A Few Dedd Heads!

Rocke Mastroserio

When Charlton bailed out of the superhero genre in the late 60's, they dived into the ghost one. Thunderbolt (which had been Son of Vulcan which had been Mysteries of Unexplored Worlds) became Ghostly Tales, a comic hosted by Mr. L. Dedd. He's just about my favorite horror host for a comic, his cackling approach perfect pitch for the Charlton-style ghost story. Below are a bunch of versions of Mr. Dedd taken from sundry comics, each by a different artist.
Steve Ditko
Jim Aparo
Pat Boyette
Wayne Howard
Tom Sutton
Wes Crum
Rocke Mastroserio was the first artist to render Mr. Dedd and he did the first several covers before guys like Pat Boyette, Steve Ditko, Jim Aparo, and others tried their hand at him. It's Mastroserio's version that I still find the best. Some artists make him too noble looking, only Rocke made him appear as wretched as he should look.


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