Ditkomania Month!

This month the Dojo wraps up a year-long look at the work of the late great Steve Ditko by filling up this month with Ditko-related posts. In fact, every post this month deals with the work Ditko in some shape form or fashion. We'll take a look at his later work at DC such as Stalker, Shade the Changing Man, The Demon, and Man-Bat. Then there's the work he did late in his career at Marvel on such characters as Captain Universe, Captain Marvel, and of course his last great work for the company --Speedball. I won't have time to deal with all of the many, many characters and concepts he put his hand to. 

And that's not even mentioning his parade of great work for the up-and-coming Indy marketplace such as Static, The Missing Man, and the Mocker among others for publishers such as Pacific, Eclipse, Renegade, Defiant and others. Finally, I need to carve out time to look at Ditko's purest work such as Mr. A and The Question among a cavalcade of other heroes. Add to that the many essays Ditko wrote expressing his strong, vibrant and quite biting opinions, there is more than enough to fill a month. Below are just a few of the things I hope to turn my hand to this month of total "Ditkomania". 

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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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Ditko's Amazing Spider-Man Artist's Edition!

I'm closing out this month-long look at Steve Ditko's work for Marvel with a glimpse of a beautiful Artist's Edition. This tome contains many pages of original art including entire comics. Spidey's origin is here, a true bit of Americana.  Here are more details. 

At $175 bucks I don't suspect I'll be adding it to my hoard, but it's nice knowing it exists.  Next month we turn our attention back to Charlton and the project Ditko turned his attention to when he left Marvel -- The Blue Beetle. 

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Ditko's Hulk!

Often overlooked is Steve Ditko's contribution to early stories featuring The Incredible Hulk. Ditko drew the sixth and final issue of the Hulk's first series featuring the menace of the alien Metal Master. 

And during that short but important time when the Hulk was being co-starred in a host of magazines to keep his profile high, Ditko took on old Jadejaws in the pages of The Amazing Spider-Man. 

But most significantly, when the Hulk was given a new series in the pages of Tales to Astonish, it was Ditko who was tapped as the penciller. He was inked by George Roussos, Dick Ayers and Vince Colletta on the series. This was at that point in time when it was not yet public knowledge that Bruce Banner was also the Hulk. 

Ditko stayed with the series through the first eight installments of Tales to Astonish. As expected, Jack Kirby supplied the covers for the Ditko issues. Kirby also stepped in and took over the series when Ditko left. Ditko was the first artist to draw the Hulk's arch nemesis The Leader. 

Below are the covers. 

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The Amazing Neighborhood Spider-Pillow!

I'd imagine most comic book fans of any era not only have burned into their memories the artwork and stories of their golden era but the ads of that time as well. I know that for me comics were such treasures, discovered and acquired at great cost of money, time and energy that these glorious four-color pamphlets were sucked dry of their entertainment content almost completely, and that included the wonky ads they might contain.

One of the weirdest in my time was the ad above for inflatable plastic pillows starring some of Marvel's mightiest.  What struck me at the time and still does is the absolute randomness of the images used in this merchandising effort. I'd imagine when the Stan and the others at Marvel realized the success they'd tapped into with their new comics, they were eager to cash in. Certainly riding trends until they bust, had long been the working model for Martin Goodman.  Now Marvel seemed to be ladling out merchandising rights all around and some of it was profoundly strange.

These pillows for instance.

We have a dynamic Thor portrait by Jack Kirby and Vince Colletta. I don't recognize the exact source for this one but I'm sure someone can tell me.

Likewise this Ditko image for Spider-Man, which is a bit more subtle in how it integrates the artwork onto the total pillow for a clever effect. 

Here's a look at another version of this ad, this time with newcomer Captain Marvel thrown in for no discernible reason save to jazz up the image.

Weirdly I found this product starring Sub-Mariner as rendered by Gene Colan and Vince Colletta. It looks like it ought to be part of the same merchandising push, it certainly has that random art quality.

These are two handsome plastic pillows with proper Jack Kirby imagery and seem a bit more classically composed. I doubt they are part of the same push, but are delightful in their own way.

I think I've seen the Thor pillow in real life somewhere, but I forget now where that would've been. I don't remember ever really wanting these items, but I sure remember seeing that delicious ad.

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Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man!

There are some great pin-ups Steve Ditko contributed of "Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man". The poster above was a six-foot wonder delivered to fans in a handy-dandy tube. 

Some amazing art for a set of posters. Getting remuneration for jobs like this was just one of the sticking points for both Ditko and Kirby in Marvel's early years. Despite that injustice, they are great to look at nonetheless. 

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Marvel Masterwork Pin-Ups!

Marvel Masterworks Pin-Ups is one of my absolute favorite Yoe Books. It gathers between its pages most if not all of superhero pin-up pages which appeared in Marvel's comics over the course of about two decades or so beginning with the very first Fab 4 pin-ups from Fantastic Four #2 and ending with John Byrne's pin-ups for Fantastic Four Special Edition from 1984. In between there are scuds of images of both heroes and villains by the likes of Kirby,  John Buscema, Gene Colan, Dicky Ayers, Don Heck, Larry Lieber, John Romita, Bill Everett, and Barry (Not-Yet-Windsor) Smith. Most of them are by the "King", but coming in second is "Sturdy" Steve Ditko. Below I've gathered his Spidey images from the book. 

The oddball grace of Ditko's early version of Spidey is neatly showcases in this image  Amazing Spider-Man #3. 

It is a more muscular Spider we see here from the first Amazing Spider-Man Annual. 

This pin-up from Amazing Spider-Man #20  has always been a favorite of mine as it shows Peter Parker, a figure no less important to the success of the early Spidey stories.  

This a grand image from Amazing  Spider-Man #21, which of course served as the cover this Yoe collection. The way the light frames Spidey is outstanding. 

And this image from Amazing Spider-Man #23  might well be my favorite of the lot. There's not only the entirety of the Spider-verse cast represented with headshots, but we have a very mysterious and threatening image of Spider-Man himself. He's become so common that it's easy to forget that Spider-Man would be downright scary if you met him in one of those dim Ditko alleys. 

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