Steve Ditko's 160 Page Package!

Steve Ditko's 160 Page Package is one of my favorites of his Indy productions with Robin Snyder. It hit the market two decades ago and it was at the time one of the exceedingly few collections of Charlton stories anywhere not featuring some of the "Action Heroes" (and even those were rare). It contains work by Joe Gill and Steve Ditko from 1971 to 1975 when the duo were at a long time teamed to create scary yarns to fill the pages of Charlton's ghost-host books such as Ghostly Tales, The Many Ghosts of Dr. Graves, Ghostly Haunts, and more. The tome includes a passage from both Joe Gill and Ditko reflecting on their work together and their friendship because as unlikely as it seems for two men with such divergent personalities, they were friends apparently. There's also a biographical sketch about Joe Gill by Robin Snyder I assume. 

One of the real treats in a Ditko ghostly tale was the clever ways he'd incorporate the host into the story. Some artists were content to have the host pop up at the beginning and again at the end, but Ditko regularly had Mr. Dedd, Dr. M.T. Graves, Winnie the Witch, Mr. Bones (or even Impy who Bones replaced in Haunted) hang around panel after panel and page after page mouthing off giving the whole affair a nifty fourth-wall-breaking illusion. 

These are done in tasty black and white and that's an advantage in many respects since Dtko's work holds quite well in black and white. I have many if not most of these in the original and some in later reprint volumes and the color is great, but this dandy too. Now Steve Ditko didn't create Mr. Dedd, the host of Ghostly Tales, that was mostly likely Rocke Mastroserio, but when Ditko drew him he made him his own. 

Likewise his Dr. Graves is more or less definitive for me, as Dikto took him and often fashioned him into a low-key Dr. Strange. But no one drew the eventual hostess of Ghostly Haunts Winnie the Witch like Ditko. She was demure in the hands of Pete Morisi or Wayne Howard, but beneath the inky pen of Ditko Winnie was buxom and bold and intoxicating. It's like she might want to smack you around any moment if you didn't pay close attention to her tale, and who could ignore her tail when Ditko drew it. 

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The Outer Limits - The Architects Of Fear!

Most television shows don't scare me, even when I was a small kid the tension and suspense of most TV shows was so diminished by its serial status that one didn't really worry about the main protagonists who you knew would be back once again the next week. And by and large TV is watched in the light, the light of day or the glowing light of lamps. That said such shows as The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits don't have continuing characters so it is much easier to allow the unknown fate of such individuals to bet beneath the skin. Of these two, The Twilight Zone was not a show designed to scare so much as to provoke, to provoke thought and compassion in the appropriate places. But rarely if ever fear. In the case of The Twilight Zone, there always seems to be a whisper of a fairy tale which makes the stories often profound but not especially spooky. The Outer Limits went for the jugular, eschewing too much moralizing for creepy images packed into bizarre circumstances with regret and death often the result. 

"The Architects of Fear" is for my money the scariest episode of the show, though I find "The Sixth Finger" (about another man who ceases to be "human")  to be in the running also. What "Architects" has is a premise which curdles the blood. A cabal of men decide the world needs a mutual enemy from the depths of space and select one of their own to be transformed utterly into an alien, a creature unrecognizable as part of the environment of Earth. The make a "monster" but for weirdly skewed and imagined noble reasons. The destroy a man and make of him a "scarecrow" to frighten others to do what's necessary. They fail and the result is the destruction of a man and an ideal. The creature they make is hokey if seen too efficiently, so the trick is to keep it off screen and just toss the audience bits and pieces. The imagination will fill the necessary gaps and each viewer will flesh out the "scarecrow" with their own monster. We eventually do see it, but only after the threat is ended, and if it didn't match up to our imagination, that was fine since the image in the mind remained. 

The show makes us build our own nightmare in broad dayling and put it shambling through the rushes of a swamp, all the while knowing it's a human being like us, with all the longings and passions that come with that designation. Like the members of the cabal, we become the "architects" of our own fear. The Twilight Zone never did that. 

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Caltiki The Immortal Monster!

I'm not sure when my consciousness was properly invaded by knowledge of Caltiki The Immortal Monster, but it hasn 't been all that long. This is a 1959 Italian black and white movie set in Mexico and featuring one of the more intriguing of the amorphous monsters which were a bit popular at the time.

The trend began with The Quatermass Xperiment (called The Creeping Unknown in these United States) which had a oozing monster come down from space to threaten mankind by absorbing many individuals before getting fried with electricity. It continued with X the Unknown which had a creature bubble up from beneath the Earth to irradiate and kill many a man before being sent packing. The Blob is a famous contribution from Jack Harris starring Steve McQueen. So it's not odd I guess for others to take a tumble at slithering piles of goo. 

This movie feels amazingly like a filmed version of one of Marvel's monster stories from its heyday. An ancient Mayan site is being explored and a mysterious pool is found and before you can say "Run" a giant monster is up and oozing all over everyone. The "heroes" make a getaway but not before getting a sample. One of the team is killed outright, another is infected and goes mad becoming a dangerous murderer, while the third member tries to save himself and his buxom wife from the crazy guy and the monsters at the same time. Innocent bystanders are killed and many toy tanks and trucks are sacrificed to end the threat. If you like monster movies I cannot see how  you cannot like this one. It's got ancient menace, radioactive monsters, crazed maniacal killers, and a big old finale with tanks and guns and havoc galore. 

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Yoe - Mummies!

I've always enjoyed a good mummy movie. The Mummy from Universal is likely my favorite of the classic original cycle. Dracula is limited and stiff given its stage origins despite the compelling performance of Lugosi, and as good as James Whale's Frankenstein is, it falls short with a somewhat clumsy ending despite the wonder of Boris Karloff. 

But The Mummy which also stars Boris Karloff is a solid flick right the way through that pays off all the elements it has taken some pains to set up. Karloff gets to talk in this one and his somber tones, his finest acting feature, are key to making this movie absolutely atmospheric. Zita Johann as the love interest of both the titular Mummy and the stock-hero David Manners is exotic, lovely and compelling. I know how the movie ends, but still you can see part of her wants to go with Imhotep before she is disgusted by his unnatural state. The first ten minutes of the movie, the part which actually features a wrapped mummy corpse is arguably among the finest in all of horror history. It's only equaled in the Universal movies by reveal of the Creature in the first Frankenstein. It's actually scary. 

But the Yoe Books collection Mummies is not about the classic Karloff flick, but about the whole history of mummies in pop culture and beyond. Steve Thompson (BookSteve) delivers a detail-rich essay to front this volume which then proceeds to deliver a gauntlet of Pre-Code mummy horror tales from an array of fright comics. To be honest most of the stories look pretty much alike about mummies, gods, sphinxes, and such with competent but sometimes indifferent art from pros such as Mike Sekowsky and Don Perlin. Aside from a story by John Belfi for Charlton's The Thing and a story or two from Bob Powell which plays a bit with perspective, the stories are designed to tell a tell as efficiently as possible. One artist who is well represented is a guy named Sy Grudko, who I have never heard of before. There are stories from Ace, ACG, Star, Quality comics along with a few more. Titles like Web of Mystery, Web of Evil, Forbidden Tales, and Chamber of Chills are the sources for these yarns of moth-eaten Egyptian corpses up and causing trouble. But they are a fun diversion on a calm afternoon, which is when I read them. 

There's a nifty little cover gallery as well with the Jack Katz offering above being the best of the lot and my personal favorite image in the entire volume. There's an energy of impending menace which is sadly missing from much of the other more sedate images in the tome. Despite a somewhat dizzy collection of tales, I find this volume still entertaining. 

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Ditko - Strange Suspense!

Strange Suspense is volume one in The Steve Ditko Archives from Fantagraphics. This handsome and highly readable tome brings together in chronological order Ditko's earliest work in comics. This is his Pre-Code work, the raw stuff which informed comics before the Comics Code was created and leveraged public opinion to make comics more palatable to the parents of the country. These stories are violent, sometimes wildly so. Steve Ditko was a young man, fresh from the military and from his training at The School of Visual Arts under such comic masters as Jerry Robinson. Bringing his adoration for Will Eisner and blending it with a palpable respect for Mort Meskin, Ditko of this early time creates stories filled with movment and vibrant realistic backgrounds. He's drawing for the most part wild stories of science fiction and horror so his characters are outsized deformities of reality but memorable. I find Ditko's eyes are the feature that seems most dominant to me on his pages from this era. He's drawing for several folks, including briefly the  Simon and Kirby studio, but most of the work in this book is from Charlton books such as This Magazine is Haunted, Strange Suspense Stories, and The Thing. (These were titles inherited by Charlton from the going-out-of-comic-book-business Fawcett folks.)The best stories in fact are from the latter, a comic for which Ditko created several very memorable covers as well. 

Now the work here will surprise folks used to classic Ditko, as in these early years he's still developing and hasn't become that distinctive talent we're accustomed to. His work is very like his teacher Robinson and his mentor Meskin. Some say he and Joe Kubert, another up and comer at the time, have very similar styles and in years past have been mistaken for one another. I like this version of Ditko. IT was not only good on horror and sci-fi tales but effective on a single romance tale and one western and a single gangster yarn from his earliest days. I find it's use of detail effective for the kinds of stories being told, gothic horrors with a science fiction edge. His eyes are distinctive in particular. My favorite two stories from this period are "Cinderella" and "Rumplestiltskin", two very weird and dark interpretations of the classic fairy tales. The former in particular is a romp with twist on twist and ironically it's also the subject of Ditko's very first cover as seen above. The story "The Worm Turns" is a ferocious tale with an amazing giant monster creation. Here the remaining covers Ditko produced in order during this period. 

Steve Ditko had to leave comic book work for a couple of reasons. One was that the arrival of the Comics Code knocked off a lot of the work he'd been getting, and he became deathly ill. More on that next time. 

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The Twilight Zone - Robby!

It may no longer be the case, with the likes of C-3PO, R2-D2, and heavens forbid the new bot on the block BB-8 having so dominated popular culture. But once upon a time Robby was the pinnacle of cinematic circuitry, the top of the titanium heap when it came to big-screen robots. He dominated the movie Forbidden Planet and soon had his own feature called oddly The Invisible Boy. But he wasn't over then, but went to appear in a slew of TV shows, not the least of which of The Twilight Zone. In fact Robby made three appearances across the five seasons of the original show. 

His first appearance was in the fist season episode "One for the Angels" in which Robby is presented in the size of a child's toy. It would be all the way to the fifth season before his next appearance (in somewhat altered form -- see above) in "Uncle Simon" when he's the oost-mortem container for a horrible man, and finally in the same season in "The Brain Center at Whipples" when he shows up briefly at the end to symbolize the transformation in industry from humans to robots. (This is my favorite of the three.) Robby was in lots of television shows besides sci-fi ones but his most famous appearance perhaps was on an episode of Lost in Space in which he squares off against the loyal Environmental Control Robot B-9 of the Robison family. 

It's fun to watch these vintage shows sci-fi shows and watch out for such cameos and also for the use and steady reuse of other costumes and props from the highly influential Forbidden Planet. For more about Robby's TV show appearances check out this dandy link. 

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The Weird, The Odd, And The Ditko!

This fine October month we find ourselves in an unusual situation in which the real world is brimming with more terrors than the mythical world. That said, the fictional realms do offer sanctuary from the terrors of the times and this month I want to focus on some of them. And often when it comes to horror and sci-fi it comes in the form of an anthology. The ghost comic made up of three or four little scares has traditionally been the norm. 

The first horror comic book is supposedly a one-off titled Eerie #1 from Avon in 1947, and the first series was from ACG titled Adventures into the Unknown in 1948.  EC though perfected the mold in many respects with books like Tales from the Crypt and The Haunt of Horror. It was a bandwagon which was quickly jumped on and scores of publishers littered the stands with books such Beware, Web of Mystery, Weird Mysteries, Fantastic Fears, and many many more. 

But of course they were pretty rugged in terms of content and that became a soft target for the always abiding social improvers and comic books were nearly decapitated by the backlash. The Comics Code came in and the anthologies went away for a time. Then Warren created Creepy and Eerie, and later DC came out with House of Mystery, House of Secrets, and The Witching Hour, and Marvel had Tower of Shadows and Chamber of Darkness, and so on and so forth and it was on again and in some respects had never really stopped, but merely mutated into giant monster tales and suchlike. Charlton Comics offered up a delightful bevy of ghostly comics in 50's such as This Magazine is Haunted and The Thing, and in the late 60's and through much of the 70's such as The Many Ghosts of Dr. Graves, Ghostly Tales, Haunted, and many more. 

This October  I want to focus on stories drawn by the singularly talented Steve Ditko. The focus will be on stories he drew from  his earliest days for Charlton Comics and a smattering of other small-time publishers who like Charlton are no longer with us. He drew all sorts of tales, stories of romance and western derring-do, but I'm mostly plumbing these catacombs to enjoy his weird stories from the aforementioned titles The Thing and This Magazine Is Haunted, among others. If time permits I'd like to move onto his work under the aegis of Stan Lee at what was to become Marvel before he made his fame (if not fortune) with a certain friendly neighborhood wall-crawling superhero if some note. I've been astounded how much I like the work done in Amazing Adult Fantasy, the title Lee concocted for just himself and Ditko.

But that focus on Ditko doesn't rule out other Pre-Code wonders. Hopefully I'll be able to get around to all sorts of monsters, ghosts, mummies and assorted ghouls of many kinds from a host of creators. The basket is full and I might not get to it all, but that's a good thing. 

While I'm reading these vintage weird stories of science and the occult, I'll also be using my time also to take a look at some classics of vintage television. The Twilight Zone remains the standard by which all science fiction and fantasy shows are measured. Known for its smart writing and compact storytelling, the show held up a mirror to an America audience filled with dread and self-doubt despite the happy talk to the contrary. Rod Serling was the mastermind of the show writing many of the scripts alongside the likes of Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson. Later Serling tried to dabble in the weird again, this time with a color show called Night Gallery, a show more pointed to the occult and weird fantasy than had been The Twilight Zone, though the latter had plenty of that too. 

There were other shows too, such One Step Beyond which actually predated The Twilight Zone and the magnificent The Outer Limits, to my mind the best pure science fiction show ever on TV. I want to get a decent glance at some of these during the month as time allows and comment when and where I think interesting on certain episodes and the themes they're developing. These shows often spoke to a time when America was scared of an enemy outside our borders, and tragically not much one within. But usually the message was something akin to what Walt Kelly surmised in Pogo - "We have met the enemy and he is us."

And in addition to all that (if time allows) I might also dabble in one of my favorite pastimes, taking a good close look at some of my favorite vintage Ditko covers and assorted collections of the great man's work. He had a real knack for creating compelling images that tickled the imagination. I've a lot planned so for the duration of this Halloween-inspired month regular features such as the "The Saturday Serials" and "The Sunday Funnies" will give way for a time, but I do expect to bring back at least the latter in the portentous month of November. But that's then, and this is the Countdown to Halloween. It will almost certainly be weird, and it might well be odd, but rest assured it will be filled with Ditko. 

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