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. That order is the order in which the work was produced and not necessarily when it was published, so the reader can watch Ditko's style develop over time. 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 comic masters such 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 movement 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 its 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 are 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 week.
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