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Nothing in this comics world is more compulsively readable than random Steve Ditko comics, and here’s a recent favorite: The Big Man, from the 1986 Renegade Press release Murder #1. Simplicity in action – an anxious toymaker gets back at his nasty business partners by building a super-costume that transforms him into an enormous guy at will.  Then he crushes his enemies with enormity. “An envious mind, maybe a tiny mind with a big hate. A victimized mind seeking redress, etc. etc. etc.” muses a detective, whose function is mostly philosophical elaboration; the villain dies in a costume malfunction. So basically it’s The Incredibles, if The Incredibles was 115 minutes of Syndrome handing out critical beatings.

Murder was one of frequent Ditko cohort Robin Snyder’s anthology projects with Renegade, loosely arranged under the banner of Robin Snyder’s Revolver, as in ‘revolving’ artists and themes, although only the first six issues were numbered under the Revolver title – then came three issues of Ditko’s World: Static, an issue of Ernie Colon’s Manimal, three issues of Murder and a reprint-heavy Revolver Annual subtitled Frisky Frolics. Ditko showed up in almost every issue, as well as various artists and writers associated with the Warren magazines, which had folded a few years prior in 1983; indeed, some of the content is reprinted from Warren publications, while it’s possible the assorted Bill DuBay and Jim Stenstrum pieces (scripts?) were intended for Warren during their time with the publisher. To your left you’ll see Jim Stenstrum’s Tales of the Siberian Snowtroopers #1 (Revolver #6, reprinted in Annual #1), drawn by future Image co-founder Erik Larsen, who otherwise contributed a few illustrations to the extended Revolver project. If the story wasn’t intended for Warren, this would mark the only original, non-Warren comics work by Stenstrum, a specialist in keen violence and sarcastic heroism of the sort that would eventually spark a pre-Image comics revolution in America, the ’80s British Invasion fed by a growing 2000 AD and Warrior, as I’ve indicated in this space before. Here, it seems several time periods exist at once, although I wouldn’t call Stenstrum ‘ahead-of-his-time’ in the ’70s – internationally he was perfectly of his time, while many American genre comics hung a few steps back.

But now, onto the sequels, collections and follow-ups you dare not miss:

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I found this Thor origin story by Steve Ditko in a comic called The Saga of Thane of Bagarth issue number 24 from 1985 which was a reprint of an old Charlton comic from 1973. I’ve never seen or heard of it before.

I posted it on my back issue blog. Check it out!

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Further to Dan’s excellent post on Wally Wood, one way to think about Wood’s career is to realize that he followed a pattern common to commercial comic book artists of his era. Think of Kirby, Ditko, Kane, and Eisner (and maybe also John Stanley). All these cartoonists started off as journeymen artists, had a mid-life crisis which made them try do more artistically ambitious work, but ended up being thwarted either by the limits of their talent or the constraints of marketplace.

Jack Kirby had his midlife crisis in the late 1960s. He already had a formidable body of work, arguably the best adventure cartooning ever done in the comic book form, running from the explosive patriotic bombast of the early Captain America to the mind-stretching cosmic adventures of the Fantastic Four and Thor. But by the late 1960s he was tired of playing second fiddle that blowhardy glory-hound Stan Lee. So Kirby made is big break for DC and became the auteur behind the hugely ambitious Fourth World series. I’m very fond of the Fourth World series, and even enjoy the aspect of them that is most often mocked, Kirby’s peculiar writing style, which to my ears at least has a kind of vatic poetry. Be that as it may, DC comics wasn’t willing to give the series the support they deserved and the books were canceled mid-storyline, leaving us with the fragments of a promising epic. Kirby would go on doing fascinating work, but he never really got over the sting of losing the Fourth World. None of his subsequent work had the same crazy ambition as the Fourth World.
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I can’t stop thinking about this comic book! I can’t sleep! It’s driving me crazy!

For starters it’s Ditko inked by P. Craig Russell and it’s Rom…! Ditko’s my guy. I think he’s up there with the greatest comic-book storytellers, right next to Carl Barks, Osamu Tezuka, Jack Kirby, and Gilbert Hernandez, and like those guys he has an idiosyncratic, functional line, especially when he ink’s himself. So it’s weird to have the fucking opera-comics-guy P. Craig Russell inking Ditko. Russell’s sharp, mechanical ink-work does very little for Ditko’s acting; the best faces are either at a remove and minimal, or just on the verge of Russell over powering Ditko’s worried, angry expressions. But! Russell’s precise draftsmanship does wonders for Ditko’s layouts! illuminating the “frozen music” of his single pages and spreads. I’ve been living with this page for days…

It’s ridiculous how intuitive the contour lines shape the reading composition of this page. And just about every page of this comic book is equally stunning with innovative and exciting techniques, all respectfully appropriate for the story, and virtually never to be seen again in what we’ve accepted as the American comic book. Blackest Night indeed. Rom #64 is the alternate path never taken: a wormhole to an alternative reality where a person doesn’t have to wade through shit and mire and deceit to find such pure light, a reality where shitty movies are adapted into awesome comic books and more people are occupied by Steve Ditko’s genius (I mean that!) and a quality color job (shout out to Petra Scotese!) rather than Tobey Maguire’s abs.

BONUS FEATURE!

I’m compelled to assume that Ditko and co. weren’t aware what pages would be presented as spreads and what pages would be faced by ads, but because these are consecutive pages I’m equally compelled to assume they knew exactly what they’re doing. This spread in particular reminds me of Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan.

CREDITS:

ROM™ Vol. 1, No. 64, March, 1985
ROM™ copyright ©1984 Parker Brother
Story Title: Worldmerge!
Story: Bill Mantlo
Art: Steve Ditko & P. Craig Russell
Letters: Janice Chiang
Colors: Petra Scotese
Editor: Mike Carlin
Prime Dork: Jim Shooter

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I had planned a better post, but scanning problems are delaying things a bit, so here’s a few links to tide things over.

You know, there’s a prominent comics link-blogger who likes to go on and on about how hard it is to put these things together, but based on my limited experience, it actually seems like a great and incredibly easy way to post stuff online, even when you’re busy with a day job, a baby, election day, scanner foul-ups, early morning meetings, etc. If I was actually paid to do this every day, I bet I could get a routine going with my RSS feeds where it took me less than an hour to round up links to all of the “important” comics blogosphere blogonet sites every morning. Kind of fun!

1. Austin English is a great guy and all, but he has weird ideas about what’s ugly and what isn’t. (And seems to compare Denny O’Neil favorably to R. Crumb, an aesthetic crime that should not go unpunished. (Jk Austin! Sorta.))

2. I knew about Talking Lines, but didn’t realize there was another interesting looking new R.O. Blechman book out.

3. Birthday tributes to Steve Ditko weren’t even a dime a dozen yesterday, unless you pay way too much for your internet service, but this one, despite its brief length, was particularly provocative and original.

4. Naoki Urasawa talks process. [via]

5. A too-rare interview with Peter Blegvad appears in the new Believer. [via]

[UPDATE: And I didn't realize it when I originally posted, but the issue includes a TON of good comics material that I should have mentioned.]

6. Almost every post Jog writes these days is worth linking to, but since everyone already reads him anyway, what’s the point? That said, this review of J.H. Williams III and Detective Comics is unusually thorough and well-wrought, even for him.

7. And here is an insightful appreciation of last week’s Chris Ware New Yorker work. Click on it; it’s not boring.

8. Finally (but not leastily), for those of you who didn’t notice, this weekend brought the grand debut of our newest online team member, the great Jason T. Miles. Please make him welcome and stay tuned for more. I don’t want to ruin his next post by giving anything away, but it sounds pretty awesome.

That’s it. I hope you found at least most of those worth reading. Nothing is more annoying than linkblogs full of garbage. On second thought, I have to admit that maybe this isn’t that easy to do exhaustively if you hope to maintain any kind of quality control. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m finding less and less of interest in the actual comics blogosphere blogonet these days. Writers outside it seem more thoughtful lately. Still, ninety minutes tops.

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Steve Ditko, from Spider-Man #33.

Jaime Hernandez, from “Bob Richardson”.

The bridge is over. The bridge is over. Yes. But what does that mean in practice? One way to describe our bridge-less world is to say that it is now possible to read Jaime Hernandez and not see the influence of Ditko. Indeed, I suspect that most readers of Love and Rockets might not know who Ditko is.

That’s not much of a loss. There are all sorts of pleasures in Jaime H.’s work that don’t require Ditko-knowledge. Anyone who is literate and has an eye can appreciate Jaime’s excellent sense of character, the purity of his art, the constant inventiveness of his stories, and the sheer scope of storytelling he’s achieved over hundreds of pages.

Still, there is a small loss. Consider the above panel from the Jaime story “Bob Richardson” (page 4 of the story).

The panel is a visual allusion to a famous sequence in Spider-Man #33 where the web-slinger is trapped under a giant machine. Ditko’s scene was one of his great dramatizations of the triumph of the will, with Spider-Man overcoming not just the machine but also own sense of failure and defeat. In the Hernandez story, the significance of the allusion is that on a psychological level Maggie undergoes a many traumas: she’s beaten down by life and is made to feel good-for-nothing by friends and family alike. Yet she finds within herself the resilience to go on. Hernandez’s image of the dog under the machine is meant to say something about how Maggie feels. He’s taking Ditko’s super-heroic imagery and transforming it into a scene of quiet emotional symbolism.

The visual allusion to Ditko is only a tiny nuance, one thin sliver in a multi-layered story. Still it’s a layer that one would like Love and Rockets readers to know about.

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50 cent bin Ditko. Sounds like a terrorist rapper. I picked up these 70s Ditko horror comics at my secret spot here in Pittsburgh. I spent like, 3.50 total for 7 books. (Then I spent 3.50 for one new comic: Incognito #2-which is actually really good, somehow very timely) All “late” Ditko where he’s just crankin’ it out, where’s he’s just using that template of his, of generic action scenes, familiar poses. Eyeball the panel I’ve enlarged at the very bottom and think about how many Ditko comics you’ve seen that exact framing, that exact pose. Two crooks beatin’ their feet down an alley in a Ditko comic will more than likely have a variation of this pose. Yet, it scares the shit out of me somehow. So generic but so symbolic and perfect for the pulpy pitch of the story. This period of Ditko just continues to fascinate me. And unlike 70s Kirby comics which have been scooped up by collectors and are now more pricey than they useta be, 70s Ditko comics are still around in the bins if you sniff for them. Anyways, tune in next sunday night when my hunt for cheaply printed mildewy newsprint continues on ComicsComics.