Steve Ditko/Chuck Norris
by Frank Santoro
Monday, September 8, 2008
I swear, I’d never heard of this, never seen it. I about fainted when I saw it. Just thought I’d share another quarter bin find. (Still only reading dumb comic books these days, kinda tired of all the serious stuff.)
Labels: Steve Ditko
As great as Ditko was, all his characters seemed to resemble dolls with slight variations of colour, hair, nose shape, fat or thin etc. I remember as a little kid thinking J. Jonah Jameson was Dr. Strange’s secret identity.
As Dan Clowes pointed out, even his women talk with clenched fists and look like men in wigs. I always suspected something ‘Aspergian’ in his approach to people – especially given his intense, detailed attachment to abstract concepts.
Check out his Indiana Jones too – he looks like Mr. A in a leather jacket. Not exactly Mort Drucker…
… and for some reason you can always see every ‘normal’ character’s socks, no matter what they wear.
oh yeah i remember this stuff! about two years ago i became fascinated by this series (in an NFL Superpro sort of way) and i bought the first few issues dirt cheap offline. the stories are unreadable but the covers are sweet as hell. and the Ditko thing was like a sweet surprise when i flipped open to the credits… a sweet surprise in a “what the #$%@?!!!” kind of way.
According to Blake Bell’s “Strange And Stranger” this book was originally to be inked by Joe Sinnott, but he declined to do it because Ditko’s pencil art was too loose. The whole section about Ditko’s later work-for-hire period, when he gave inking his own stuff, is rather depressing – he so obviously didn’t care any more.
“gave up” I mean.
Prediction- Chuck Norris will run for public office in 2010. His platform will involve folksy, no-nonsense solutions to complex problems. He will mention karate in is stump speeches.
You can see Norris engaging in Ayn Rand-ian internal dialogues about heroic ethics and ‘objective truths’ all through that campaign. While also kicking ass in between TV interviews, like Static or the Question. Fat sweaty businessmen (wearing trilbys with desperate, open hands) trying to bribe him, while Norris tells them why rich men should never pay tax… “No thank you sir – you EARNED your money!”