Action Heroes Archives, Vol. 2 (DC Archives Edition)
With its shoddy printing and cheap mechanical lettering, Charlton Comics always seemed like the comic-book equivalent of the movies' Poverty Row studios. Like its Hollywood counterparts, Charlton could sometimes rise to the occasion and produce a gem, usually by turning the reins over to an auteur, which is what happened with these late-1960s stories. Spider-Man artist Ditko had just left Marvel Comics and ensconced himself at Charlton, which gave him fewer readers and less money but greater artistic freedom. Besides resuming duties on his 1960 cocreation, nuclear-powered superhero Captain Atom, Ditko revamped the 1940s character the Blue Beetle and created the masked crimefighter the Question, infusing the stories with an Ayn Rand–inspired moral absolutism that Marvel never would have allowed him to voice. This volume collects the later years of Ditko's Charlton run. While the tales lack the polish of the artist's Marvel work, his angular artwork remains brilliantly idiosyncratic, and the stories' political bias is precisely the kind of iconoclastic viewpoint that seldom gets expressed in mainstream comics. Flagg, Gordon