Strange Suspense: The Steve Ditko Archives Vol.1
Ditko is best known to comics fans as the co-creator of Spider-Man but was prolific before and well after his 1960s Marvel Comics heyday. To this day, he continues to turn out the occasional strip espousing his uncompromising Ayn Randian political philosophy. Befitting his legendary status, every aspect of his career is worth examining and preserving, which makes the launching of a series reprinting his vintage stories welcome indeed. This initial volume collects roughly three dozen of his earliest published (1954) stories, examples of the era’s most popular genre, the horror tale, for which Ditko’s idiosyncratic style was particularly suited, though he was also adept at romance, westerns, sf, and even humor. These blunt, one-dimensional tales, mostly done for the Poverty Row publisher Charlton, may lack the polish Ditko would bring to later work, but his visual approach, including his command of such storytelling basics as staging and panel composition, was fully in place. Every story here is immediately recognizable as the work of one of mainstream comics’ most distinctive artists. --Gordon Flagg