Mixed Pickles - the Book log 2012

Steve Ditko is probably one of the greatest (and one of the most divisive) comic book artists of the Silver Age. From his Atlas pre-superhero horror and mystery stories, though the classic work on Doctor Stange, Hulk, and Spiderman, taking in his Charlton superhero work, and oddities like "Hawk and Dove" for DC, and onto his Ayn Rand inspired (and proselytizing) indepent work, there are fans who love him for what he achieved in his early days, and loath him for the way he refused to play the fanboy game and become the passive idol they desired. But before all the times of adulation and excoriation, there were the days when Ditko was a learner, plying his trade for the small, low-paying comic book publishers in the days before the Comics Code stifled the medium for a generation. This volume prints all of Ditko's pre-code work, most of it for Charlton, in a beatiful hardback volume on heavy stock paper. It looks as if the artwork has been reprinted from stats of the comic pages, with their register slippages and mistakes. I suspect that that is the only form that the comic pages are now available in, the originals having long gone to feed furnaces or line trash cans. And these are, it must be emphasised, the works of an artist learning his trade. Many of the trademarks are already present - the floating heads, the closing in camera shot, the distorted faces. There is, too, a clumsiness, as if the pages were being drawn at high speed (and given the kind of page rates these guys were payed, they drew fast or starved). So, don't go into this book expecting the fine delineation of Ditko on Doctor Strange, or the sharp scripting of Stan Lee in his Tales of Suspense majesty. Enjoy, instead, the development of a talent, the first stretchings of the artistic muscle - it is only by seeing where he came from that you can tell just how far he managed to travel.