Happy Birthday to the great Steve Ditko, who would have turned 93 today.
Ditko drew — and possibly wrote (Stan Lee on credits, but that sometimes is overstated) — this neat little science fiction back-up story in the third issue of Iron Man.
These SF and horror stories would soon become rarities as publisher Martin Goodman and Editor Lee replaced them with a new line-up of superheroes, including a certain web-crawler that would bring Ditko more notoriety than anything else he would create.
The Amazing Spiderman #1 had just hit the newsstands. The rest as they say…
Marvel did a nice job reprinting all of Stan Lee’s and Steve Ditko’s horror and SF stories in this two-volume series.
The National Cartoonists Society would be poised for their annual awards event this month if it wasn’t for the COVID pandemic, so it’s a good week to celebrate cartoons.
And we need some way to celebrate summer again…
Michael Berry is very underrated cartoonist. With many appearances in Esquire and Playboy, plus hundreds of cartoons in the “cheapie girlie” magazines, his love of pretty women was always apparent. And many of his gags actually still hold up.
Unlike his better-known contemporaries like Dan DeCarlo, Jack Cole, Bill Ward et al, not enough is known about his life and career. That’s a shame — he’s just as good. One of the many things I enjoy about his art is that the finished result appears effortless.
Although I am sure it wasn’t.
Humorama applies to a single magazine, as well as an entire line of inexpensive men’s gag magazines, published during the 50s and 60s by Martin Goodman of Marvel Comics fame.
A collection of Humorama cartoons from recent years — currently out of print, unfortunately.
Atlas/Seaboard announced its 1974 entry into comic book publishing with plenty of talent and plenty of marketing. Founded by former Marvel Comics publisher Martin Goodman and featuring marquee names like Neal Adams, Steve Ditko, Wally Wood and many up-and-comers, it seemed the possibilities for the new company were endless.
But… those possibilities ended just 23 issues later (no individual title lasted more than four) in late 1975. Many of the titles had rebooted midstream, providing a capricious and confounding publishing strategy.
Howard Chaykin’s Scorpion was easily one of the better Atlas titles — so naturally, after two issues, Seaboard canned Chaykin, hired Alex Toth, and never actually published the pages Toth produced. (They turned up later, elsewhere.)
Not one to waste a great character, Howard quickly transformed Scorpion into Dominic Fortune at Marvel, where he has lived on and off for the last 40 years.
This great page captures Chaykin inventive and dynamic sense of storytelling. Literally “thinking out of the box,” Chaykin flies the airplane right through the outer panel walls, and somehow Atlas’ production dept. made it work — years before full bleed pages were practical in comic book printing.
And, as Luke narrates in the recent Star Wars The Rise of Skywalker trailer, “No one’s ever really gone.” To wit, Atlas just made another comeback of sorts:
