© Charlton Publications Inc. 1977
GERR!
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Steve Ditko and Ghostly Haunts
Ghostly Haunts number 54 is from 1977. Charlton Comics was always the poor second cousin in the comic book field; but comic creator Steve Ditko had a long relationship with them. Charlton was one of the lowest paying publishers and their product often showed it. The publisher was more concerned with keeping their presses running than with editorially fussing over their comic books.
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4 comments:
I always loved this story. Nicola Cuti was one of the better writers on Charlton titles. Steve Ditko was the most captivating artist that the company had on its horror/suspense mags--on par with E R Cruz at DC. Ditko uses his 'angry young blonde' character once again; this time, a little chubbier and with shorter hair. It's safe to say that he was still drawing Gwen Stacy years after he left Amazing Spider-Man (and years after Stacy's death!). Ditko's panels move through the imagination in a manner very similar to motion pictures. In fact, complete with the witch narrator, this story more resembles an episode of Tales of the Unexpected or Alfred Hitchcock presents than what it does a stereotypical horror comics story. And don't you just dig the way she chucks the snowball at the viewer in the final panel. Supercool tale.
It is a very satisfying eight pager! It would have been cool if Ditko could have finished the art in the more elaborate and atmospheric style he used in Warren's Creepy and Eerie books.
This may sound sinful, but the major problem I have with the Warren titles is the lack of colour! In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud talks about how people like Ditko and Kirby were among the more successful 'four-colour' artists because of their definitive palettes of distinct shapes and lines. I would take it a step further and say that Ditko was made for colour. This is particularly true of his superhero, horror/suspense and fantasy work. As far as I'm concerned, Kirby's stories in the same genres can stand better on their own without colour than what Ditko's can. Dr Strange in black and white? Nah--doesn't work. It loses its proto-psychedelic edge. Ditko works best in black and white when he lets his Randian objectivist light out from under the bushel, and creates those grim noir tales of black and white morals.
Someone like Gil Kane on the other hand works well in both black/white and colour because what defines him as an artist is not his shapes and structuring, but rather his panel to panel plotting, which very closely resembles scene development in cinema. For example, his black and white art in His Name is... Savage (1968, I believe) is as striking as his coloured art in Amazing Spider-Man #s 100-102 (1971). Check out the panels of Gwen Stacy sitting alone in her apartment, crying, in #102. They have the effect of a camera panning out in a motion picture, and would have worked just as well in black and white. This is the sort of art that Kane strived for and celebrated in others. So it's not surprising that he cited #33 (1966)--in which Ditko has Spider-Man slowly lift a huge chunk of machinery off his back over three or four pages--as the best early issue of AS.
I do have a personal preference for good B/W art over color. Both Kirby and Ditko understood how to work with the limitations of the printing process in early comics and with the expectation of the type of coloring that would be done. When I first saw "Collector's Edition" in Creepy, I was amazed that Ditko could render in line that way. I do think Ditko did more experimentation with finished art than Kirby was interested in doing.
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