Gorgo Loves His Mama

Ditko Monsters: Gorgo: edited by Craig Yoe; written by Joe Gill and others; illustrated by Steve Ditko and others (1961-64; reprinted 2013): This grand, tabloid-sized volume reprints all of comic-book legend Steve (Spider-man, Dr. Strange) Ditko's work on the Charlton Comics adaptation and continuation of the giant-monster movie Gorgo.

Gorgo was a British attempt in the early 1960's to match the success of Toho Studios' Japanese giant-monster movies, especially Godzilla (nee Gojira). Thus was born Gorgo, a giant monster with an even more giant mother. Like King Kong, Gorgo gets captured and exhibited by some remarkably stupid showmen. Unlike King Kong, Gorgo has a mother who seems to be several hundred feet tall. England takes a beating.

After adapting the movie, Charlton continued the adventures of Gorgo and Mama Gorgo. Ditko and his long-time collaborator at Charlton, writer Joe Gill, combined on several issues of the title over a three-year period, with Ditko also providing several covers to issues he didn't otherwise illustrate.

This volume really highlights Ditko's two almost paradoxically opposite skills as a comic-book artist. He's great at drawing really weird things, and he's great at drawing people and settings that look far more normal and believeable than that of any other mainstream American comic-book artist in history. Giant monsters and ordinary people: it's the Robert Redford/Godzilla movie you always wanted!

In between depopulating the ocean for their out-sized caloric requirements (Gorgo's mother can gulp down sperm whales whole), Gorgo and his mother sleep on the ocean floor and occasionally get into adventures. They're not the villains of the series -- far from it. Instead, they end the Cuban Missile Crisis (I'm not joking), save Earth from an alien invasion, rescue an American nuclear submarine from the ocean floor, and inspire men and women to get married wherever they go (again, not kidding). For giant, destructive monsters, they sure are swell.

Throughout, Ditko juxtaposes the mundane and the fantastic with the same sort of skill he exhibited on his far more famous work on Spider-man and Dr. Strange, two characters he was drawing for Marvel pretty much simultaneously with several of the stories in this volume. Ditko enjoyed working for Charlton, pretty much the cheapest of the comic-book publishers to survive through the 1960's and 1970's, because he had pretty much carte blanche. Charlton was too cheap to exert editorial control, which meant Ditko didn't have to tailor his style to the publisher or have his stories micro-managed by an editor.

It's all a lot of over-sized fun on over-sized pages. This is Ditko near the height of his mainstream artistic powers. The scripts by Joe Gill are loopy in that Silver-Age science-fictiony way. The historical material contextualizes both the movie and the comics. Really, a fine piece of work. Gorgo loves his mama! Highly recommended.

Charlton Chews

Unexplored Worlds: The Steve Ditko Archives Volume 2: edited and with an introduction by Blake Bell (1956-57; collected 2010): This second volume of the Fantagraphics Steve Ditko Archives takes us through a year in which Ditko recovered from tuberculosis and drew like a fiend, racking up over 400 pages of work, mostly for bargain-basement Charlton Comics. The co-creator of Spider-man and Dr. Strange strove to develop a personal style very early on, as this volume shows. The art is distinctly Ditko from the get-go.

But it's also a Ditko experimenting with what works in terms of storytelling. He plays with detailed rendition and exquisite linework, especially on covers and in opening splash panels. And the broad nature of what Charlton was publishing -- very short stories in a variety of genres, all of them terribly written -- gave Ditko pretty much free rein to work on everything from how to draw a horse's legs (he still doesn't have it at this point, though I'm not sure he ever did; Kirby didn't either) to how to draw fantastic vistas of space and time and other dimensions.

A story about a painting that's a gateway to another dimension shows us the Ditko who will be, less than ten years later, on Marvel's Doctor Strange. On that great character's adventures, Ditko would become one of a handful of the greatest depictors of the weird and uncanny in comic-book history. It's a bit of a paradox.

Ditko was (and is) perhaps the most humanistic and normative of superhero illustrators, his characters not puffed up like steroid-addled beachballs, their faces and clothes lived in and life-like. But he also had a penchant for action conveyed through body language and positioning, and an eye for the weird and unusual conveyed in a few simple lines. He was the comic-book world's version of Magritte with his surreal juxtapositions and commonplace elements arranged in impossible ways.

The writing on almost all of these stories is pretty terrible, as noted -- Charlton was the Yugo assembly line of American comic books of the 1950's and 1960's. But the sheer volume of pages required by Charlton (and the sheer volume required by Ditko to survive at Charlton's miniscule page rates) did give Ditko a chance to develop, experiment, and become the artist he soon would be. Highly recommended.

Strange Spiders

Spider-man/Dr. Strange: Fever: written and illustrated by Brendan McCarthy with an additional story written by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko and illustrated by Steve Ditko (2010/1965; collected 2010): Enjoyable, wonky, slight and psychedelic team-up of Marvel's two biggest heroes co-created by the occasionally trippy pen of Steve Ditko.

That Ditko was amazingly good at conjuring up the weird magical vistas of sorcerer Dr. Strange always seemed a bit paradoxical, as Ditko's other strength lay in making his characters look realistically proportioned -- and New York realistically lived-in. Nonetheless, Ditko made magic look somehow effortless and cool and disquietingly surreal, and forty years of other Dr. Strange artists have struggled to approach the surreal-yet-grounded vistas and creatures of Ditko's realms of magic and mystery.

McCarthy has earned a name as a somewhat surreal comic-book artist, often more for his cover painting for books like Shade, The Changing Man (itself a revival of a trippy 1970's Ditko creation for DC Comics). Here, he grounds his magical dimensions in Australian aboriginal art, among other things, in this tale of Dr. Strange and Spider-man fighting spider-demons in another dimension.

McCarthy wisely keeps Strange and Spider-man believably human-proportioned and muscled, and some of the effects he achieves are quite lovely and strange. He's no Ditko, as the bonus reprint of the first Ditko-plotted-and-drawn Spider-man/Dr. Strange team-up shows, but he's definitely not your average 21st-century comic-book artist. Recommended.

Martians and Spiders and Cocoa Puffs, Oh My

Comics:

Killraven by Alan Davis and Mark Farmer (Six-issue miniseries 2003): Marvel Comics' 1970's Killraven, Warrior of the Worlds series (which started off as War of the Worlds) was a sequel to H.G. Wells's late 19th-century Martian invasion novel War of the Worlds. Set in the third decade of the 21st century, Killraven depicted a world overrun by Martians about 20 years earlier, with humanity reduced to slaves, food, entertainment, and the occasional survivor living off the grid.

Though created by others, Killraven quickly became the stand-out work of writer Don McGregor and artist P. Craig Russell. The whole 70's saga is still available in a Marvel Essential edition, and I'd recommend seeking it out -- it's an odd but intoxicating blend of superheroics, post-apocalyptic action and increasingly intricate experiments with art and storytelling, none moreso than the final issue of the initial run, "The Morning After Mourning Prey." McGregor and Russell helped pave the way for the increasingly literate genre comics of the 1980's and 1990's -- in many ways, their Killraven is a more direct ancestor of Alan Moore's 1980's Swamp Thing work than any previous Swamp Thing iterations.

By my count, this miniseries was Marvel's second attempt to reboot Killraven with a new team for a new generation of comics readers. It isn't exactly a failure. Writer/penciller Alan Davis is a solid writer and artist of superhero comics for both Marvel (Excalibur, Fantastic Four: The End) and DC (JLA: The Nail). His Killraven reboot attempts to streamline things, and the plot reaches a point after six issues of this miniseries that the original series never actually reached over its 30+ issues and one graphic novel -- a partial rapprochement with some of the Martians.

Nonetheless, this is pretty boring stuff, though maybe it wouldn't be if one hadn't read the original run. Characters are simplified and streamlined, none moreso than Hawk, a tragic Native-American malcontent in the original run who here becomes simply a whiny blowhard. The introspection and weirdness of the original (a battle with Martians amongst the devastated breweries of Milwaukee would be one of the high points of the original series, which often set its larger battles with the Martians in iconic American locations including, in the graphic novel finale, Cape Canaveral) have been abandoned for a relatively straightforward quest plot. It all looks great, albeit a bit slick, and it's all as boring as hell. Pick up the Essential volume, don't bother with this. Not recommended.


Essential Silver Surfer Volume 2 by Stan Lee, Steve Engelhart, John Buscema, Marshall Rogers, Ron Lim, John Byrne, Joe Staton, Joe Rubenstein and others (1981-1988; coll. 2006): The former herald of Marvel's world-eating Galactus would undergo a 16-year hiatus between the cancellation of his first regular series and the beginning of his second regular series in 1987, with only a couple of solo one-shots and appearances in other characters' titles during the interregnum. Writer Steve Engelhart and penciller Marshall Rogers were finally allowed to get the Surfer back into outer space in 1987, as the Fantastic Four's Ben Grimm figured out how to get around the 'barrier' Galactus had placed around Earth to stop the Surfer from leaving, a punishment for the Surfer turning on Galactus to save the Earth way back in the Surfer's first appearance in the Fantastic Four in the 1960's.

Engelhart and Rogers waste no time going cosmic, placing the Surfer in the middle of an intergalactic war between Marvel alien-race mainstays the Skrulls and Kree, a war which becomes part of a larger battle involving the machinations of a bunch of Marvel's really old, powerful aliens, The Elders, and their attempts to really, really, really screw up the entire universe. Along the way, various cosmic characters and storylines from Marvel's past show up, including the Celestial Madonna, Jim Starlin's In-Betweener, Lord Order, Master Chaos, the High Evolutionary, Galactus himself, Mangog, the Soul Gems, the Super-Skrull, Jack Kirby's Eternals, the Celestials, and Kree super-blowhard Ronan the Accuser. Surprisingly fun. Recommended.


Spider-man: Election Day by Marc Guggenheim, John Romita, Jr., Klaus Janson, Barry Kitson, Zeb Wells, Todd Zauck, Matt Fraction and others (2009): AKA 'the Spider-man collection with Barack Obama on the cover.' Spider-man's megaselling team-up with Barack Obama on Inauguration Day makes up only about 20 pages of this 200-page collection, with most of the rest of the collected issues dealing with New York City's mayoral election on Earth-Marvel. The main story, by writer Guggenheim and artists Romita, Jr., Kitson and Janson, is a sort of standard, competent Spider-man arc, angst alternating with action sequences. Someone's framing Spider-man for 'The Spider-Tracer Murders,' in which murder victims are found with Spidey's electronic bugs on their bodies. Meanwhile, a Green Goblin-like menace called The Menace seems to be trying to affect the outcome of the mayoral race in its last few days. The whole thing plays out like a slightly more self-reflexive Spider-opus from the 1970's.

The Obama issue also evokes the 70's, though in this case the Hostess Fruit Pie one-page ads that used to run in comics and featured licensed DC and Marvel superheroes fighting supervillains who were trying to steal large quantities of fruit pies. The Obama issue, written by Robot Chicken's Zeb Wells and illustrated by Todd Zauck, feels like the longest Hostess Fruit Pie ad ever created. Minor, early Spider-man villain The Chameleon tries to impersonate Obama at his inauguration. Spider-man has to stop him. This would be a bit more interesting if Zauck could draw a convincing Obama. Unfortunately, he can't, though he's a little better with John McCain and Joe Biden. It's all pretty crappy, making DC's 1963 story "Superman's Secret Mission for President Kennedy" look like Watchmen by comparison. Not recommended.


Book:


Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman (Collected 2003): Klosterman's essays on various pop cultural topics managed to combine hilarity with insight at about 120 bpm. Though I remain unconvinced by his attempt to argue for the greatness of Billy Joel, I am convinced by his explanation of how The Empire Strikes Back helped create the angst and failure of Generation X. A piece about the differences between the 1980's Lakers and Celtics and another one about several nights spent 'touring' with a Guns and Roses cover band also stand out. Highly recommended.