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.

Gothic Revival

Unholy Trinity by Ray Russell (1967), containing the following novellas: "Sanguinarius" (1967), "Sardonicus" (1960), and "Sagittarius" (1962): Penguin recently re-released this slim volume of three novellas. If you enjoy Gothic fiction, you should buy it.

Ray Russell fiction-edited Playboy over its first several years. He was also a very talented writer. Unholy Trinity collects Russell's three Gothic-infused novellas of the 1960's. They pay homage to both the general tropes of Gothic and pre-Gothic texts and to specific texts within that long tradition. Stephen King once characterized the most famous of the three, "Sardonicus," as the finest Gothic homage ever written, and I don't necessarily think he's wrong.

First in the collection and last to be written, "Sanguinarius" retells the true story of the Bloody Countess, Elizabeth Bathory, who slaughtered young women and bathed in their blood to remain youthful back in 17th-century Hungary. Russell's style mimics English literature around the same time -- the diction occasionally ventures into the territory of grue-filled plays by Shakespeare, John Webster, and others from that century. The novella establishes a remarkable level of sympathy for Bathory while also bringing the reliability of her narration into question throughout. Technically pre-Gothic in literary time, it reflects the style and content of Gothic influences that include The Duchess of Malfi, The White Devil, The Spanish Tragedy, Titus Andronicus, and Macbeth. Its a marvelous piece of work about a lot of dreadful people.

Secondly and first-written is "Sardonicus," adapted into a movie entitled Mr. Sardonicus in the 1960's. Set during the 19th century, Russell's novella is a brilliant whole of description, characterization, and plot: only the psychology feels a bit too modern for the tale to be a lost story from the end of the Gothic's dominance. It's an immersive pleasure, a joy to read. It also straddles the line between natural and supernatural throughout its narrative, a common attribute of the Gothic; deployed within, to fresh and startling effect, are such tropes as the sinister, wealthy male; the younger woman in terrible peril; horrifying physical disfigurement; a dark and terrible castle; a blighted landscape; torture; and many, many others.

Finally, there is "Sagittarius," Russell's tip of the hat to Jack the Ripper, the Grand Guignol, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  As with the first two, this is told as a reminiscence of horrors past, though the frame-tale now exists in 1960's New York. And, another tip of the hat, that frame tale takes place in a gentleman's club, that oft-used setting for the frames of ghost stories. It's another terrific piece, especially in its evocation of the Grand Guignol theatre in late-19th-century Paris, with its excesses of horror and titillation.

As noted, this volume now exists as a Penguin reprint under the collective banner of guest editor/presenter Guillermo del Toro. It's a terrific example of a writer conjuring up tales that seem to be from another time yet nonetheless remain determinedly contemporary in their sensibilities. Highly recommended.