The Steve Ditko Archives, Volume 1: Strange Suspense

The Steve Ditko Archives #1

by Steve Ditko, Blake Bell (Editor)

Before Spider-Man, the legendary comic-book artist Steve Ditko drew horror comics that were not yet hobbled by the Comics Code Authority (adopted in Oct. '54). These graphic stories featured bloodshed, dismemberment and the ugly ends of the lives of the twisted inhabitants of Steve Ditko's imagination. Following up on Strange and The World of Steve Ditko , Blake Bell's 2008 best-selling critical retrospective of Ditko's career, The Best of Steve Ditko Vol. 1 will, for the first time, feature spectacular full-color reprints of every story from those first two years of his career. Beginning with Ditko's very first story, readers will see the initial works of an artist already at a level of craftsmanship that exceeded most of his peers'. The book will also feature editor Bell's insightful historical notes.

Genres: Comics, Horror, Graphic Novels, Pulp, Science Fiction, Crime, Fantasy

240 pages, Hardcover

First published May 15, 2014

About the author

Stephen J. "Steve" Ditko was an American comic book artist and writer best known as the co-creator of the Marvel Comics heroes Spider-Man and Doctor Strange.

He was inducted into the comics industry's Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1990, and into the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 1994.

Reviews

[Jack Tripper · Rating 4 out of 5]

EC Comics like Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror may be considered the gold standard for pre-Comics Code-era horror, but I think I enjoy these Steve Ditko-penned stories even more, as a whole. EC featured a lot of straight revenge-type stories and oftentimes relied on some ironic, gruesome twist on the last panel for their effectiveness. These tales, from a number of early to mid-50s magazines such as Strange Suspense Stories and The Thing, offer a bit more variety. There are some Crypt-style comeuppance strips (supernatural and non), but also creature features, mysteries, hauntings, even a few space adventures and westerns. I know EC had lots of different magazines, for every genre, but it's nice having it all in one volume, unlike the EC compilations available today. Now, I find it doubtful that a random sampling of the magazines featured here would measure up to a random sampling of Tales from the Crypt, but these Ditko ones sure do.



The stories are all pretty typical of the era, but they're well-told, and well-illustrated. I love that Fantagraphics reproduced the newspaper print-style of the vintage comics as opposed to having them recolored on super-glossy paper that you can't look at under direct light, as it actually feels like you've been transported back in time. Ditko would later go on to become the exclusive artist for The Amazing Spider-Man, and it's cool to take an extensive look at what he was up to before he was famous (well, comic book famous at least). Each of the offerings here run about 6-7 pages apiece, and there are a number of Ditko-drawn cover images for the various magazines scattered throughout. The first few strips, from the earliest part of his career, are pretty average, with overly busy panels, but after that he found his groove, and it's a shame that The Code put an end to what could have been an amazing career as a horror artist and writer.

Monsters, curses, revamped fairy tales, madmen, witches, space robots, damsels in distress, haunted houses, it's all here, and it's all awesome.

4.0 Stars.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strange Suspense: The Steve Ditko Archives Vol. 1 contains Steve Ditko horror comics published by Charlton in 1952-1955.

Sometime in the blur of recent history, Fantagraphics needed to raise some funds and did a Kickstarter. I put in some cash and selected this as my reward.

Strange Suspense is a collection of pre-Comics Code Authority horror, meaning there's a good amount of blood and gore. The stories themselves are nothing spectacular, mostly Tales from the Crypt-style tales that lack the punch of the EC originals.

However, the art is the star of the show and it's quite interesting to watch Steve Ditko grow as an artist. You can almost see him becoming more confident. While he's not quite at his peak level at this point in his career, you can see the beginnings of a lot of the faces and bizarre landscapes that would later find their way into Amazing Spider-Man or Strange Tales. There's a personification of death that looks a hell of a lot like the Green Goblin and there's some embryonic Doctor Strange in The Library of Horror, my favorite tale in the book.

Strange Suspense is an interesting piece of comics history and an interesting look at Steve Ditko's art before he hit the big time. While I prefer EC's offerings from the time period, it's also a decent collection of pre-Code horror. Three out of five stars.

[Keith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although I may be a minority of one on this, I actually enjoyed this book MORE than the EC Comics treasuries I've thumbed through in the past. While EC is heralded as the alpha and omega of 50's horror and crime comics, I always found them a little hokey and pat -- more of the open-and-shut plot twists I associate with "Twilight Zone" than anything actually surprising or disturbing. Certainly nothing I've read from EC has ever made me understand what made people think our nation's youth was being corrupted by funnybooks all those years ago.

Not so with these Charlton classics penned by Ditko. Sure, many of these short-shorts are centered (literally) around transparent deals with the devil, and there's no shortage of ghoulish, well, ghouls running around and making a mess. But abut halfway through the book we get into some genuinely cringe-worthy territory -- mass murder, dismemberment, mutant heads and eyes growing out of the unlikeliest places, torture and loss and more than a few deaths-by-devouring. And none of this happens offscreen, either -- blood splashes across the page liberally in all of these stories.

It's visceral and creepy and uncomfortable just to think that someone came up with this stuff, and that there's so much of it--on the level of pure cartoonery, Ditko was able to create a world of monstrous, distinctive characters I've never seen outside of Dick Tracy's rogues gallery. Strange Suspense is a book that fascinated me at the same time I struggled to get through it, with the googly-eyed man on the front cover becoming less kooky and more grotesque each time I went back to it.

While I know that Ditko fans are disappointed that this early work doesn't showcase enough of his singular style, anyone curious about the dark old days of horror pulps doesn't need to go any further than this volume. You get exactly what you came for with this one -- and then some.

[Mauoijenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before Spider Man, Dr. Strange, Batman and Robin... there was Ditko's horror comics. Read these delightfully horrific comics before the "code" changed things in comic world. I enjoyed these very much. :)

[Dominick · Rating 4 out of 5]

There have been a lot of Ditko reprints recently, so I've seen a few of these stories in the last little while, but this is nevertheless an impressive collection. It appears to be (the introduction and contextualizing material could be more thorough) a comprehensive collection of Ditko's early work for Charlton, pre Comic Code. And it's impressive stuff, at least visually. The stories are for the most part standard-issue 1950s ephemera, mostly in the horror and SF genres, though there are occasional examples of crime and even humour; only a few are memorable in their own right (e.g. the one narrated from the point of view of a wedding dress). Most, however, feature some pretty impressive work from Ditko. his style is still in development here, but it's recognizably Ditko from the get-go, albeit a tad busier and more detailed than his work becomes later on. This is not necessarily a bad thing, just a different one. Ditko had an amazing facility for the grotesque and gruesome, more generally evident here than in most of his later work. Even the horror stuff he did for Warren is not, as a rule, as gleefully transgressive as the best stories here. Especially compelling is Ditko's facility with clearly-delineated characters. One is never in much doubt about the morality (or lack thereof) of these figures. Essential stuff for Ditko fans, and probably a worthwhile investment for any serious comics fan.

[Bob Fish · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an amazing series of collections !
Thank you Fanta !
Here an appreciation video :) :
https://youtu.be/mQPDxao44WU

[Robert Adam Gilmour · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although his early work is crudely drawn at times I think it's often as good as any of his later comics. "Stretching Things" has a level of work put into it that even a lot of his best work lacks and in the era contained by this book, there is a special kind of darkness and grotesquerie that he sadly never returned to.

Most of the stories are horror and I think they stand up very well next to any of the fifties horror comics. They aren't the best written (some of the writing is very poor) but they also aren't as irritatingly full of redundant text as the EC Comics were.
Some of my favorites are the twisted fairy tales, which I think had a really great sensibility that even other similar comics didn't touch as often as I would like. Early Ditko horror comics have something in common with those by artists like Graham Ingels and Rudy Palais, in that not only are horrible things happening, but the whole world seems a bit rotten and occasionally nightmarish.

This Ditko Archives series was planned longer than 6 volumes but I fear it may have been stopped. Hopefully just a hiatus. But I'm not sure any later volumes will be this good again, partially because his early approach was confined to this era.

[Rob McMonigal · Rating 5 out of 5]

So unbelievably good. Ditko was amazing. Even from these early comics, you can see the visual tricks and strong sense of dynamic action that he still uses to this day. Well worth grabbing, if you can find it in print.

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I never was a huge Steve Ditko fan growing up, but lately I've come to enjoy and appreciate his work. (His philosophy? Not so much.) Strange Suspense: The Steve Ditko Archives is the first of a multi-volume series, the fourth volume of which, Impossible Tales, should come out in May 2013.

The tales in Strange Suspense are all pre-code stories with writing of varying quality, ranging from clever Twilight Zone-ish tales to really bad morality tales that certainly have not stood the test of time. Although the bulk of these stories are horror, this volume also includes science fiction tales, Western yarns, and even a romance story. Again, some are better written than others, but this is Ditko's show and he does not disappoint, even in these early efforts. (It's not clear who wrote most of these stories; maybe Ditko.)

Strange Suspense is packed with stories and cover art that is by and large stellar, even if Ditko himself thinks otherwise. Ditko is quoted as saying of his early work, "a lot of it was pure junk" (p. 10). I disagree, although you can see a definite development of his skills at work here. The only problem I have with the book is the color alignment is off in many places. Maybe this was something that could not be corrected, but it's very distracting.

Be aware that Strange Suspense is out of print and hard to find at a reasonable price. My advice is to get it through interlibrary loan (as I did) to see if you want to make an investment in it or the whole series.

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sometimes tedious, there are some real gems and laugh-gassers in here. There's a place in my heart for Ditko without question!

[Guido · Rating 4 out of 5]

Terror cincuentoso de la mano de Ditko y sus cómplices en el crimen.

[Quentin Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was pleasantly surprised by this volume. I'm not a big fan of Golden Age comics other than EC, but this was better than average. There's still some of the weird, nonsensical plots that inhabit Golden Age comics, but there's good stuff as well, There was also a wide variety of stories. It's mostly horror, but there's also crime, action, science fiction, humor, western, and even romance.

While I will never agree with Frederic Wertham's idea that comics warp minds, there is some truly disturbing art and stories here with very graphic violence. Some of this stuff is gruesome even today, so you can just imagine how it went over in the 1950s. The most disturbing story to me involved some creepy mannequins that are really vampires and drain this man's blood. Then they disguise him as a mannequin so they can feed him on him again later. The store manager sees him and thinks he's just a mannequin, and decides this mannequin would work better headless. He proceeds to cut the "mannequin's" head off and burn it. Talk about a bad day! And the mannequins were truly disturbing in way you rarely see in modern comic art.

One of the stories was "Rumpelstiltskin", a horror retelling of the classic tale. You can very much see hints of the future Green Goblin in Ditko's Rumpelstiltskin.

Also, it was obvious even in the early days Ditko was a step ahead of most artists of the time.

Overall a good collection for Ditko fans, golden age horror fans, or really fans of comic art in general.

[Kevin · Rating 2 out of 5]

these early messterpieces by ditko are cheapie nightmares of the pre-code era, starring his zany and unconventional face-masking and some altogether amazing (but rare) monsters, but the effects fall way flat after reading them strung together, the repeating cycle of the 'gotcha' narrative becomes annoying even as you watch his narrative craft improve.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very early Ditko. You can witness his signature style come to life from beginning to end of the book. Far from his best work. Best left to die-hard fans and academic types.

[Fernando · Rating 3 out of 5]

Los primeros trabajos de un autor son siempre muy interesantes. Este primer volumen recupera el Ditko previo a Spiderman y también a la "Comic Code", la censura y el atavismo posterior mezclando historias de terror, de ciencia ficción y género negro. Durante ese recorrido por el lado oscuro de la humanidad montaremos en un tren de dibujo enérgico y anguloso, de rostros exagerados y mentes perversas o zombis atómicos del Far West. Está excelentemente editado aunque, en ocasiones, el respeto a los colores originales en las viñetas punteadas me ha dificultado la labor de lectura pero la culpa es de mis ojos, como si me salto un semáforo al conducir. No lo tenía en mi lista de lecturas inmediatas pero, al cogerlo en busca de una historia para pasar cinco minutos de espera telefónica por estar a mano, se quedó conmigo hasta el final y me duró apenas un par de días y su grosor es considerable. Creo que eso dice mucho.

Por otro lado... Es Ditko, por favor. Un clásico, una leyenda, un referente. Merece la pena conocerlo alejado de la cabalgata de mallas brillantes y superpoderes que le otorgaron la inmortalidad.

[Michael P. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Once you catch on that the endings of most twist-ending and comeuppance stories (not always the same thing) are predictable, a lot of the shine of old anthology comics becomes dull, at least to me. That is the problem with this collection, which I expect will please readers who do not think structurally. The stories in this collection did not impress me, but the renderings by Steve Ditko, not yet at his best, do. It was interesting to see him draw straight-up western, sci-fi, and crime stories, he did not do a lot of those later in his career, but he was, as you might expect, at his most imaginative in the horror and mystical stories. There are flashes of the brilliance that will be fully expressed in DR. STRANGE and some of his other later work, so I am glad I stuck with this book. It was instructive to see early Ditko, and how good his work was even at the beginning. Nevertheless, this art was at the service of banality, and so I did not find this book at all satisfying.

[Gonzalo Oyanedel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Haciendo sus primeras armas en el mundo de la historieta, Steve Ditko dibuja entre 1953 y 1954 varias historias autoconclusivas que destacan por la truculencia explotada en la etapa inmediatamente anterior al Comics Code Authority. Relatos criminales y horrorosos donde (curiosamente) rara vez el mal queda sin su correspondiente castigo mostrado por el artista con lujo de detalles; y aunque Ditko fue muy crítico de estos inicios en años posteriores, su oficio habla de esmero y talento como demostró una década después en Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, Mr A y otros. Para estudiosos y seguidores de su trabajo, una perla.

[Kris Shaw · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is another beautiful hardcover by Fantagraphics, who excel at doing comprehensive collections like this. This volume focuses primarily on Ditko's early Charlton stuff. I have been a huge Ditko fan ever since I discovered his pencils in Marvel Tales #163 in 1983, which reprinted Amazing Spider-Man #9 from 1963. The stories in this book are extremely text-laden and are best digested slowly, no more than 2 or 3 per sitting. Any more, and your eyes get heavy and you nod off. Either that, or the wonderfully toxic aroma of overseas ink knocks you out. Maybe they put chloroform in the ink to keep costs down...who knows?

[Ralph Carlson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Comic book stories illustrated by one of the greats.

[Tor Jonsson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Only loses a point for some dated native American and African stereotypes. Otherwise I love the vivid artwork, the strange tales full of monsters and magic, and of course the twists here and there.

[B · Rating 3 out of 5]

These are like O. Henry stories where everyone dies. Shows a real malevolence and vindictivenes. Interesting for historical purposes.

[Ribrarian Not]

Libro de historietas con ISBN propio. Edición española.

[Bill FromPA · Rating 4 out of 5]

      This Ditko anthology from Fantagraphics presents over 200 color pages of covers and complete stories from Steve Ditko’s earliest published comic book work, coinciding with the last years before the establishment of the Comics Code Authority. The comics are mainly horror with some science fiction and crime and single examples of romance, western, and satirical stories. Steve Ditko is the only named creator here, but in this collaborative medium, it’s likely that other hands were involved in the writing, lettering, coloring, and perhaps inking. In the years covered here, 1953 and 1954, one can see the artist developing a mastery of the medium and a distinctive style. The space the characters and objects occupy becomes more convincingly three dimensional, the appearance of the characters more consistent and recognizable across panels, and the composition of the drawings more dramatic, clarifying the actions portrayed.
      The colors are extreme – a pale woman’s face is left uncolored, the white of the page representing her pallor, the head of a man being choked to death is completely sky blue, faces are rendered bright yellow by lantern or candle light. In many cases the color serves purely expressive purposes with no contextual justification – a man going mad is shown in 3 successive panels of increasing close ups, his face colored completely green , then red, then yellow.
      Hints of some later achievements are here: the bullying frat boy in “Die Laughing” is a prototype of Flash Thompson and the demonic underworld portrayed in “Library of Horror” was to show up later as the realm of Nightmare in Doctor Strange. Ditko was to later create some genuinely scary monsters at Marvel; I recall that as a child I was fascinated and terrified by the splash page of “The Thing Behind the Wall”. Here, however, the monsters are mostly Halloween-mask type gargoyles and goblins, some bearing a family resemblance to their descendant, the Green Goblin; the hairy thing with glowing eyes reaching out from the cover of “This Magazine is Haunted” 17 is perhaps the most effective creature in this collection.
     The comics in this collection came along too late and were too obscure to play much of a part in the “scare” that Hajdu documents in The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America; the horror and crime titles produced by EC set the standard that provoked the furor and that Ditko here aspires to. Nevertheless, with the high body count and graphic violence in these stories, one can get a feel for the types of comics that contributed to the general feeling among “responsible citizens” that the entertainment being sold to the young was out of control. Only the final item in this collection, a story and cover from the Mad-influenced humor comic “From Here To Insanity” carries the Comics Code Authority seal. At this time tuberculosis would force Ditko to leave the field for over a year; his return in late 1955 when he would do his first work for Marvel , which would eventually lead to him becoming one of the most influential comic book artists of the 1960s.

[Chris Turek · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a complete joy to read. The plots and writing are mediocre to poor a fair amount of the time, though there are more than a few slick ones. If it were not for the EC books coming out at the same time, this writing would read as more than adequate for its time period.

The art is what you're after here. Even when clunky, you can see Ditko experimenting with balloons and other new ideas. Most of the work is well worth dissecting, and all of it is worth reading. It is undeniable that you are watching a genius rapidly maturing before your eyes.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

A perfect title for the contents. Still tame compared to today's comic's content (especially some underground comix), this collection features pre-comics code stories by the man who later co-created Spiderman with Stan Lee. Unlike similar horror comics that followed, such as Creepy and Eerie, not everything here had to have a crazy twist at the end (though many often do). Occasionally gruesome, often imaginative, always weird.

[Mike Gallagher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Steve Ditko is a master of the macabre. This volume of stories from early in his career are breathtaking in their strangeness and imagination. The writing is what you would expect, run of the mill stories of 'evil', but the art elevates them into frightening tales.
The volume itself is gorgeous. Thick archival paper, beautiful cover reproductions, and enough stories to make it worth the price. This is a treasure.

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection contains Ditko's pre-code, pre-Marvel horror and suspense (plus one humor) comics from Charlton and others. This is young, raw Ditko unleashing his feverish imagination and some fairly routine stories, drawing about 200 pages of nightmares in a year. They don't have the polish of his later work, but they have his singular, truly bizarre vision.

[Khairul Hezry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before Spider-Man, before Dr. Strange, before the Comics Code, Steve Ditko did horror. And the world is a lesser place now that he's not involved in comics anymore.

[Jacob Dougherty · Rating 5 out of 5]

AMAZING stories/artwork from before the Comics Code ruined horror comics. If you thought Steve Ditko only had Spider Man on his repertoire, you really need to check out this work...

[j_ay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Zany Ditko stories and covers from 1954 and 1955...worth a look, just for fun.