Ditko’s Shorts

52499

ISBN: 978-1-63140-153-4 idwpublishing.com $24.99 US Visit YoeBooks.com

H O R T S

Edited by

CRAIG YOE & FESTER FACEPLANT

YOE & FACEPLANT

DITKO’S SHORTS

DITKO’S

Ditko’s Shorts is an incredibly fascinating compilation of one-, two- and three-page comics! Only a brilliant master could tell a dramatic, compelling tale in such compact form. You’ll marvel as Ditko walks this thrilling highwire act without a net! The many genres in this beautiful book show the artist’s great range. There are horror, fantasy, science fiction, western, and even humorous stories. Taken from rare comic books from a who’s who of publishers, all the comics are meticulously restored, with insightful introductions by punk-rocker and comics historian Fester Faceplant and Eisner Award-winner Craig Yoe. In short, this is sure to be a much loved and talked about Ditko treasure!

DITKO’S H O R T S

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Moment of Decision . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Triple Header! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Flymouth Car Show . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

What Happened? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Starlight Starbright . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Decision . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Will Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Menace of the Invisibles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Stranger in the House . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Man Who Crashed into Another Era! . . . . . . . . .

Free . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Cheapest Steak in Nome . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Shadow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Mañana . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Strange One . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Forbidden Planet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

A Remembered Friend . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Careless Man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Casy’s Kiss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

19 20 22 25 28 31 34 37 40 43 46 49 51 54 56 58 60 62 64

Information on Steve Ditko’s fascinating current comic books can be obtained by writing the publisher Robin Snyder, 3745 Canterbury Lane #81, Bellingham, WA 98225, or robinbrigit@comcast.net. Many of the stories reprinted from Charlton comics may have been written by Joe Gill.

Check out our Ditko videos on The Yoe Tube at YouTube.com/TheYoeTube and Vimeo.com/TheYoeTube If you like this book, please blog; post on Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Amazon, and Goodreads; podcast and tweet about it!

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Cover pattern artwork by Art Fuentes. Thank you, Art!

Promotional video by Jason Willis. Thank you, Jason!

Deep thanks to Michael Ambrose, Giovanna Anzaldi, Mark Lerer, Rich Meyer, Mike Csotd Peterson, Donald Pitchford, Chris-Ryall, Peter Sanderson, Tom Stein, Steven Thompson, Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr. A very special thank you to the talented artist Marty Hirchak.

CONTENTS Such a Strange Case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Off Limits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Pursued . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 Automata Ultima . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 The Rulers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 The Dark Continent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 The Lost Worlds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 Why He Survived! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 The Size Secret . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 Moon-Run! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 You’ll Know No Rest! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 It Keeps on Happening . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Are You a Scorpio? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 The Vengeance of the Canoes . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 Potion of Youth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 The U.F.O.’s that Aren’t There . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 The Guardian! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 Are Zombies Real? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Lost Mine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108

Yoe Books: Craig Yoe & Clizia Gussoni, Chief Executive Officers and Creative Directors • Sandy Schechter, VP of Research • Media Associates: Steve Bennett, David Burd, Steven Thompson, and Doug Wheeler.

IDW Publishing: Ted Adams, CEO & Publisher • Greg Goldstein, President & COO • Robbie Robbins, EVP/Sr. Graphic Artist • Chris Ryall, Chief Creative Officer/Editor-in-Chief • Matthew Ruzicka, CPA, Chief Financial Officer • Alan Payne, VP of Sales • Dirk Wood, VP of Marketing • Lorelei Bunjes, VP of Digital Services.

ISBN: 978-1-63140-153-4 17 16 15 14 1 2 3 4 November 2014. First printing. Ditko’s Shorts is © 2014 Gussoni-Yoe Studio, Inc. All Rights Reserved, including the digital remastering of the material not held by copyright owners. Yoe Books is a trademark of Gussoni-Yoe Studio, Inc. Yoe is a registered trademark of Gussoni-Yoe Studio, Inc. IDW Publishing, a division of Idea and Design Works, LLC. Editorial offices: 5080 Santa Fe Street, San Diego, CA 92109. Any similarities to persons living or dead are purely coincidental. With the exception of artwork used for review purposes, none of the contents of this publication may be reprinted without the permission of Idea and Design Works, LLC. Printed in Korea.

IDW Publishing does not read or accept unsolicited submissions of ideas, stories, or artwork.

BRIEFLY STATED Steve Ditko. His very name is short, concise, and compact. Three little syllables, and yet the laconic nature of those same syllables belies the ineffable magnitude of the man’s body of work, and indeed what constitutes the man himself.

With the mere mention of his name, almost any comics fan can get lost in the vastness of his art. The psychotropic infinities of other dimensions, the claustrophobic vegetation in his jungles, the forbidding crags of his mountains and peaks, the barren and unending otherworldly wastelands of his planets and moons—all these and more does the mind’s eye conjure when one contemplates Ditko.

The fact that he is a man who can, and has, written more dialogue for a single page than many writers put into several issues worth of stories is a testament to his profusion of ideas, in that he can also show great restraint with pencil and ink on the page.

Today’s comics often will devote an entire issue to a fight sequence. Ditko can begin and end a battle with but a single panel. He can put whole chapters in between panels and never lose the flow of the story because he knows it’s not always what you see, but how you see it. And he is a master of seamlessly telling the story from panel to panel, page to page, with his inscrutable eye, knowing just where to excise dispensable matters and show only what propels the tale forward. He allows us, the readers, to fill in the blanks while he draws us to the ultimate climax and conclusion of the narrative.

This, then, is why Ditko is so well suited to the stories we present to you here. His genius is on display for these one-, two-, and three-page “shorts.” While many of his contemporaries may have shrugged off these same pages as nothing more than filler and turned in rushed, sloppy work, Ditko shows both grace and class by treating each of them as a work of art and not just a paycheck. The aplomb with which he puts so much into such limited space is a sheer delight. Perhaps some of these were indeed pages written simply to fill a book that had fallen short of its page count, but they are all interesting each in their own right, and made even more so by Ditko. He never cheated his readers by taking an easy way out, and we are all luckier people for that.

Many of these stories are only now seeing the light again for the first time since they were published between 35 to 50 years ago. There are treasures here. Small, beautiful treasures from one towering, giant pen.

— Fester Faceplant Fester Faceplant is the founder of the Charlton Arrow, owner/operator of The Charlton Comics Reading Library, an aging punk rocker, lover of cheese, starving musician and writer, and drunken sot.

A SHORT INTRODUCTION I see dinosaurs I see rocket ports I see Ditko’s comic book shorts In most cases, the purpose probably was to create disposable space. At the last moment, the comic book publishers could plug in an ad page or two to foist cheap body-building devices, X-Ray Specs, Sea Monkeys, and other such flimflam on wide-eyed, snot-nosed, gullible kids.

The form that followed the function was a throw-away comic story not worth the wood pulp it was printed on—except in the hands of a master cartoonist.

The famous quote, “I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have the time,” has been attributed to a bevy of different writers and thinker-uppers of note, including Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw, Voltaire, Blaise Pascal, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Winston Churchill, Pliny the Younger, Cato, Cicero, Benjamin Franklin, and Bill Clinton, but, unfortunately, listing all those many attributions very much violates the spirit of this book because it makes this one hell of a long sentence.

But the point is well taken.

Ditko took the time.

It’s easier to tell a good yarn if you have the space to plot, characterize, and work on effective timing and pacing. The One-, Two-, Three-Page Wham, Bam, It’s A Comic, Ma’am School of Comics Creating is difficult.

Our cartoonist pulls it off.

Thank goodness for short comics! They may be the perfect length just as the three minute 45-record was the hallmark of the rock ‘n’ roll record. Endless superhero stories that meander for a mind-numbing number of issues and graphic novels thick as Manhattan phone books are mere short-order comics wannabes! Except that they aren’t mere. I KID! We all love a good comic doorstop—if it’s done as entertainingly well as Ditko’s shorts.

Ditko’s less is as good as Alan Moore!

It’s tempting, when reading an anthology, to skip over most short comics as not worth the time. When gathered together as a force, the mini-comics here can’t be ignored.

Ditko’s art compels you!

Adopting the constraint that the comics for this book had to be three pages or under in length, we’ve mined these rare nuggets from three different publishers, from over a 22 year span, 1954 to 1976. The genres represented here are fantasy, sci-fi, humor, and even the once-popular comic book breed, horse stories.

Reader, you’ll enjoy seeing Ditko’s shorts.

I’m sure these diminutive strips will entertain you to the max.

To say the least.

—Craig Yoe

Space Adventures #11, May/June 1954.

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This Mag is Haunted #17, May 1954.

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