Written by Steve Ditko, Michael Fleisher, Paul Levitz, et al.
Penciled by Steve DitkoDC collects Steve Ditko’s 1970s comics SHADE, THE CHANGING MAN #1-8 and STALKER #1-4, along with stories from STRANGE ADVENTURES, PLOP, HOUSE OF MYSTERY, HOUSE OF SECRETS, WEIRD WAR TALES, SECRETS OF HAUNTED HOUSE, TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED, TIME WARP, GHOSTS and MYSTERY IN SPACE!
Yes, yes, new DC this, Justice League that, on and on and on. With everyone else talking about the future, let’s have a look at the past, and one of the most influential and polarizing creators in the history of comics — after the jump, and on and on.
DC Comics has put out a great series of relatively affordable archival hardcovers over the past few years. It started with putting the entire Kirby Fourth World saga into four solid books — and then from there, beginning a survey of its weirdest corners. In collecting the entire Kirby oeuvre, we’ve been treated to not only lovingly crafted collections of OMAC and The Demon, but also genuinely unexpected volumes — how many people out there were screaming for a complete tome of Kirby’s The Losers? Once DC moved past Kirby, the choices got even stranger: The Atomic Knights, The Secret Society of Super-Villains, and, of course, the DC work of Steve Ditko.
That Steve Ditko deserves a series of books collecting his DC output is unquestionable, even if his Marvel work is his most famous (co-creator of Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, et cetera). Like or hate his Objectivist leanings (which alternate between deafeningly obvious and completely ignored in his stories) or his fussy anti-persona, Ditko remains one of the most influential and imaginative writer-artists of all time. The problem with collecting his DC work is that the qualities that most enhance the Ditko myth — his stubbornness and refusal to abandon his principles — also mean that there really isn’t much Ditko DC work to speak of.
The short biography: Steve Ditko quit Marvel over a disagreement with Stan Lee on whether or not Norman Osborn should secretly be the Green Goblin. From there, he went to small Connecticut publisher Charlton, where he revamped and outright created nearly all of their best-remembered characters: Captain Atom, the Ted Kord Blue Beetle, Nightshade, the Question. Charlton made up for its low pay with general creative freedom, which Ditko no doubt cherished. Still, in the second half of the 1960s, DC lured him away — unless I’m mistaken, largely through editor Dick Giordiano.
Thus began Ditko’s first DC stint, where he created two new properties that were advertised on the strength of being, well, Ditko’s. First was the Creeper, who already had his own hardcover volume a year or two ago. Next came Hawk and Dove (or, as they were originally billed, the Hawk and the Dove). Here’s where the reason that collecting DC’s Ditko material is a pain comes into play: Ditko was gone from DC in a year. There’s a Creeper hardcover because he managed to make it through six and a half issues of The Creeper (counting the character’s Showcase debut), plus a number of uninspired backup stories from his second DC stint in the 1970s. The Hawk and the Dove got their own Showcase debut and two Ditko issues before being handed off to Gil Kane and summarily canceled.
Ditko then went back to Charlton, where he published a few stories that served as two things: one, angry screeds direct from Ditko’s wounded pride, obliquely directed at DC; and two, the last gasp of Charlton’s original superhero universe before giving themselves over to reprints and horror comics, to which he often contributed.
For whatever reason, Ditko returned to DC in 1975, and the material of that second stint is what The Steve Ditko Omnibus, Volume One collects. Volume Two, meanwhile, will collect The Hawk and the Dove, among other things; chronology is clearly not an issue. Ditko’s first work under his new contract with DC was just to draw — four issues of Stalker, collected here. Paul Levitz wrote the stories, and the legend-among-legends Wallace Wood inked Ditko’s pencils. Billed as “The Man With the Stolen Soul,” Stalker was just that, a guy who got cheated out of his soul by a demonic figure and set out on a quest to get it back, using his sword, his wits, and his cool red eyes.
Continued belowI wish I had better things to say about Stalker, but its roots as an attempt to compete with Marvel’s Conan line are glaring to the point of distraction. (DC tried the same thing, with slightly more success, with David Michelinie and Ernie Chan’s Claw the Unconquered, only finally stumbling upon something truly worthy with Mike Grell’s Warlord.) Moreover, Steve Ditko isn’t the guy you want drawing your sword and sorcery comic (if he’s not writing it, anyway). Wood’s inking is remarkably faithful to Ditko’s pencils — Ditko probably wouldn’t even have lasted one issue otherwise — but this means that it retains all of Ditko’s limitations, too. When Ditko rendered the world of sorcery as abstracted lines and shapes in Doctor Strange, it was in contrast to the concrete, real world that Stephen Strange also walked in. In Stalker, his tendency to reduce environments to their most important and obvious details only makes this strange world seem like it’s made of cardboard — rather than a cinematic experience, we receive a school play.
Levitz also wrote better comics in his day. “Dawn at world’s end… where the sea spills over into eternity, and land fades softly into legend. Here the hot morning sun begins its journey… and few mortals end theirs — for fear they will lose their immortal soul. But this lonely wanderer has travelled here for a reason that puts him beyond such fears. He has already lost his soul… and he has come here to get it back!” That’s the first panel of Stalker #2 — things don’t get any less purple from there. Everyone involved in Stalker comes off as uninspired, despite some fun fights. The most interesting aspect of the series is how it seems to almost pointedly fly in the face of Ditko’s Randian beliefs. Rather than being a truly self-made man of righteous principles like Ditko’s apparent hero John Galt, Stalker receives his noteworthy talents from a demon as part of an evil bargain; in a Ditko-written story, he’d be a villain.
Showcased more prominently on the Omnibus‘s cover, and rightly so, is Ditko’s post-Stalker project: Shade, the Changing Man. Here, Ditko was teamed with a collaborator more his speed, and equally controversial — Michael Fleisher, whose mid-70s Spectre stories with Jim Aparo were decried for their gruesomeness in a time when heroes killing the villains was exceptionally rare. (Fleisher then wrote the novel Chasing Hairy, which caused Harlan Ellison to famously call him “insane” in an interview, which Fleisher sued over. He’s an anthropologist now.) The Marvel-style nature of the collaboration — Ditko plotted and drew, Fleisher scripted — helped Shade cement itself as probably the wildest, most overtly psychedelic thing Ditko ever put his pen to, perhaps even moreso than Doctor Strange.
While Shade doesn’t have quite as blatant a Randian overtone as The Creeper or The Hawk and the Dove, the flourishes are still there. Rac Shade, secret agent from another dimension called the Meta-Zone, has been framed for treason, and flees to Earth to clear his name. The Meta-Zone’s outpost on Earth covers up its activities by not covering them up at all — meanwhile, the public laughs it all off as nonsense. This dim view of cultural susceptibility colors a lot of Ditko’s prime work — the world is full of dupes, and only the true heroes are capable of seeing the truth (such as that A is A). Of course, in the long run, Shade is less about Objectivism and more about being totally goddamn demented. When left to his own world-building devices, Ditko’s reductive landscapes and pointedly stiff body language are exactly pitch-perfect — where Stalker was essentially generic fantasy, Shade is a world of mad science, bizarre technology (at one point Shade has a giant glass vase jammed onto his head — “the tranquilizer hood”), and the hero using his M-Vest to transform his visage into terrifying distortions of the human figure.
Continued belowThere’s other stuff in this book, too — short stories Ditko did for DC’s generally mediocre mid-70s horror line. There’s also an introduction from Jonathan Ross, which achieves the impressive feat of meandering across multiple pages while saying nothing more than “I really like Steve Ditko” (Steve Niles did the same thing in his introduction for The Creeper by Steve Ditko, but kept it mercifully brief). That’s actually a bit of a sticking point for me — without the historical and biographical context for these stories, the book comes off as “Shade, the Changing Man; also, some less cool, borderline pointless stuff,” no matter how much Ross enjoyed Stalker as a kid. Because Ditko’s DC output was so sparse and fitful — after Shade, he did a few Demon and Legion stories, and reunited with Levitz to create the Prince Gavyn version of Starman, and then nothing — collecting his work should be an almost scholarly exercise. That this book is sixty dollars only compounds that need for some form of added informational value, because I’m not going to lie: that’s a high price to pay for a book that’s half one good series, half misfires and paychecks.
Steve Ditko is a fascinating creator whose career deserves more illumination and discussion than “oh, that guy who quit Spider-Man and really, really liked Atlas Shrugged.” This book helps enable that process simply by existing, and I’m grateful for that. As an object of pleasure, though, it leaves me wanting — Ditko has better work than this that’s more readily fascinating on multiple levels. If DC was smart, it’d round up the Charlton superhero stories he did — now that’d be a sixty-dollar hardcover worth savoring.
Final Verdict: Shade — 8; Stalker — 5; Other Stuff — 5.5 / Mixed bag, but if you can get it at a discount…
