Categories
Discussion & Analysis

Steve Ditko 1927-2018

Steve Ditko would’ve been 91 today.

There are a number of great articles on Steve Ditko that I’ve been meaning to archive in some useful way. What better time than now.

· The Avenging Page (In Excelsis Ditko) by Joe McCulloch (My personal favorite essay on Ditko by one of comics’ best writers.)

· Steve Ditko Doesn’t Stop by Joe McCulloch (Excellent overview of Ditko’s later career in small publishing.)

· Steve Ditko’s Cartooning: Abstraction/Word vs. Picture/Motion by Ken Parille (An examination of some of Ditko’s unique and oft-overlooked artistic traits.)

· Comic Art As Fine Art from The Great American Novel (Thorough “compare/contrast” between Ditko’s Fantastic Four and John Byrne’s.)

Showcases On Specific Works 
The Creeper
Ghostly Tales
Stalker
ROM 1
ROM 2

Recently, I was asked a few questions in regards to Steve Ditko over at ComicBook.com and The Double Page Spread Podcast.

Anyone who knows me even in passing knows the impact Steve Ditko made in my life. It’s been four months since he died, and it’s still an odd thing to process.

I hope Steve Ditko was content in the end. He certainly worked hard for it.

DITKO FOREVER

Categories
"COPRA" Comics I Make

C O P R A # 17


COVER.17

I can safely say that COPRA #17 has it all: love & violence, impending doom & cushy nostalgia, blood drips & beards, blockheads & weirdos, struggles & triumphs, lunchtime & pushups:

03

04

05

06

Locked within a tight grid of pan dimensional deviance and suppression, this is a boiling point love letter to Steve Ditko. And like any unrequited love worth a damn, it’s an affair that ends in heartbreak and confusion. Well, you gotta read it to see what I mean.  Do not let me stop you: GET COPRA SEVENTEEN.

RAX

Categories
Discussion & Analysis

Fight Fight Fight

I’ve been drawing fight scenes more than usual recently – what action comic is complete without a few of them? – which got me thinking about some of my favorite comic book brawls. There are hundreds of superhero fights that I can recall quicker than people’s birthdays or important passwords and forgive me if I’m wrong, but I bet your memory’s probably  identical to mine. From the banal and obligatory to the inspired and well crafted, we’ve all seen a wide range of slugfests.

SD

Is it the choreography in service of mayhem? Is it an appreciation for impossible anatomy? Is it that smattering of blood on the corner of a mouth?  Is it not worth examining at all? Too late!

Kieron Dwyer 1

Captain America #345 by Mark Gruendwald, Kieron Dwyer and Al Milgrom. I have a soft spot for the Gruenwald-era Captain America. The Ron Lim drawn issues are great, especially Streets of Poison where Cap absorbs a warehouse worth of cocaine & gives Daredevil a beatdown, but the Dwyer issues are in a class by themselves (he had been drawing comics for about a year by the time this issue came out).

Kieron Dwyer 2

This Code-approved scene is half shoot out, half hands-on massacre. It was a 75 cent instant classic.

.

Legion of Super-Heroes #4 by Keith Giffen, Tom & Mary Bierbaum and Al Gordon. This is about as abstract as a cosmic battle is ever going to be in a DC comic, but what makes it awesome is that it’s a fight between Mon-El (red, caped) and the Time Trapper (see: all that sand), meaning he’s fighting basically the concept of time itself (as well as the Superman editorial offices of ’90).

Keith Giffen

I used to dislike the impenetrability of these Legion comics. These days, I love it, especially if they were drawn by Giffen.

.

Justice League Europe #11 by William Messner -Loebs and Bart Sears (plotted by Giffen same month as the Legion issue up there… wow!). This fight’s pretty brief, which should appease all those whiners who begin their sentences with “In real life, a fight wouldn’t last as long as–“.

In real life!

Bart Sears

Anyway, you wanna talk about brief? How about “One punch!” (If you got that reference, congratulations/shame on you).

.

Orion #5 by Walter Simonson. This is an All-Fight issue between father and son, Orion and Darkseid. It’s an incredibly paced fight, this one. I’ll say it here: Orion contains many instances of innovative action-storytelling. It’s some of Simonson’s best work, and his love for the material only strengthens it. Toward the end of the run it gets a little wonky (when he has to draw regular people eating hot dogs or walking), but the majority of this run is page for page forward-looking superhero comics.

Simonson

No banter, plenty of speed lines. Is speed line porn a thing?

.

Amazing Spider-Man #4 by Stan Lee and God Himself. Not only is this one of the best fights ever, it’s the quintessential Spider-Man story. It has all the staples: teen angst, young romance, awesome villain, humiliation during battle, worried aunt, hateful boss, public ridicule, wisecracks, isolation. You really don’t need to go further than this one issue; it goes off the rails after this.

Ditko page

Okay. Steve Ditko. There, I said it.

.

The Uncanny X-men #173 by Chris Claremont, Paul Smith and Bob Wiacek. Ah, the Smith run on the X-men, a highlight for many X-fans. His trajectory is interesting because, not unlike Dwyer, it was during Smith’s first year when he landed the gig that defined his career. He rocketed into fandom heights almost immediately, rode the X-wave for a year, then came close to burning out. This issue may be the apex of that initial run, but definitely the one that personally influenced me.

Paul Smith 1

I recently paid homage to this widescreen battle in a recent issue of Copra (the one where they also go to Tokyo), and although Smith was carrying over the style set forth by Frank Miller (in the Wolverine mini-series tied to this issue), it was this story that made an impression on me.

Paul Smith 2

Speaking of things I’ve recently tried to pull off, how about battle royal match-type of fights? I can’t think of any standout examples with a huge cast of characters (well, this milestone goes without saying). You know what? I don’t even wanna know. Somebody’s bound to say Secret Wars and I’m not ready to deal with their warped sense of history or taste.
BS

 

Isn’t it weird when an artist actaully knows some martial arts and then draws a step-by-step of what he knows but passes it off as a narrative? The O’Neil/Cowan Question had a lot of that. So did Mike Baron comics.  I get trying to be faithful to the art form of self defense, but sometimes I just want a clumsy pair of fists to operatically connect with someone’s cheekbone.

.

“Honorable Mention” and “Runner Up” sounds wrong, so I’ll sidestep my personal Top Fight list to admit that, undeniably, the master of the superhero fight scene is Jack Kirby (oh, yes he is). Frank Miller is up there, especially when he’s the one drawing it (don’t deny it, you). Erik Larsen has cornered the market on big hands that punch things (tell me I’m wrong). Frank Quietly’s Authority had epically drawn moments of violence (okay, don’t tell me). Recently, James Harren has produced some of the best tighten-up-release carnage I’ve seen since Berserk (stop it).

And hey, you know I’m talking exclusively about American mainstream comics, right? I know all about some of the very best outside of that: Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy. Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit. The comics of Wong Yuk-long. These are all works of beauty, just like the list I laid out. Every knuckle, every grimace, every drop of blood, all modest examples as to why comic book fighting is so present, so central to the landscape. It represents what comics are so impossibly good at being, all in one shot: awkward and graceful and ridiculous.

KD

–Fiffe

Categories
Art & Illustration

Doctor Strange & An Interview


Here’s a recent Doctor Strange drawing I made specifically for a brand spanking new blog: the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe Reduxe Edition and it’s dedicated to the title of the same name. From the crew that brought us Relaunched, a diverse bunch of cartoonists aim to present their versions of the original profiles. Mark Gruenwald would be proud.

Doctor Stange was created and designed by Steve Ditko and the original drawing that mine was loosely based off of was pencilled by Paul Smith.

In other news, I was recently interviewed by Martyn Pedler over at Booklsut in regards to my bootleg/love letter/fan fic Suicide Squad comic [see previous post for details]. It’s a brief piece, underpinned by Pedler’s own frustrations with ethical negotiation when reading modern mainstream comics. Read it, it’s interesting.

Oh, yeah, and here’s  a Squad related sketch I did for Zack Smith at this past Heroes Con.

–Fiffe

 

Categories
Discussion & Analysis

One Artist Anthology Comics

My latest love letter, made up of historical and critical kisses, is One Artist Anthology Comics over at The Comics Journal. I trace the trend from Crumb to Ditko, and focus on the strongest of the contenders such as Clowes, Ware, and the Hernandez Bros. I also examine the glut in the mid 90s, the fallout from a beat up industry, the [not as thin as I thought] herd of modern examples and why cartoonists can greatly benefit from such a specific publishing pattern. Check out why the one-man anthology is the format of choice around here.

 

Categories
Art & Illustration Retrospectives - Master Post

Steve Ditko’s Birthday…

…was yesterday, but I made him a card anyway. He turned 81 years old.

You may recognize the name Ditko as the creator of many of your favorite comic characters such as… ah, the names escape me… Spider-something or other. Anyway, he’s a comics legend, an innovator, and he’s still making comics. I have cobbled a few of my personal favorite Ditko pieces, some not seen too often and others never to be reprinted elsewhere.

Like Ditko often suggests, there is black and then there is white and there is no in between.