Black Magic #47 [v8n2] [1961]

Here's an interesting anomaly. As most people know, following a few scattered stories when he began working in comics, most of Ditko's work in comics from early 1954 to early 1966 was for Charlton and Marvel.  One of the exceptions to this was "The Black Fog", a single 6-page story late in the run of BLACK MAGIC.

Ditko had drawn three stories for the series early in his career. The series continued until #50 in 1961, with several long publication gaps along the way.  I'm almost certain this particular story was drawn well before its publication, but also does not date from the 1953 era of Ditko's previous BLACK MAGIC stories.  From the style I think I'd place it around 1957, which might be a clue to its origin, but I'd be curious what other people think.

Anyway, "The Black Fog" is a story about a man who is plagued by dreams of darkness, death and falling. He gets a pill from his friend that's supposed to keep him awake for 24 hours to stop the dreams, and if that sounds like a bad prescription to you, well, there's a good reason for that.

Whatever the story behind the story, it's a well drawn effort from Ditko, who does a good job with the nightmare sequences, with the smokey blackness enveloping the character and the robed figure of  Death.  There are a few stray panels that seem off, maybe re-drawn by someone else during whatever path saw this story published when it was, but that's a minor thing compared to the strengths of the story.

Black Magic #28[v4n4] [1954]

"Buried Alive" is one of the earliest Ditko stories, and really shows off his young talent. This is extraordinarily good work for anyone, much less someone who only had a couple of dozen published pages prior to this, still showing some of his main influences (a few clear bits out of the Eisner playbook here) but already distinctively Ditko. Click below for a bigger scan and look at all the little bits that he put in this page, like the small gargoyle on the house, the details in the trees, the shadow of a rat in the mausoleum, the coffin. It almost seems that Ditko's early training as an artist was learning what details not to include given the print quality and page rates (especially the print quality from his other publishers. The Prize books I've seen from the era do seem to be better printed than the Charlton or Marvel books of a few years later. I can't imagine a lot of this linework surviving in those books).

This is a solid 6-page story about a man, Carl, who has a family history of people being mistakenly presumed dead and waking up to find themselves buried alive. He's justifiably paranoid, so he rigs a coffin with an alarm that'll go off in his room, and asks his friend Abel to hang around in the house for a week if he dies so that he can be rescued it he's buried alive.

Abel agrees, but is worried about what this death obsession is doing to both Carl and Carl's sister Angela, and tries to get Angela to leave. Unfortunately she suddenly dies soon after and is placed in the alarm-rigged coffin. Carl refuses to sleep, sure that she'll wake up, but finally falls asleep and has a nightmare about the alarm sounding and being unable to go help her. He checks the coffin and finds out she was alive and struggling in the coffin before dying, leaving Abel feeling guilty as he had slipped Carl a sleeping pill that prevented him from waking up to help her.