Get Smart #3 [1966]

This is the second of Ditko's two issues of the Dell comic book based on the TV series GET SMART.  He also did two issues of HOGAN'S HEROES at the same time, as well an issue of one of Dell's original features, NUKLA, all with Sal Trapani on the inks.

After a photo cover, the inside cover features a 1-page black and white story "The Raid", which is a nice little vignette capturing the mood of the series, with some nice humour in the artwork, and as usual the uncoloured artwork on slick paper stock used for the covers is much more pleasing to the eye than the crudely coloured interiors on newsprint.

The rest of the issue is the 31-page "The Nuclear Gumball Caper", with Agents 86 and 99 sent by the Chief to find a small nuclear device created by KAOS.  I think the story is a bit of an improvement over the previous issue, more in keeping with the flavour of the show, but the art is a bit weaker. The amount of Ditko that comes through varies pretty wildly, with very little in some of the faces, but when it comes through in the body language it's really entertaining.

Plus that Ditko bird is pretty cool.

Like the previous issue, I can't really recommend it unless you've exhausted most of the rest of the Ditko you want to read, but if you find an affordable copy it's worth a look.

Saban's Mighty Morphin Power Rangers #4 [1996]

Back in the darkest days of the 1990s, there was an inexplicably popular kids TV show called MIGHTY MORPHIN POWER RANGERS. Marvel did some comics based on the series, and Ditko drew [at least] four 10-page stories for them, among his last half-dozen or so stories he did for Marvel.

The 10-page story in this issue is "Revenge Of The Nerd", with inks by Tom Palmer and story by Tom Daning. The nerdy and pimply teenager with the unfortunately named Myron Zitzner is teased and bullied in school, only to be rescued by the some of the Power Rangers in their civilian identities.  Unfortunately his bitterness makes him unable to appreciate the help.  The Rangers then have to take care of an attack from a giant monster, as they often do, while the mastermind behind all those attacks kidnaps Myron and transforms him into a giant pimple which shoots out acid and attacks the Rangers.  They have to transform into other forms (no doubt more toys to sell to kids) to defeat him, with the rather unfortunate image of squeezing his mutant pimple form until he pops out, having learned his lesson, and later using his brains to win the admiration of some cute girls.

So, no surprise, not that good a story, although obviously I wasn't really the target audience (other than to the extent that "Ditko fan" was the target, and at that Ditko fans probably outnumber Power Rangers fans now, at least until the nostalgia wave hits them) either when it came out or now.  Ditko's art is solid, though Tom Palmer's inking is a bit heavy.

Chuck Norris #1 [1987]

For some reason Ruby-Spears decided the world needed a Chuck Norris cartoon back in the mid-1980s, and thus we got CHUCK NORRIS: KARATE KOMMANDOS (presumably because you can't trademark "Commandos"). Then Marvel decided to jump on the bandwagon, and a comic book version of the show was produced for their Star line, and Steve Ditko pencilled the first three issues.

And maybe they had something, because I never noticed before, but my copy of #1 is listed as "Second Printing" in the indicia. Who knew? I'm not sure where this is in the epic arc of Norris' career, whether he was actually hip at the time, or if he was ironically hip. Or has his hipness always been ironic?

Anyway, this issue has the 22-page "The Super Cruiser", and the title doesn't refer to Norris but to a high-tech anti-terrorism vehicle that Norris and his "Kommandos" have developed for the government, which is at the local school where Chuck's young friend Too Much is a student. So we get an attack by ninjas of the Cult of the Klaw (I'm surprised they didn't go with "Kult"), and the Kommandos stage a rescue, and we learn important lessons about doing your homework and how good some book called "The Children's Story" is. And if Chuck Norris recommends a book, you know it must be... something.

Pretty much for the Ditko completist only, although for what it is the art isn't bad, and the big fight scene, with lots of silent panels, isn't too shabby.  Jo Duffy writes and Art Nichols inks.

Battlemania #5 [1992]

This is the final issue of Valiant's licensed WWF wrestling comic, Ditko having drawn one of the two stories for every issue. In this case, "Justice For All" is a 20-page story featuring Sid Justice, a good-natured farm-boy type, going up against the vile Jake "The Snake" Roberts. Laura Hitchcock writes and Charles Barnett III inks.

The story opens with Justice settling down for some milk and catching up on the Arkansas Farm Journal. His apartment is pretty funny in the opening page, with a butter churn, some gardening equipment, a basket of vegetables, a bookcase with a gaslamp, what appears to be a lot of moonshine, various models of farm equipment and animals, some family photos and for some reason a TARDIS model (okay, a police box, but I don't think they actually make models of those that aren't tied-in to Doctor Who, and I don't think they have them in rural Arkansas). Anyway, his housekeeper opens a package, which turns out to be a cobra, which Justice makes short work of. Since his housekeeper broke her glasses in the commotion, and refuses to accept a handout from Justice to pay for them, Justice goes to get the money from the man logically responsible, Jake "The Snake" Roberts.

The resulting quest for remuneration takes Justice to battles with The Snake at the gym, a rooftop (with, hey, a water-tower!), the streets and finally the snakehouse at the zoo before justice finally prevails.

This is surprisingly good, maybe the best of Ditko's BATTLEMANIA stories. The faces lack a certain Ditko-ness, presumably to keep them on-model to the actual wrestlers, but the body language is all there, the story structure follows the classic Marvel formula that Ditko had a hand in defining, "The Snake" is very much shown as a Ditko villain in the style of Kraven, and the fights in the various locales are very well done, especially the rooftop and the zoo. Not a masterpiece by any means, but you could do far worse in looking to sample Ditko's late-period for-hire work.

Battlemania #4 [1991]

A short-lived part of Valiant's initial launch was its marketing relationship with the World Wrestling Federation, including this series of magazines, which seems to largely exist as a vehicle for the 12-page catalog of schlock in the middle. Surrounding that are two long stories, the first of which is the 20-page "Pain Or Peace", pencilled by Ditko, inked by Don Perlin and written by Jim Shooter.

I never was much of a wrestling fan, but picked up far more than I cared to about it through hanging around with people who were. I'm not quite clear from this story if the set-up is that the "characters" are real and this is their life outside the ring or if it casts the characters in other roles. In this story the Big Boss Man (a police officer), is waiting in a van using some major monitoring equipment on a house newly bought by the Undertaker and his manager Paul Bearer, convinced they're up to no good. He's joined by a kid delivering pizza, and they monitor as Mrs. Goodheart enters the house as part of the welcome wagon. What follows are a bunch of suspicious events and comments that are always on the edge of threats to Mrs. Goodheart or hints of cannibalism, but not quite enough to meet the Big Boss Man's standard of probable cause. Finally, of course, it goes too far (and I'm sure the badgering of the pizza delivery boy questioning his manhood didn't help), and there's a brief fight (which is a nice throwback to classic Ditko fight choreography), which leads to the Big Boss Man crashing a funeral. Apparently his high tech surveillance gear missed the arrival of a funeral procession. On the other hand, the ending seems to confirm that there is cannibalism going on.

Yeah, this wasn't that good. The inking is kind of heavy, but there are a few solid bits of Ditko when you get away from the faces of the wrestlers.

Anyone know if any of the other Ditko drawn WWF stories are worth getting?

This story and others also appeared as part of some one-shot specials, like this.

Get Smart #2 [1966]

Ditko drew five comic books for Dell right after his departure from Marvel (two each of GET SMART and HOGAN'S HEROES and one of NUKLA), most likely arranged through assignments from Sal Trapani, who inked those books, as discussed by Mark Evanier here and here, along with partially inked sample images that may have a touch of Ditko's then studio-mate Eric Stanton as well.

Dell's comics at the time were pretty generous with the page count, with very few ads (the backcover and a half-page interior), so even with the photo cover you get 34 pages of Ditko artwork in here. The interior front and back covers are a nice treat, both with single page black and white stories that are the highlights of the book, "Self Defeat" and "Hot Wire", which look really nice on the better printed glossy paper stock, and are nice cute gags that are in keeping with the show (for the record, I was a big fan of the show as a kid, though it's been over a decade since I've seen it).

The interior story is one long 32-page adventure divided into three chapters, "The Dumb Dummy" (12-pages), "Dungeon Of Doom" (11-pages) and "Double Trouble" (9-pages). It really doesn't make a lot of sense, but involves a Kaos agent creating robot doubles of people and some such. Doesn't really capture the show at all, and has some really odd bits (for some reason the Chief is called Control half the time, which I don't recall from the show).

The art is pretty snappy, though. Not quite up to most of the other stuff Ditko was up to in 1966, but getting the job done with some nice flourishes (a few nice double-takes and weird expressions, and of course those Ditko fingers). The likenesses aren't too great, with Maxwell Smart being almost unrecognizable except for a few panels, and the Chief way off. Agent 99 was closer to model, and at least generally consistent.

Can't really recommend this with so many other pure Ditko things out there, but if you ever run out of those you might want to pick this up. Has anyone read Ditko's HOGAN'S HEROES issues? Worth a look?

Phantom 2040 #1 [1995]

Ditko pencilled all four issues of this 1995 mini-series, based on an animated cartoon of the era that took Lee Falk's comic strip character into a near-future science fiction world. Which, yeah, is kind of an odd direction to take a traditionally jungle based character, but that's animation for you.

"Generation Unto Generation" is a 20-page story presenting the first part of the origin of the new Phantom (not sure if it's directly based on an episode of the cartoon). Young Kit Walker of Metropia is approached by Guran, a friend of his father, who vanished 16 years earlier and, as he finds out, was the previous Phantom, with a brief rundown of the classic Phantom history. Kit takes on the identity of the Phantom just as an old enemy of his father plans an attack on the city involving robots, hypnosis and other things. Good enough story, and Ditko does a good job with the action bits. The brief bit of him drawing the Phantom history makes me wish he was doing a historical Phantom series.

The inking is by Bill Reinhold, who does a really good job. As I recall, he mentioned back in an issue of DITKOMANIA that he made an effort to add elements of the style of some of Ditko's classic work to the looser style Ditko used when pencilling work for others. It's one of my favourite of the later examples of someone else inking Ditko, and overall this series is probably my favourite of Ditko's mainstream work in the 1990s.

The issue also features a two-page centerspread poster of the character, pencilled by Ditko and inked by John Romita, I think the only time that combination has ever been seen. As with most things inked by Romita it ends up looking more like Romita with a light flavour of the penciller, but still nice to see.