I've been a huge fan of Steve Ditko ever since I started to recognize who the artists of my favorite comic books were (thanks, "Marvel Tales"). I spent last night perusing IDW's incredible "Ditko Unleashed", a museum catalog curated for presentation with the recent Palma de Mallorca Spain exhibition and while there have been 2 previous "Art of Ditko" retrospectives published in the past decade this one is by far my favorite of this bunch.
I've was dazzled by the section covering the early 1960s as I'd never seen so many "Amazing Spider-Man" originals. I marveled (pardon the pun) at his line's embodiment of elegant immediacy and utilitarian simplicity. And while his Marvel, Charlton, and DC work maintains those qualities in spades, it was the scans of the Warren era work from "Creepy" and "Eerie", where the artist employed inkwash to potent dramatic effect, that I was most amused and wowed by.
My favorite Ditko creations are The Question and The Creeper (drawn below), two truth-seekers who inhabit worlds of rampant corruption and distortion. DC has done right by The Creeper in his Ditko form and beyond, publishing a handsome hardcover of the classic Denny O'Neil scripted run and using him, albeit sparingly, where he's appropriate in contemporary DC stories (see last week's "Deathstroke" #11). The Question, on the other hand, has not been treated with the same sense of majesty befitting the character. Outside of the "Charlton Action Hero Archives", the Ditko stories have never been reprinted and the legendary Denny O'Neil/Denys Cowan run had a what I can only assume was a modestly printed Volume 1 TPB that remains out of print to this day and Volumes 2 though 6 that are disappearing but available at increasingly steep prices. But credit where it's due, they did just finally collect the 2004 Rick Veitch/Tommy Lee Edwards series and have shown a newfound dedication to their collected edition offerings as a whole in the past year.
This treatment of The Question and my desire to read the 1987 O'Neil/Cowan run in its entirety led me to an old-fashioned single issue hunt this past fall and has made for a incredible reading experience once I received these issues and every other Question book I owned back from my wonderful binder Herring & Robinson as the two beautiful editions you see at the bottom of this post.
Seeing how Denny O'Neil respectfully laid waste to the Ditko era Question's rigid Objectivist ethos and turned the character into a Zen Buddhist over the course of the series may be the finest second act for a superhero(?) comic book character I've ever seen and is every bit as revolutionary in its creative reestablishment and transformation of an existing property as Alan Moore's "Swamp Thing" or Frank Miller's "Batman" published roughly around the same time.
I'd tell you all to get out there and read it, alas, it takes much more work than a simple amazon search. But hey, as quickly as all of this comic book media is expanding maybe old Vic Sage will end up a movie or TV show eventually and if the continued success of "Arrow" can get Mike Grell's 1987 "Green Arrow" series published in full anything is possible...
Question Vol 1 & 2 Contents
"Mysterious Suspense" 1 (Millennium Edition), "The Question" (1987) 1-36
+ Annual 1-2, "The Question Quarterly" 1-5, "The Question + Azrael"
(1996), "The Question Returns" (1997), "Steel" (1997) 38, "Adventures In
The DC Universe" (1997) 8, "The Question" (2004) 1-6, "Justice League
Unlimited" (2005) 8 & 36, "The Question" (2010) 37, "Americomics
Special" (1983) 1, & "The Multiversity : Pax Americana"(2015)
Spinner-Rack #1 (My Comic Book) is available on Etsy and at Zanadu Comics, Arcane Comics, & the Fantagraphics Store & Gallery.
