Number 1071


Ditko x 4


These four stories drawn by Steve Ditko were originally published in Marvel Comics' Journey Into Mystery just after Thor became the main feature. Ditko's pages are masterpieces of composition. I loved these stories when they were published, and while the stories themselves are typical for Marvel Comics at the time, the artwork makes up for any shortcomings in the plots.

Did Ditko work "Marvel-style" on these stories, getting a springboard plot from Stan Lee, drawing them, then Lee would step in and write the dialogue? Or did Stan give him a script? I've never known how he and Lee worked on these five-page shorts during that period.

From Journey Into Mystery #84, 1962:





From Journey Into Mystery #85, 1962:






From Journey Into Mystery #86, 1962:





From Journey Into Mystery #92, 1963:

Number 1029


Leiber and Fox


Someone did me a big favor by posting online the backup stories from Marvel's Journey Into Mystery #83 to 104. I bought that comic regularly. Among the stories I remember were the five-pagers by Larry Leiber and Matt Fox.

I thought Leiber's art in those days was kind of rough, and combined with Fox's busy pen inking gave the stories their own oddball look. Like a lot of other fanboys in those days I dismissed it as not being up to the standards of Marvel artists like Kirby and Ditko. I didn't know that Leiber would find a career at Marvel, but at the time I also didn't know he was Stan Lee's brother. To his credit Leiber built a career in comics. He worked at it and got better. I also didn't know that Matt Fox's art was what we'd now call outsider art. He had a particular and peculiar vision. His Weird Tales artwork is considered classic, and here are three of my favorite covers by him:



Fox had also done interior drawings for Weird Tales, and comic book work in the early '50s for Stan Lee and a couple of other publishers.

Nowadays I find the Leiber/Fox team's artwork charming, if I may use that word. I like it and appreciate it more now than when I first saw it.

Here are four of the stories from that online source. "The Purple Planet" is from Journey Into Mystery #98, "The Unreal" from JIM #100, "The Enemies" from JIM #101, and "The Menace" from JIM #102.

The panel reproduced on the top of this page gave my high school buddy Ron and I a big laugh in 1963. We thought it looked like some kind of weird alien urination. It was the interpretation of immature minds, but hey, I still think that's what it looks like.

Number 477


Two cups of Joe


Like coffee? I love coffee, but after my recent surgery didn't have any for a week. I'm feeling well enough to be sitting here now with a cup of joe and two stories by Joe Sinnott.

"I Am A Robot" is from Journey Into Mystery #90, 1963, and "Shark Bait" is originally from 1954, scanned here from Marvel's 1976 Weird Wonder Tales #16.

I'm a fan of Joe Sinnott, and you can either click on his name in the links beneath this posting or enter his name in the search engine above to see the rest of the Joe Sinnott stories I've posted. I like Sinnott because he was like several others of my favorite Golden Age artists: He could draw anything. That he is best known now for his inking over Jack Kirby is OK, but as much as I liked that work I really liked his solid solo drawing style.

(SPOILER ALERT. Here's where I tell you what's wrong with the endings.)

The stories, though...eh. They both have fatal flaws in their plots. I don't expect other writers to observe Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, but to use half of the first law and ignore the second half is more designed for a snap ending than logic."A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm." In the shark story, it seems the criminals who fed jewels in smaller fish to the shark may have forgotten that like all critters, human and otherwise, sharks gotta excrete, so they were taking a big chance that by the time they got the shark their jewels weren't shark scat all over the bottom of the ocean.