Number 1463: Ditko does his Thing

Halloween is tomorrow, so it looks like I’d better get a couple of bags of cheap candy for the neighborhood monsters. But...wait. I think I have a few of those miniature candy bars left over from a couple of years ago. Heh-heh. I try to discourage the kiddies from coming back to Casa Pappy, but as I’ve found out over the 38 years I’ve lived here, the neighborhood kids aren’t discouraged by mold on stale Snickers bars.

So...where was I? For Halloween I’m presenting four Steve Ditko stories from the infamous Charlton horror comic, The Thing. The stories, scanned from black line reprints published in a 1972-73 Australian comic, Doomsday, were uploaded by scanner Bladeshade9. Thank you Bladeshade9. I appreciate your efforts, and if you come on over to my house I’ll give you some Halloween candy. I’ll even scrape off the mold.

Unlike Pappy’s candy, these Ditko stories may be old, but never moldy or stale: “The Worm Turns” and “Day of Reckoning” were originally published in The Thing #15 (1954). “Rumpelstiltskin” and “The Evil Eye” are from #14.

Number 953


The Thing that Haunted Dick Ayers


I don't have to explain Dick Ayers to anyone, do I? Dick Ayers, who made his debut in comic books in 1948, who has worked for just about every comic book publisher in the business, and who has drawn almost every genre?

These three strips, all published by Charlton, are from, respectively, The Thing numbers 16 and 17, and This Magazine Is Haunted #20 (a title Charlton took over from Fawcett when Fawcett stopped publishing comics in 1953), all from 1954. The Thing #16 has been erroneously called a Seduction Of the Innocent title, when in fact it didn't show up in Fredric Wertham's famous anti-comics screed. The Thing #16 was published after SOTI was released. The gory panel at the top of this post was used to illustrate an article about the formation of the Comics Code in the November 8, 1954, issue of Time, and that may have led to some confusion with SOTI.

Ayers' horror comics work was excellent. In this pre-Code era Ayers usually worked with Ernie Bache as his assistant, and all three of these stories feature Ayers' own distinctive lettering. I have shown "Nothing He Couldn't Do" before, but as with other strips I've re-presented recently, these are new scans.

Number 331


The bloody eyeball


The Thing #16, a Charlton horror comic from late '54, is notorious for having some sort of gory violence in every story: a spear through a guy's throat, a guy stabbed in the chest, a spike through a guy's cheeks. Kind of a one-note comic book! This story, "The Mentalist," drawn by Bill Molno, has a spear thrown into a guy's eyeball. It's what Doc Wertham called "the injury to the eye motif." Whatever, this is one gruesome comic book.