If Steve Ditko agrees to draw a cover for your magazine or trade paper, you don’t give him suggestions when you receive his artwork, the man knows what he is doing:
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How I pissed off Steve Ditko
Written by Eric Reynolds | Filed under Steve Ditko, Fantagraphics history 8 May 2008 1:41 PM
With our forthcoming opus STRANGE & STRANGE: THE WORLD OF STEVE DITKO hitting in just a few weeks, I thought I would share a brief Steve Ditko story. About ten years ago we had the great fortune of publishing a new series by Mr. Ditko, STEVE DITKO’S STRANGE AVENGING TALES. This was incredibly exciting to me, having been a lifelong Ditko fan. Unfortunately, I did not get to interact much with Mr. Ditko. See, I do all of our promotion, and to say that Mr. Ditko is not big on promotion is like saying the Pope is not big on gay marriage. And, he preferred snail mail to phone. As such, I did not have many opportunities to interact with one of the greatest comic book artists of all-time. Except one.
At the time, the venerable fan publication COMICS BUYERS GUIDE was very excited about Mr. Ditko’s new series, and CBG Editor Maggie Thompson was kind enough to offer us the cover of an issue to promote the book, but asked if Mr. Ditko would provide an original cover for CBG. As I recall, Gary Groth ran the idea by Ditko and, somewhat surprisingly, he was game. So, I mailed Mr. Ditko all of the appropriate specifications for creating an original CBG cover. A week or so later, I received the following postcard in the mail:
two signed postcards from the master and the rest of the story here:
And now for some Ditko in color; a nice vintage eight page story in color by the master artist Steve Ditko:
“From All Our Darkrooms…”
Originally printed in Out Of This World #4, Charlton,1957
Script (?) Art: Steve Ditko
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Ditko’s Darkroom
One more lazy reprint post, if only to get “the Sensual Santa” off the top of the page. This one’s a tasty little Steve Ditko number from 1957, with some really nice black and white linework at play. This is one of my favorite periods of Ditko’s work, and I really dig the last couple of pages in particular. Enjoy!
Posted by Brian Hughes at 8:07 AM
http://againwiththecomics.blogspot.com/2008/12/ditkos-darkroom.html