Craig Yoe

Created in 1934 as a recruiting device to make the US Navy appear attractive to adventure minded young men, Don Winslow appeared in newspaper strips, books, and even in a couple of movie serials as well as in comics. This collection presents a selection from his Fawcett Comics run between 1943 and 1948 at the height of his popularity. There are very much a product of their time and come across as repetitive, jingoistic, and embarrassingly sexist and racist from today’s perspective. Yet there is a certain charm to them. Winslow had hung up his cap by the mid-1950s and that’s where he probably belongs, making this an historical insight into a different era of heroes… (mais)

It is not generally known that famous comic book artist Steve Ditko has a fine pair of legs and likes to show them off by eschewing long trousers in favour of a variety of shorts. It is not generally known because it isn’t true. ‘Ditko’s Shorts’ is not a fashion book with one model showing off his kit. Instead, it is the latest Ditksploitation book in which ancient, not very good comic book stories are packaged into an expensive luxury format to convince you that they are somehow special. This is not a cynical trick of hard-nosed publishers, I think, but a labour of love by hardcore fans who think you should like Ditko as much as they do.

To be fair, there are ninety pages of graphic storytelling here and the price, given the quality of the paper, hardcovers and so forth is not too steep. $24.99 is what you would pay for a hardback novel and, if you’re a real fan of Steve Ditko’s art and buy this as an art book, you won’t be too disappointed. There are thirty-eight stories and, in one sense, you get quantity but they are all one, two or three pages so in another sense, you don’t. In the good old days of the fifties, many comics were anthologies of shorter stories and, if one book needed a couple of pages to fill it up, the writers had to dream up this kind of thing. Inevitably, these are twist-in- the- tail tales so any description of them ruins them. Some are quite clever and even amusing if you are young. The writers are not generally credited but, as these are all from Charlton comics, a few must be by Joe Gill.

Among the best stuff is the humour, surprisingly, two shorts of the type done by ‘Mad’ magazine, which was much copied in its day. ‘Car Show’ spoofs the eager salesman of vehicles. ‘Starlight, Starbright’ mocks the biographies of rags to riches singers. The other content is a mix of Science Fiction, crime, horror and westerns. Science Fiction lends itself to these kinds of trick endings because you can conceal the true nature of the aliens until the last panel where they turn out to be invisible or the size of a dust mote or whatever.

Really, it’s an art book for collectors of Ditko’s drawings. That’s the market it’s aimed at and that’s who will buy it. Ditko is a good enough artist but his Charlton work had to be turned out quickly and it shows in the quality. It is a truth almost universally acknowledged that Steve did his best work in the early sixties at Marvel Comics. His other stuff is okay but pales by comparison.

Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/… (mais)