We recently had a request for Ditko, and this gory great tale fits nicely into our awful wedded life theme for a true grue February freak-out! So ease back and watch helplessly as the witches (and the rats) do their absolute worst... from the June 1954 issue of The Thing #14.
Is this the goriest Ditko story ever? I mean it's extremely tame by today's standards, but the bloody stumps were a surprise. I don't recall anything like that in his Warren contributions. It's a little funny, but at first glance in the last panel, I thought the cop was holding up her disembodied head!
ReplyDeleteMan I love Gerda. She's got a very Dr. Strange villain style (as obviously most of what we have for Strange does come straight from Ditko), is a revenge story where she actually has all the reason in the world for her revenge, and takes it all pretty calm at the end instead of raving like what usually happens.
ReplyDeleteI like Ditko's restraint here -- you see the rats eating but the gross part is blocked; when the arms and legs are eaten they are just torn fabric and clean white bones. You get the horror without the gore (yes, I love gore but this works too) and the setup with "water cools the wound" is great.
I love page 6; the whole thing is a beautiful piece of comic work, the dive framed by the moon, the processed underwater stuff with the trailing blood, the floating corpse. Don't like the coloring in panel 5, though, it's a little slapdash but other than that page 6 is a master class from a master story teller.
Great story with flawless, sometimes wild art that was Ditko's specialty.
ReplyDeleteI watched Dumbo recently. And the very first line of dialog--from the stork delivering all the babies to the zoo--I could tell right away it was Sterling Halloway. I love that guy. He was a swell actor, very sophisticated, endlessly capable of creating well-rounded fully-flashed characters, sometimes with just his voice. It's crazy he could do that with a voice unbelievably distinct. But I forget all about how he sounds seconds after he starts talking. It never sounds like I'm hearing Winnie the Pooh talk when Kaa opens his mouth, you know?
ReplyDeleteDitko's like that. Holy cow is he great at making brand new people and places each and every time he puts his brush to paper. But it's also always so unmistakably Ditko. This south Asian shock rocking sorceress surrounded by a handful of color-coded mini-devils is a good example. So new and so Ditko. I just love it.
The panel on page six where Warren settles into the coral like a starfish made out of drumsticks is one for the scrapbook.