Gorgo – Steve Ditko’s Truly Fantastic Giant
Ditko Monsters – Gorgo!, stories drawn by Steve Ditko, written by Joe Gill, designed and edited by Craig Yoe. YoeBooks!/IDW Publishing. 224 pages, $34.99 retail hardcover.
I realize I’m jeopardizing my Geekcred here, but when I was a kid I never was much of a monster movie fan. After I got past James Whale and Ishirô Honda, it was pretty much “if you’ve seen one slimy green tail, you’ve seen them all.” Of course, this was prior to the proliferation of porno.
My pathetically mature attitude kept me away from Marvel’s monster comics prior to Fantastic Four #1 (the first one). That changed with Fin Fang Foom and Strange Tales Annual #1, and it changed with Steve Ditko’s Amazing Adult Fantasy. (Memo to self: define “adult.”) It became impossible to pass up any Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko effort, be it superhero or monster. Hell, I even bought Ditko’s Hogan’s Heroes adaptations.
So, like many Baby Boomer Doctor Strange fans, I first encountered Gorgo in the 1966 Charlton reprint Fantastic Giants. The giant lizard shared the cover with a big ol’ ape named Konga, a bizarre caricature of the artist, and the legend “A Steve Ditko Special! 64 pages!”
I’ve waited almost fifty years for Fantastic Giants #2, and thanks to my pal Craig Yoe, it finally arrived in the form of a 224 hardcover, Ditko Monsters – Gorgo! He reprints a ton of Ditko Gorgo stories shot from the source material but painstakingly restored and fronted by a wonderful and highly informative introduction by the editor.
These stories are fantastic fun, which is exactly what they should be. Mystery Science Theater 3000 could riff the Gorgo movies, and they did, but these comics stories co-star such notables as John F. Kennedy, Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev. Communism be damned; evidently, Castro and Khrushchev had licensing agents.
If I have one complaint, and it’s a minor one, the book could have used a table of contents and an index. Bitch, bitch, bitch.
So, you might ask, what happened to Konga? Where’s Ditko Monsters – Konga!? That would be next month. One good turn deserves another.
MIke,
Ditko gets a percentage of these publications right? I certainly hope so. I don’t have any info about his economic status but he still maintains his midtown Manhattan office which cannot be bargain-priced.
My wife and I were in Manhattan last month to see Scarlett Johansson in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and Emelia Clarke in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”. (But the best thing we saw was “Old Jews Telling Jokes”).
Anyway, I found the building where he has his office. I won’t reveal how I knew where to look. It’s impressive yet nondescript. I took a picture of his door and posted this on my Facebook page:
In an unassuming office building in midtown near Times Square, Steve Ditko has an office. Ditko was the original artist and co-creator of Spider-Man. He takes no money for the movies, although his name is in the credits. He hasn’t drawn Spider-Man since 1966 yet his influence on the character is pervasive. He does not go to conventions. He does not sell his art. He does not grant interviews and he does not want to meet fans. He in in his 80s yet still maintains an office and regular working schedule. His name is on the building’s directory as Stephen Ditko: 715. I stood outside in the hall and took this photo. I was not intrusive or presumptuous enough to knock even though he is hiding in plain site.
Stephen Bissette has pursued this at his myrant blog, and states firmly that Ditko did not see a penny from the book. You’d think Yoe and/or IDW would at least throw in a freebie half-page advert directing readers to Ditko’s current comix via Snyder.
Yoe and Goldstein may be “honorable” people, but they are not very virtuous in the traditional sense. Whether Ditko wants any compensation or not is beside the point. Others are making money off of his work, others who had nothing to do with the contracts Ditko had with Charlton way back.
My understanding of the reason Ditko left Marvel, and of course this is from various articles that I’ve read, not first hand knowledge, is that he was upset about not receiving royalties from the almost-animated cartoons that appeared on Saturday mornings in the mid-sixties. If royalties were “part of the deal” he certainly would have received them so I presume they weren’t and he thought he deserved them nonetheless. Maybe his views have become more strident in the interim and he no longer believes that.
These stories are not in the public domain so Yoe and Goldstein must be paying someone for the reprint rights.