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.
As we finally get back to speed here, let us take one more quick look at this year’s New York Comic-Con, from friends of ComicMix 
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Unusual is in the mind of the beholder. My favorite teevee shows of all time include such fare as The Prisoner, Fawlty Towers, and Boston Legal – unusual to some, but probably not to most ComicMix readers. If pressed, though, I’d have to say my all-time favorite show was Mystery Science Theater 3000.
Okay, I admit it. I’m still a fan of [[[Mystery Science Theater 3000]]], the long-running teevee series that featured four robots and a loser riffing on a couple hundred B-flicks… if you’re feeling particularly generous about that “B” part. Michael J. Nelson, Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy were among the show’s writers and producers. They were also performers – Corbett with the eighth season, Murphy with second season. Nelson, who was head writer from the start, played odd parts for the first four seasons and took over the lead when creator Joel Hodgson left the show at the beginning of season five. The show ran from 1988 through 1999 and begat a feature film.
On this day in 1912, Carl Laemmle merged his movie studio, the Independent Moving Picture Company (IMP), with eight others, creating Hollywood’s first major studio, the Universal Film Manufacturing Company — later to become Universal Pictures Company. Universal would unintentionally give gigantic starts to other film companies, like not paying Irving Thalberg enough money to keep him from being lured away to MGM, or by refusing to pay a decent production fee to produce cartoons starring Oswald the Lucky Rabbit to a young up-and-comer named Walt Disney.
