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Marvel Visionaries Steve Ditko by Steve Ditko | ||||
This is a recent collection in the Marvel Visionaries series (others include Stan Lee and Jim Steranko). It covers all the major points of his Career with Marvel Comics. It starts with a number of his twilight zone style horror/science fiction stories from the 50's. These are interesting to get context for where the man started. The art is great and the stories are quirky and interesting. The biggest complaint this collection nets is that it spends too little time on this period of his career, but if you actually read it you see it serves more as an overview of career high points. It EXCELS in this respect. There are 3 Spider-man stories: The Classic Amazing Fantasy 15 origin story, The Master Planner Trilogy (considered by many, myself included, to be the high point of his Spider-Man run), and Amazing Spider-Man annual 1 (the first appearance of the super-villain team the Sinister Six). If you only choose 3 Spider-Man stories to do, you'd be hard pressed to choose three better ones. There are 2 Doctor Strange Stories. The story of his first appearance and his origin. The origin is classic and truly unique. Most super-hero stories are revenge stories plain and simple (with a little science fiction element thrown in for good measure), this is a story of personal development, arrogance and redemption. A young surgeon is on top of the world until an auto accident takes the effective use of his hands. He then searches out a mystic for a way to get his life back, and through the course of events takes on the responsibility of the sorcerer supreme defending the universe against those who would use magick for evil. Two Iron Man stories. The first is the story in which Ditko completely redesigned the Iron man costume into what became the classic look automatically associated with the character. The other is a whimsical story setting up a new character named "Squirrel Girl" who winds up being able to take down the world's most dangerous super-villain with an army of specially trained squirrels. The final story is the Origin of his 1980's character Speedball. From reading it I get the impression it was his attempt to try to write the type of stories he wasn't able to do on Spider-man but it's surprisingly good. The series never really took off but the story is solid. This package gets wrapped up with an introduction by Ditko biographer (and webmaster of DITKO LOOKED UP [[/A>) Blake bell. Not comprehensive by any means but a great roadmap and primer for anyone with an interest in this unique and amazing artist/writer. ---Landon | ||||
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