Mysterious Traveler: The Steve Ditko Archives Vol. 3 (STEVE DITKO ARCHIVES HC) Hardcover – May 22, 2012

I was intrigued by the Action Heroes archives (particularly volume 2), and decided to purchase more of Ditko's work. Of the volumes available in hardcover, this one was definitely the cheapest (as a new book, it came in just north of nine dollars, including shipping!), so I decided to give it a go. As for that price, it's obviously great value, despite the flaws I will list below. However, at the original cover of forty dollars, I'm not as convinced. In any case, here are my observations.First, the physicals of the book. The cover is a sort of "soft: hardcover, with no dust jacket, not unlike some of Dark Horse's video game guides. As such, it damages easily; shelf wear shows pretty strongly on these books, so expect a corner crease in your lifetime. I think this book should have shipped with a slipcase. Further, the book has a permanent bar code on the back (again, not unlike Dark Horse's video game guides). It's unfortunate - it looks very ugly, and I think a sticker would have been just fine (the stickers come right off of this material, with no residue). Finally, you will notice in the image a man walking in what appears to be rain. As far as I can tell, the rain is actually not part of the drawing, but rather an added effect by the publisher; in particular, there are regular streaks of glue that, when they catch the light, look like raindrops. It's not a bad effect.The book opens well (much better, e.g., than DC's archives). The pages are nice enough, although I immensely prefer the pages in the DC archives. The reproductions are pretty good. I would guess that the colors here more properly duplicate those found in the original comics, so if that's your thing, that's probably a plus for you. However, the palette is a bit muted for my taste, particularly for an archive. Chacun a son gout.The introduction is top-notch. One of my issues with DC archives are the hit-or-miss intros - this one by Blake Bell is great. It also includes some unpublished Ditko art, which is always nice.The content of this volume really hits the spot. I've always thought that Ditko was a shining beacon in an otherwise-overrated Silver Age. While his writing wasn't always top notch, his plots and his art more than make up for it. This volume collects tales of the weird, in a sort of Outer Limits/Twilight Zone frame of mind. I read almost half the book in one sitting, and then turned around and re-read the stories later in the evening. I really enjoy the fast-paced plots appearing here, and they have just enough X-Files weirdness to merit another look.A lot of people have complained about missing pages. Make no mistake - there are missing pages. Again, for a forty dollar cover, I probably would have been more miffed at this. But for the price at which I purchased it? I could care less, but not much less.In short, as with any purchase, the rating is based on the price as well as the product. My high buy/low sell point, given the manufacturing defects and my own opinions on the reproduction, would probably be twenty dollars (twenty five if pages weren't missing). As I got it for around nine dollars, it's an easy 5-star purchase.

Before his glory days at Marvel illustrating Spider-Man, Steve Ditko worked for poverty-row publisher Charlton. Toiling long hours for low page rates, he produced some amazing work, including the stories reproduced in this volume. According to Blake Bell's introduction, Ditko turned out a staggering 500 pages of art -- both pencils and inks!-- and 26 covers during 1957 alone. This volume reproduces about half of those pages.The stories are in the fantasy/sci-fi genre that will be familiar to readers of the pre-super hero numbers of Marvel's "Tales to Astonish," "Strange Tales," and "Tales of Suspense," to which Ditko also contributed in the late 1950s and early 1960s. As near as I can tell from Bell's introduction, Ditko was probably not responsible for most of the scripts for these stories; Bell believes that Joe Gill probably was. But given the very loose editorial control exercised by Charlton, my guess is that Ditko had free rein to do pretty much what he wanted with Gill's scripts. The result is some really quite striking visual images -- the equal I would say to anything he did later in his career with Marvel, DC, or back with Charlton. The stories differ in quality, with some being pretty weak, but Ditko's art is uniformly superb.The stories vary in length and some come to rather an abrupt conclusion. Bell offers the opinion that it sometimes appears that "the writer just ran out of pages to finish a story and figured the editors at Charlton wouldn't notice." As I write this, there is only one other review and the reviewer is upset that the final page appears to be missing from the story "The Forbidden Room." The story does seem to be missing a conclusion, but it is eight pages long, so maybe this is a particularly bad example of abruptly ending a story. The story originally appeared in "Mysteries of Unexplored Worlds," No. 4, so perhaps somebody can check to see if the ending is the same there. Bell actually misses the point of the story, "I Made a Volcano." [SPOILER ALERT] The story makes more sense if you realize that the "old man" whose face is obscured until the final panel is meant to be a certain German dictator. Odd that Bell missed this, particularly since he illustrates his introduction with a full-page blow up of the man's face. I guess readers in 1957 would have been more likely to realize who this was supposed to be. This fumble aside, Bell's introduction is very good.I do not have the first two volumes in this series, so I don't know whether they provided an explanation of where this art is being reproduced from. I doubt that all of the original art still exists, so I assume that most (all?) of what we have here (except for the original art to two covers) represents scans of the comic books. The reproductions are very good, however, and the colors are not off-register as they frequently were in the actual comics, given Charlton's pinch-penny production methods. So, I assume that some work was done to clean things up.All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed this volume and I highly recommend it.Added May 27: As noted in the comments on this review, the last page to "The Forbidden Room" is, in fact, missing. Although this omission is a serious one, I still believe that this book merits five stars given that it provides Ditko's fans with by far the best way to read these stories.

Steve Ditko is a legend among comic book collectors,artists and writers. He guards his privacy vehemently and many of his fans hope to get a glimpse of him through his early publishings. He is the creator of Spider-man,supposedly with the help of Stan Lee,and his style cannot be confused with any other artist in the industry. this book is a lot of fun for those who admire and respect one of the last giants of the silver age of comics as well as those newly introduced to this art form.

Steve ditko was a drawing machine. He's one of the most original artists of all time. When he tries hard his work is outstanding. Later his work got very loose sometimes in the 70's or 80's depending on the title he drew and even then he came up with some great stuff. But during the 50's all of his work was great. This is a big book of his work. And in spite of a printing error that made some people mad , the rest of the book is great. This situation occurred in 'silver streak comics' vol 2 , this art looks pretty good , it's probably scanned comics and not restored as I would like it. But it still looks good. Ditko's fluid love of his craft is very apparent in this ditko archive. And the price was very low and that was a good thing for me. As I really like hardcover editions of reprints of comics. I even like them better than the original comic format as the paper is better!. This is all reprints from the Charlton line of comics which has long since vanished. (around 1980). These scans don't look bad like some comic reprint books do. There's no faded pages, except a cover or two that has wear on it. (cover reprint that is!) Considering the very cheap price grab this book because it's a big book and it has lots of stories. At that price you won't care about a few bad pages of reprints.