Ditko's First Superhero?

All comic fans know that the Silver Age of comics began when DC made a concerted effort to revive the superhero genre by redesigning The Flash in Showcase Comics. It was a success, soon spinning off into a renewed title. They then followed suit by reviving a newly realized Green Lantern which was equally successful. Then followed things like the Justice League, etc.

Estranged from his editor at DC, Jack Kirby had retreated to working at Martin Goodman's outfit (which was then not called "Marvel"). He had been trying to talk his editor is allowing him to create superheroes at the nascent Marvel the way they had done it at DC (including Kirby's Challengers of the Unknown). Finally, with Goodman threatening to shut down the comics arm of his publishing business, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko were given the task of creating, writing, and illustrating a raft of new superhero characters.

Kirby, of course, created most of what we would later call the Marvel Universe; and Steve Ditko also made tremendous contributions.

But Spider-Man and Dr. Strange were not the first superheroes that Steve Ditko created for a publisher. A full year before Kirby changed everything with his Fantastic Four, his co-worker had already had a hand in creating a new superhero for Charlton Comics:

Captain Atom.

Captain Atom was a classic superhero transformed by radiation into something more than human. In his case, he was Allen Adam, a technician who, accidentally launched into orbit in an experiment craft, has his body destroyed, but whose existence is altered by radiation so that he is able to reform his atoms and consciousness. His powers were explained as being of nuclear energy origins and he quickly becomes a super-powered agent for the US government. (If this sounds familiar, Alan Moore slightly altered the story for his own version of Captain Atom as Doctor Manhattan in the comic book THE WATCHMEN.)

The creation is officially shared between writer Joe Gill and Steve Ditko. But I have always wondered about the details and know nothing of them. I can only surmise from the collaborations between the two how much credit should be attributed between them. Sometimes it is obvious in Ditko stories that are credited to Gill that he, in creating the dialog, had almost no idea what Ditko had written--for the dialog sometimes bears no relation to the illustrated story! This is not the case with the Captain Atom tales, with the dialog generally being logical to the sequential storytelling, if somewhat campy and sophomoric.

But one thing that does stand out in these stories is the right wing politics and subtle philosophy that comes through. This aspect of the comics makes them classic neo-Fascist Ditko polemics. Yes, most politics in late 50s and early 60s comic books was right wing, but Ditko's take on politics is almost unique in the industry. That wacky sense of the sociopath as hero does glimmer between the cracks. And so I am left wondering if the writing was actually all Ditko, with only the dialog being from Joe Gill.

It would, of course, be a familiar story for Ditko and Kirby very soon after.

My personal copies of Space Adventures starring Ditko's Captain Atom.

Space Adventures 34, the second appearance of Captain Atom.

Space Adventures 35.

Space Adventures 36.

Space Adventures 37.

Space Adventures 38.

Space Adventures 40.

Space Adventures 42.

Breaking Into Comics

When I was a young man--in my 20s--and establishing my professional and semi-professional credentials as a writer of short stories, I decided to try to break into the comic book business.

This seemed almost too easy for me. First of all, I had grown up reading comic books. My parents owned used bookstores and soon after opening his first one, my dad found that he had accumulated around a quarter of a million old comics. So in short order I had at my disposal just about every comic book published between 1955 and 1967. And I loved comics. I genuinely adored the format and it appealed to me on just about every level. So in just purely terms of immersion, I was already about as learned as a youth could be about comics.

Fast forward a couple of decades and I was becoming enough of a professional writer that I could call myself that according to the bylaws of the Horror Writers Association. I'd sold enough short fiction at the level of five cents per word (or higher) to become a full, voting member of that then-new organization.

So...comics. Why not? I'd been surrounded by them as a kid, and I was still surrounded by them because I owned several comic book shops at that time. All I had to do was learn how to write a comic book script and research the markets and I was pretty sure that I could break in as a pro.

At that time the comic book market was changing, but had not undergone the throes of death and re-birth that the industry would later suffer. It seemed a solid bedrock kind of market and I was ready to try my hand at it. What I initially wanted to see was an actual comic book script so that I could know how to proceed.

And I finally got my hands on one. But not just any one. It was a partial script for a SWAMP THING issue by Alan Moore. Holy crap! That thing was dense! Moore used hundreds of words of script to describe a single panel! It was as if he was leaving almost nothing to the artists! Was this the way they were all done? Not only didn't I think I could produce a script like that, I didn't want to create that kind of script!

Over the course of the next few weeks I got my hands on other scripts by other professional comic book writers. And every one was different. No two of them was the same. One script that was given to me was written by J.M. DeMatteis (but Mr. DeMatteis says he never wrote in that style...so the artist must have mentioned the wrong name!). In that one (and I don't know how some of his other scripts looked) he used two words to describe five pages of action. The words? 'Everybody fights'. In that one, he was leaving almost everything up to the artist! (The artist on that script explained to me that the writer was using something called the Marvel Method, and he would go in and dialog everything once the story was basically told by the artist.) Man! I could do that!

While I was trying to figure out how to write a script, I sold my first story to a comic book anthology! That's right. I didn't yet know how to write a script--that is, I knew how some people did it, but I hadn't done one yet. And here I'd submitted several short stories to Steve Bissette's TABOO project, and Mr. Bissette had picked one for publication! I approached a comic artist I knew who was looking for work and asked if he wanted to do it. He did it and ended up doing the adaptation based on my story. I had decided to take a smaller cut of the pay rather than risk producing a lousy script. I wasn't ready to commit at that point and just let the artist cut the story down into panels.

But soon after that I sold another one and had written enough experimental script pages that I felt ready to tackle the job. I was pleased with the result and felt more confident about the format of scripting. Like every other writer out there, I was pretty much making up my own rules for scripting and making a go of it. It worked, and that's what mattered most. It certainly didn't look like one of Alan Moore's epic scripts, but it did the job.

After a few sales to TABOO and other smaller press publications (Fantaco and New Comics were two of
the publishers I'd sold to), Steve dropped my name to editor Dan Chichester at Marvel.

Chichester was editing the new CLIVE BARKER'S HELLRAISER book there and was actively looking for storytellers to team with artists. At Marvel you were expected to submit very brief pitches as stories and if the editor was interested he either agreed to let you have a go at a full script, or accepted the pitch as it was. However, I had two unsold short stories that I thought could be reworked into the Hellraiser mythos and asked Dan if it would be okay if I submitted those whole-cloth. He agreed, liked them, and soon I found myself having sold those, plus another pitch.

Feeling confident in my script-writing ability at that point, I got to to work and turned in the three scripts. Dan liked them, Marvel cut the checks, and I soon had the biggest payday of my fledgling career. I was making $50 a page for scripts. That was acceptable to me and I felt that, with my toe in the door, I could produce some pitches for some superhero books. Because that's where I really wanted to be. Writing Hellraiser yarns was cool...

But what I really wanted to do was write comics about Ben Grimm.

More, tomorrow.

Before Marvel

In late 1959 and early 1960, at least a year before Jack Kirby talked Lee into allowing Kirby to create a new line of superhero titles for Marvel Comics, Steve Ditko was already doing that for the folk at Charlton Comics.

Charlton was a strange outfit. They did lots of comics, but I've never been able to figure if comic book publishing was ever profitable for them. They were mainly a printing company who churned out magazines. And they did comics to keep the presses running between jobs of producing the magazines which made them the real money. From what I hear it was easier to maintain the presses if they were constantly working.

The reputation at Charlton among creators was not wholly positive. They paid very low rates to creators and it was company policy not only to not return the artwork to the artists, but to destroy that very artwork once its purpose had been served in the printing process. But apparently there were some small advantages to working with them. They paid on time (even if the rates were low), they created a lot of work for writers and artists, and they didn't interfere much editorially with the folk making the comics. This would have been key for a guy like Steve Ditko.

Ditko seemed to be all about working. He was a creator who was being paid to illustrate. He had bills to pay and family to support. From everything I've read, he enjoyed the relative freedom of working for Charlton, and he did work for them right up until they closed up shop forever.

One of the characters Ditko created (or co-created) for Charlton was Captain Atom. The official history is that Joe Gill and Ditko created it together. But I've never read either of these guys opinions and history of Captain Atom. The character ran for a long time in various incarnations and was one of the superhero properties bought up by DC when they glommed all of Charlton's copyrighted intellectual property at auction. Captain Atom also was the source of Doctor Manhattan in the Alan Moore graphic novel, THE WATCHMEN.

So even before Kirby had succeeded in talking Goodman and Lee into allowing him to revamp Marvel into a superhero publisher, Ditko was already doing the same (to a lesser extent) over at Charlton.

My copy of SPACE ADVENTURES #36, with Captain Atom!