Tales of Suspense #44

Here's an interesting book from my collection. For a while, after superheroes became the obvious way to go at Marvel (thanks to Jack Kirby's vision and Steve Ditko's help), the company allowed the super-folk to take over all of the monster and science fiction titles. However, there was apparently still quite a backlog of the monster and alien tales that Lee had been using to keep his uncle's comic book publishing ship afloat. The work had already been paid for, of course, and it was just gathering dust. So...to fill out what had been the various anthology titles Lee and Goodman parsed out the inventories of genre tales written and illustrated by Kirby, Ditko, Heck, Reinman, Ayers, Larry Lieber, and company.

This issue of TALES OF SUSPENSE is pretty much what the fans could expect early on in Kirby's superhero revival at Marvel Comics. The reader got a cool new Iron Man tale (with the massive, clunky Kirby armor before Steve Ditko altered it in a stroke of pure genius), followed by a Larry Lieber story (Marvel in those days was nothing if not nepotistic) and a great Ditko yarn. The Ditko story art is credited completely to him, but I suspect someone else (or several someones) had a hand in the finishes. While some of the panels look like Ditko's inks, others do not. I suspect Dick Ayers may have been recruited to complete the inks, but I could be wrong.

My copy of Tales of Suspense #44.

STRANGE TALES #93

Here is the cover to STRANGE TALES #93. Despite the obvious hand of Ditko on this one, I never liked this cover. I never liked it even when I first saw it when I was a kid of about seven years old. It's just terribly bland and was not at all like the dynamic covers generally produced for these monster books by Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.

I'm not even sure of the authorship of the art. Ditko definitely did the finishes, but it could have been over Kirby layouts, or pencils by Dick Ayers, or Paul Reinman. It's very hard to say. It just doesn't look like something Ditko would have concocted on his own unless he was rushed by a looming deadline or instructed specifically to create such an image.

Ditko inks, for sure. But pencils could have been by any of the guys at Marvel then, up to and including Ditko. One of the most lackluster covers from this period at Marvel.