Page Turners: The early monstrous art of Steve Ditko

Before Steve Ditko co-created Spider-Man, Dr Strange etc he worked primarily as a horror, fantasy and monster artist for numerous comic book publishers. But it was his work for Marvel (or Atlas as they were then known) in the 1950's where he really came to the attention of fans and publsihers as a major talent. At Atlas/Marvel he created (mostly with Stan Lee) 100's of fun short "twist in the tail" type stories about Martians,robots, time travellers, monsters and ghosts. By 1959/60 Marvel were producing lots of great monster comics which followed a standard format of a lead tale by Jack Kirby, and couple of tales by artists like Don Heck or Jack Abel and finishing with a Ditko story. It wouldn't be until around 1969 -1971 before I would read these tales via UK reprints (Alan Class comics etc) or in Marvel's US reprint titles("Where Monsters Dwell", "Where Creatures Roam" and many others) and it was always the stories illustrated by Steve Ditko (most written by Stan Lee) that always fascinated me the most. Some of my very favourite Steve Ditko "monster" splash pages are noted below (and above from "Where Creatures Roam" issue 1) - Don't these pages just make you want to read the story?

Fantasy Masterpieces issue 9

Monsters on the Prowl issue 20 - One of my very favourite Ditko pages from this time.I remember being fascinated by the way Ditko drew the the water splashing off the robot.

Fantasy Masterpieces issue 7

Monsters on the Prowl issue 24

Weird Wonder Tales issue 5

Where Creatures Roam issue 3

Where Monsters Dwell issue 37

Weird Wonder Tales issue 5

A picture of the great man himself, perhaps from a time when he was drawing one of the above tales.