For Your Consideration: Creeper By Steve Ditko

Creeper by Steve Ditko

Creeper by Steve Ditko

by Robert Greenberger

Much has been written and explored about Steve Ditko’s time at Marvel and people to this day wonder why he left Amazing Spider-Man. We know he bolted from Marvel and returned to Charlton, resuming his work on Captain Atom and creating The Question, but the Action Heroes line never achieved success on the newsstands. When Carmine Infantino invited Editor Dick Giordano to come to DC Comics in 1968, it spelled the end of the heroic titles and the beginning of a new era for DC, which was struggling to remain relevant against Marvel’s meteoric rise.

Giordano arrived, brining with him a handful of talents, including Ditko, and was at first given a very free hand. Readers knew change was in the air when they started seeing house ads for Showcase #73, which promised a character called The Creeper. When people saw this garish figure on a rooftop during a dark and stormy night, they weren’t certain what to expect. Since then, the Creeper has been a beloved cult figure throughout the DC Universe and finally, DC is collecting the Ditko run in a single volume, due out in January.

Ditko created crusading reporter Jack Ryder, who followed a lead on a missing professor and quickly created the Creeper look from costume supplies so he could infiltrate a masquerade party and find the man. Things took a dark turn and it was the professor who saved Ryder, transforming him into a hero. While not your most original origin, it did free Ditko to keep things moving quickly.

No sooner did Showcase arrive than a few months later came Beware the Creeper #1, which lasted just six issues. Ditko, used to plotting his own material, conceived of the Creeper and planned his origin and plotted the first solo issue. As a result, the stories are rich with intrigue and a face-changing foe called Proteus. By now, though, Ditko had been enamored of Ayn Rand’s works and his personal beliefs about the nature of good and evil permeated his work. Oddly, Giordano paired him here with liberal writer Denny O’Neil who provided the dialogue to those early issues and then became sole writer with Creeper #2.

While O’Neil attempted to stay true to Ditko’s tenants, the artist was also busily producing Hawk & Dove (which probably explains why Mike Peppe inked Creeper stories). There, he and writer Steve Skeates, also a liberal, clashed which made for interesting stories until Giordano, another liberal, shoved H&D to the left, causing an angry Ditko to abruptly quit DC. As a result, Jack Sparling stepped in to complete the pencils to the final issue of The Creeper.

Years later, Ditko was coaxed back to DC and returned to The Creeper with a story, written by Michael Fleisher, which appeared in First Issue Special #7. Soon after, Ditko was writing and drawing Creeper material intended once again for Showcase but the famed DC Implosion saw the title canceled. Undaunted, he produced more stories which appeared in World’s Finest Comics.

Ditko’s work is fluid and distinctively his own, with characters seemingly trapped in a time warp. He was never one for fashion sense, and left to his own devices, his people spoke in speeches, not actual dialogue. But one can never fault his plotting and storytelling which always featured a beginning, middle, and an end. The stories moved and the action was usually well choreographed.

Without his appearances during the same years in the hands of other talents, this volume will give you a good taste of what Ditko always intended for his hero and is well worth the look.

Purchase

Creeper By Steve Ditko HC

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