Ditko at Charlton: Part 2

AS STEVE DITKO TOOK ON MORE MARVEL WORK DURING THE EARLY 1960s, and the first run of Captain Atom came to a close, his output for Charlton began to shrink.

Can you do Captain Atom without Steve Ditko on art? My vote would be, No.

Just why Charlton decided to halt the Captain Atom series in Space Adventures at the end of 1961 isn't clear. It may have been that Ditko was losing interest in the character - given the poor Joe Gill scripts, that wouldn't be surprising. And that would fit with the publisher filling out the final issue of the run with two Captain Atom stories drawn by Rocke Mastroserio.

Or maybe it was just poor sales. After all, the only other superheroes around in 1961 were the handful published by DC Comics, a small proportion of their overall output. Perhaps if Charlton had stuck with it, they might have been able to ride the same wave that Stan latched onto when he put out Fantastic Four later in the same year.

Either way, it was around the same time that Ditko began to distance himself from the company that had been his (professional) home for so many years.

WHO THE HECK IS STEVE DITKO?

Stephen John Ditko was born in Johnstown, Pennsylvania on 2 November 1927. An artistically-inclined kid, he graduated from Greater Johnstown High School in 1945, and in the October joined the US Army, was stationed to Occupied Germany and drew cartoons for an Army Newspaper.

When Ditko got out of the Army in 1950, he enrolled in The Cartoonists and Illustrators School under the G.I. Bill and studied under Batman artist Jerry Robinson. Robinson remembered that Ditko "... was in my class for two years, four or five days a week, five hours a night. It was very intense." Robinson would often bring in guest speakers, and one-time Atlas Comics editor Stan Lee addressed the class. "I think that was when Stan first saw Steve's work."

For his part, Steve Ditko acknowledges that he owed much to his tutor. "Until I came under the influence of Jerry Robinson, I was self-taught, and you’d be amazed at the hours, months, and years one can spend practicing bad drawing habits."

Steve Ditko's first drawn professional story was very slick and accomplished, with the instantly recognisable Ditko trademark style very much in evidence.

Ditko's first sale was the story "Stretching Things", scripted by Bruce Hamilton for Stanley Morse's Key Publications in early 1953, but for whatever reason, Morse sold the completed story to Ajax-Farrell, who published it in their Fantastic Fears 5 (Jan 1954).

Though Daring Love - as the title might suggest - veered towards cheesecake, Ditko's art for the title remains relatively demure.

Steve Ditko's second sale was also to Stanley Morse, for his romance title Daring Love 1 (Sep 1953), "Paper Love". The writer remains unknown. Ditko's third sale was to Morse as well, another tale scripted by Bruce Hamilton - "Hair Yee-eeee" in Strange Fantasy 9 (Dec 1953 - though it does appear to have been inked by other hands. 

After another job for Morse - "Range War" in Blazing Western 1 (Jan 1954) - Ditko worked for a short while for Simon and Kirby, at first inking backgrounds, then assisting Mort Meskin. "(1) He knows how to draw good proportions, etc, and can handle any type of story well," said Ditko in a 1964 interview. "(2) His panel compositions are consistently superior to most artists, (3) and most important he is truly a remarkable storyteller. No one who reads a Meskin drawn story is ever in a fog as to what is happening. Not only does Meskin tell a story extremely well, but he does it in the most difficult way. he does not take the easy way out or use impressive eye-catching gimmicks that only confuse the story's continuity."

Simon and Kirby must've been impressed with Steve Ditko's abilities, because he went from assisting Mort Meskin to pencilling and inking his own stories in just a few weeks.

Ditko went on to draw a few few stories - "Hole in His Head" in Black Magic 27 (Nov/Dec 1953), "Buried Alive" in Black Magic 28 (Jan/Feb 1954 and "Madame Cyanide and Mr Trick" in Black Magic 29 (Mar/Apr 1954) - for the Simon and Kirby's Prize Comics.

Ditko's debut job for Charlton was in the oddly-titled horror anthology, The Thing, and was a reinterpretation of the classic fairy tale Cinderella with a vampiric twist. The script writer is unknown.

Then in towards the end of 1953 Ditko did his first job - "Cinderella" in The Thing 12 (Feb 1954), along with the cover - for Charlton, where he would stay for a number of years, though not without the occasional hiccup.

In his first six months at Charlton, Ditko turned out an impressive 155 pages of comic strip and 17 covers - that's an average of nearly 26 pages and almost 3 covers a month, mostly horror and science fiction with a smattering of crime

Throughout most of 1954, Ditko would deliver stories and covers to Charlton at breakneck pace, pencilling and inking the strips, many scripted by longtime EC writer Carl Wessler.

Some time around the middle of 1954, Ditko contracted tuberculosis and was unable to work for a year or so, moving back to his parents' house in Pennsylvania to recuperate. When he was well enough to resume drawing, in late 1955, he had planned to return to Charlton, but the sands had shifted under the company. First, the introduction of the Comic Code Authority stamp of approval had been inaugurated in October 1954 - affecting the March 1955 cover-dated issues - decimating the existing horror titles, where Ditko had been earning most of his income. Then, as mentioned last time, the company's plant had been hit by Hurricane Diane in August 1955 and had suspended operations. There just wasn't any work to be had at Charlton Comics.

A few Charlton freelancers had already jumped ship to Martin Goodman's Atlas Comics, including Ditko's sometime collaborator, scriptwriter Carl Wessler. So it's probably not a coincidence that Ditko followed and his first couple of stories for Atlas were scripted by Wessler.

In his first stint at Atlas/Marvel, it seems that Stan Lee just viewed Ditko as a jobbing artist, no better or worse than any of the others. So Ditko was assigned just a few jobs per month, way below his 26 page monthly capacity at Charlton.

During 1956, Ditko drew just 63 pages for editor Stan Lee and no covers. That's an average of less than eight pages a month, barely enough to keep Ditko in pencils. So as soon as Charlton was back on its feet, Ditko returned to his alma mater and picked up where he left off.

The timing does seem odd. The final pages he would have drawn for Stan Lee would have been in the first half of April 1956. Given the production time and the three months gap between on-sale and cover dates, his first pages during his second stint at Charlton would have been delivered in September 1956, which begs a couple of questions: what was he doing between April and September 1956 and if Stan wasn't giving him enough work, why didn't Ditko just draw pages for both companies at the same time?

My guess would be that Ditko had some kind of falling out with Stan or, more likely, Goodman around April 1956 and withdrew his labour in protest. Charlton wouldn't have been fully on line by that time, so Ditko had to wait a few months before Charlton was buying art again.

Whatever the reasons behind the timing of Ditko's return to Charlton, he jumped  right back in, delivering art for editor Al Fago, himself only a couple of months away from a bust-up with Charlton bosses, on old titles like Strange Suspense Stories and new ones like Out of this World.

Unlike Stan Lee, Charlton Editor Al Fago was happy to give Steve Ditko cover assignments as soon as he started working for the company, and was rewarded with these eye-catching examples - the Out of This World cover is especially strong.

Ditko's output during his first six months at Charlton was a lot higher than during his time at Atlas, but still below his full capacity. From September 1956 to January 1957 (titles cover-dated from February to June 1957) he delivered an average of 28 pages (and a little over 1.5 covers) a month. But during the next six months (ending with the December 1957 cover-dated issues) Ditko output leapt to a dizzying 62 pages a month, plus 16 covers in the same period. Just the December issues alone boasted 84 pages of Ditko and five covers, more than in his entire eight month stint with Atlas. Some of those pages may have been inventory items, but the total number of Ditko pages contained in the 1957 cover-dated Charlton books was 429, 24 of which were covers - an average of almost 36 pages a month.

Another trio of terrific comic covers from Steve Ditko. It's hard to imagine how he could turn out such striking images when he had to work at such a furious rate.

The following year was little different. Ditko delivered a total of 418 pages for the 1958 Charltons, though only five were covers, still an impressive 35 pages a month. Just why Ditko was turning out so much material for Charlton can be traced back to the flood and its impact on Charlton's business.

"Santangelo called a meeting of the artists and myself" writer Joe Gill recalled in an interview for The Comic Book Artist 9 (Summer 2000). "He was an inspired speaker in his broken English, and said he was going to carry on (though, in the meanwhile, the guy had gotten umpteen dollars in flood relief from the government, for free; this was an enormous boost for him), but he couldn't continue to pay us the same 'high rates'. He said that we could all continue working at half of what we had been working before. I was dropped to two dollars a page." The big companies were paying four times that rate.

Dick Giordano was on the Charlton staff at the time. He said the regular rate for art - pencils and inks - was $13 a page. "After the flood, it was halved to $6.50; later it went up to $10; later still back to $13." So that probably explains Ditko's prodigious output.

These would be the last Charlton covers from Steve Ditko in quite a long while, which is a shame because the company allowed him to push the boundaries of what comic covers to could be.

Ditko rattled on into 1959 barely slackening his pace for the January to April cover-dated Charlton comics. Then something odd happened. Ditko started drawing for Marvel, but at a far less furious rate. Where he had been averaging over 43 pages a month for the first four months of the year, he abruptly switched to Marvel where he was delivering just about 15 pages a month. His Charlton output dropped off a cliff.

On his return to Marvel in 1959, Ditko was only assigned two covers during the year and, while good, they don't carry quite the oddness of his cover art for Charlton.

Could it be that even Goodman's miserly page rates were a big improvement over what Charlton was paying its contributors in the months after the flood? It seems likely, and going by the figures above, my guess would be that Ditko could get at least double, if not triple, the page rate at Marvel. Indeed, as 1959 wore on, he began doing odds and ends for Charlton again, probably topping up his workload if Stan left him some free time during the month.

What were Charlton thinking of? I get they had to save money to stay in business, but the last place you cut corners in magazine publishing is on the cover, for Pete's sake ...

Into 1960, and Ditko's work for Charlton continued at an average rate of about 11 pages a month, while he turned in around 13 pages a month for Marvel. Things must have been tight at Charlton, because where they'd previously used many Ditko-drawn covers, during 1960 most Charlton covers were pasted together using panels from inside the comic.

Here's what Steve Ditko's page output for his various clients looked like as the 1960s unfolded and he became disenchanted with Marvel Comics.

Year	Charlton	Marvel	ACG	Warren	Dell	DC	Tower
1961	230	285	0	0	0	0	0
1962	135	424	0	0	0	0	0
1963	257	423	0	0	0	0	0
1964	20	482	0	0	0	0	0
1965	20	410	0	0	0	0	0
1966	153	220	14	28	99.5	9	20
1967	261	0	0	52	0	0	40

Could Steve Ditko have been laying the groundwork during 1965 for his 1966 departure from Marvel? If he had expressed an interest in returning to Charlton, it would have made sense for then editor Pat Masuli to begin reprinting the old Space Adventures Captain Atom tales in Strange Suspense Stories prior to reviving the character in a full-length series. But I couldn't find any evidence to support that.

Steve Ditko - (2 Nov 1927 - 29 Jun 2018)

AND ... HE'S BACK

During 1964, Charlton Publications owner John Santangelo was looking at the inroads Stan Lee was making into the superhero market over at Marvel Comics and though he should have a piece of that pie. Executive editor Pat Masuli was directed to come up with some properties to compete with Fantastic Four and Spider-Man and what we got was Sarge Steel, a revival of Blue Beetle and, in Mysteries of Unexplored Worlds, a Thor knock-off, Son of Vulcan. Oh, and Captain Atom reprints in Strange Suspense Stories 75 (Jun 1965).

Blue Beetle 1 (Jun 1964), Sarge Steel 1 (Dec 1964) and Mysteries of Unexplored Worlds 46 (May 1965). Of these only Sarge Steel, with polished Dick Giordano art, was of much interest.

Quite what Masuli's plan was after he ran out of Ditko Captain Atom stories to reprint has never been clear. With Ditko firmly ensconced at Marvel in 1965 (he would have been plotting and drawing Amazing Spider-Man 25 around that time), Masuli had to compile covers for Strange Suspense Stories from interior panels, suggesting that he either never approached Ditko for new covers or he did and Ditko didn't have the time or the inclination.

In the end, the books weren't a tremendous success, with only Sarge Steel lasting more than five issues. However, circumstances led Charlton to stick with superheroes a little longer. In 1965, Dick Giordano was promoted to Managing Editor and came up with the idea of a line of "Action Heroes" ... costumed but non-powered crimefighters - except Captain Atom, sort of Charlton's flagship character, but Giordano had a plan for him, too. So, whatever Ditko's reasons might have been, he would have started pencilling new Captain Atom stories around the same time he was working on the epic Master Planner three-parter for Marvel's Amazing Spider-Man title, in the July of 1965.

This second run of the character kicked off with Captain Atom 78 (Dec 1965), numbering continuing from from Strange Suspense Stories, and featured full-length, 20-page stories rather than two or three five-pagers and a back-up strip. Ditko also got to produce all-new cover art, though it's not as quirky and interesting as the covers he'd contributed to Charlton's fantasy titles just a few years earlier.

Here, as with the earlier run of stories, Captain Atom's powers seem to be limitless. He can project radiation, pass through solid objects, in fact accomplish anything the plot calls for.

The interior art for "The Gremlins of the Blue Planet" is acceptable, inked as it was by Rocke Mastroserio, but the plot - whether by Steve Ditko or scripter Joe Gill - creaks badly. Borrowing heavily from 1950 sci-fi movies, this adventure centres around aliens who are smart enough to get to Earth but not smart enough to develop new space vehicles, instead relying on a kidnapped Earth scientist. No, I didn't think it made much sense, either.

OK, the good Captain is still inventing new super-powers as he goes along, but this time we have a costumed antagonist ... and super-powered punching.

Captain Atom 79 (Feb 1966) was a bit of a change of pace. Unlike the "Blue Planet" story, which harked back to the style of adventures we saw in the Space Adventures run, this tale looked like it was making an effort to be more like a Marvel-style superhero tale. For a start there's a costumed super-villain, something we'd not seen before in Captain Atom tales. Then there's the fact that CA gets a bit more physical in tackling the baddie, where in previous adventures he'd just zapped them from a distance with one of the superpowers that Gill or Ditko had made up on the spot.

Again, Ditko's pencils are inked by Rocke Mastroserio, which was never going to be as good as Ditko's own inks. Quite why this was necessary, I couldn't say. Looking at Ditko's output for 1966 (see table above), it looks as though Ditko should have had the capacity.

The villain, Doctor Spectro, is a cookie-cutter baddie from Central Casting - an embittered inventor whose work is pooh-poohed by all he tries to sell it to. He's discovered that the different coloured lights that make up the visible spectrum can affect people's moods and emotions. But a run-in with some gangsters results in Spectro stumbling against his light-generating apparatus, and being bathed in intense light. The result is that his mind becomes more embittered and he, too, like Captain Atom, starts acquiring additional powers as the plot progresses, including the ability to absorb energy and project it as weaponised light.

His undoing comes when he absorbs too much energy and turns into a rainbow.

As a runaway planet hurtles towards Earth, Drako (the Merciless) plans to use the captured Captain Atom's powers to force Earth to submit to his rule. Drako's daughter Celest stands in for Princess Aurora, but there's no Dale Arden in sight.

Captain Atom 80 (Apr 1966) lifts a big chunk of its plot from the Flash Gordon serial (1936). A planet is hurtling towards Earth and a frightening rate, but when Captain Atom investigates, he finds the "planet" hollow, housing a migrating civilisation. Atom endeavours to help the hapless aliens by working with their slightly sinister ruler Drako to slow the planet down and avert the destruction of two civilisations. But Drako has ambitions and tricks Captain Atom into supplying the energy to slow the planet down, but at the same time trapping himself in Drako's machinery. Only a terrible sacrifice by Drako's daughter Celest frees Captain Atom, leaving Drako a broken man.

The issue also gives us an action-packed space rescue sequence as an opener and briefly recaps Captain Atom's origin for newcomers before launching into the main story.

Compare panel three on page 13 with panel two on page 17 and spot the (not so) deliberate mistake.

The cover of Captain Atom 81 (Jul 1966) claims that Doctor Spectro is back by popular demand - though I rather doubt that. Four months doesn't seem like a long enough gap for incoming editor Dick Giordano to react to readers' letters (if there were any) and instruct Ditko and Gill to find a way to reconstruct the colourful villain.

But in typical quirky Ditko style, the still-sentient Spectro fails to pull himself together completely and we end up with five miniature Spectros, each a different colour so we can tell them apart. The minor twist is that one of them - the purple one - retains a spark of Spectro's original decency and plans to take control when the five half-pint Spectros are reconstituted into the original.

Unfortunately, Ditko's plotting goes awry when the unnamed colourist colours the good mini-Spectro red on page 17, resulting in endless confusion among the readers.

The issue is rounded out with an entertaining two-pager on Jiu-Jitsu, by Judomaster creator Frank McLaughlin.

What's that you say? Let's give Captain Atom a female sidekick who can double as a love-interest? Great idea ... we'll do it!

Captain Atom 82 (Sep 1966) continued the trend of adding a gallery of super-villains to the title. This issue introduced The Ghost, a freelance seller of secrets who also has the power of teleportation, and also gave the Captain a new ally in his battle against his growing roster of antagonists.

Not Steve Ditko's best costume design, I fear, but adding an Emma Peel style female foil for Captain Atom probably made good sense in the mid-1960s.

Nightshade is, like Captain Atom, a government-sanctioned agent. The two are introduced by Captain Atom's Air Force handler and are assigned to stake out a Washington party where it is suspected The Ghost's agents will be taking delivery of some unspecified government secrets. Witnessing a handover between two of The Ghost's men, Captain Atom takes off after one and Nightshade follows the other out of the party. They're on the point of capturing the agents when The Ghost himself shows up and teleports our heroes into a Dr Strange style dimension, albeit temporarily.

Returning to our reality, Captain Atom and Nightshade follow a clue and track The Ghost to a forgotten basement room in the Pentagon. So confident is the villain that he reveals his plan: to rob Fort Knox. Of course, our heroes thwart The Ghost's scheme and in the ensuing brawl, Captain Atom damages The Ghost's teleportation device, causing him to be teleported to ... who knows where?

This was the first issue of the title scripted by pioneering comics fan David Kaler, who'd gotten the gig via a recommendation from Marvel's Roy Thomas. Unfortunately, Kaler's dialogue was even more stilted than Joe Gill's so reading these last few issues of the title becomes a bit of a slog.

Maybe there were letters coming in to the Charlton offices. Editor Giordano uses a full page house ad to solicit additional comments from the readers.

Rounding out this issue, we get a couple of pages of Judomaster's Jiu Jitsu tips and an interesting house ad that asks readers to send in their views for a new letters column.

For me, a more exciting development than the de-powering of Captain Atom was the introduction of a revamped Blue Beetle - written and drawn by Steve Ditko - as a backup strip.

The next issue, Captain Atom 83 (Nov 1966), brought a major change to the concept of Captain Marvel. Giordano's stated aim was to develop a line of non-super-heroes. He wanted Charlton's crime fighters to be ordinary humans - costumed or otherwise - who fought crime with just athleticism, combat skills and their wits. Clearly, the near-omnipotent Captain Atom didn't fit in with that plan, so Giordano simply had him lose his powers.

The story begins with renegade scientist Prof Koste engineering a heist - his gang, in uniforms similar to the Master Planner gang over in Amazing Spider-Man, steal some unidentified technology from the air base where Captain Adam is stationed. Changing to Captain Atom, he tries to thwart the robbery, but is shot by one of the gang, tearing his protective costume. Fearful that the radiation leaking from his suit will endanger innocent bystanders, Captain Atom leaves to retrieve a replacement. Pretty soon, the airwaves are buzzing about Captain Atom and the radioactive menace he presents.

It's straight out of the Spider-Man playbook, but the idea of Captain Atom being a menace is only half-heartedly followed up.

But when Prof Koste sabotages a nuclear reactor, it's those same radioactive powers that allow Captain Atom to enter the danger zone and avert a nuclear meltdown, but not before passing out from the strain. Seizing his opportunity, Koste summons his gang so he can study the reactor (?) as Captain Atom revives, only to discover that his powers have faded. Gallantly, Captain Atom tries to fight off the gang with good old-fashioned fisticuffs, but is outnumbered and, in the series' first cliffhanger,  overwhelmed.

The issue is finished off with the debut of the Blue Beetle revival by Steve Ditko (more about that next time) and the new letter page, Captain's Column, featuring letters from uber-fan Guy H. Lillian III and Andy Yanchus, who would later become a Marvel colourist.

Things look pretty bad for Captain Atom. First his powers disappear, then his mask is torn off revealing his face to a television audience. Can things get any worse? You bet. Just wait till you see his new costume.

Captain Atom 84 (Jan 1967) concluded the changes Editor Dick Giordano was setting up for the series. Captured and powerless, Prof Koste rips his mask off before a tv camera. Not quite the disaster you might think, as in his Captain Atom identity, his hair is white. And though his powers slowly begin to return, Captain Atom suddenly finds himself in a brawl with Iron Arms, whose super power is - oh, you guessed!

His power dangerously low, Captain Atom outwits Iron Arms by pretending to be defeated, then with the baddies' attention elsewhere he sets off to stop Koste fleeing in a helicopter with his loot. But the helicopter is a decoy and Koste escapes ... and when Captain Atom returns to his airbase, he finds annoying female reporter Abby Ladd gloating over his recent defeats (didn't The Creeper's Jack Ryder also have an annoying female reporter to deal with?)

I suppose there is a scientific rationale for a metallic costume that gets sprayed on to prevent Captain Atom's radioactivity hurting innocent bystanders, but it could easily have looked just like the original uniform.

Captain Atom is given a new liquid metal outfit to replace his old, fragile uniform and so sports a new look - not, in my opinion an improvement. Captain Atom returns to Koste's lair and, after fighting his way through a small army of henchmen, secures a return match with Iron Arms. But it's a tougher fight than imagined and Captain Atom only barely prevails. The story ends with the public still in two minds about Captain Atom and the promise of more mischief from Abby Ladd.

It's all a bit confused and confusing - Captain Atom and Nightshade vs Punch and Jewelee with incognito supervillain The Ghost watching as a not-so-disinterested bystander.

The villains of Captain Atom 85 (Mar 1967), Punch and Jewelee are, to be fair, pretty lame. Former carnival puppeteers, they find a mysterious chest containing equally mysterious weapons - Punch's stinging strings and Jewelee's hypnotic gemstones - and their first criminal caper is to abduct Alec Rois from under the noses of his friends Captain Adam and Eve (Nightshade) Eden. Unknown to all participants, Alec Rois is also the teleporting supervillain The Ghost. In the end, nothing much happens and the episode is one of the least interesting of the later Captain Atom stories, helped not at all by the hokiness of the two villains. But it does set up the return of the Ghost ...

The nub of the story is that a band of alien Amazons want The Ghost as their new leader, whom they call The Faceless One - he's certainly that, though probably not the leader they're looking for.

And return he does, three months later in Captain Atom 86 (Jun 1967). The opening scenes have The Ghost appearing in three different places at the same time, first terrorising bystanders on a busy city afternoon, then giving Nightshade the slip in North Haven, and finally fading away on Captain Atom at the Pentagon. The clue should be that this Ghost doesn't steal anything or attempt to fight the police, nor our heroes. Of course it's not The Ghost, but three of his henchmen, dressed in Ghost costumes and teleported remotely by the real Ghost. It's a nifty idea, but scripter Dave Kaler doesn't follow up on this and the story straight away wanders off in other directions.

In his new lair - a rusty-looking freighter - The Ghost gloats that he's discovered a way to manufacture gold out of thin air, which begs the question, why does he need to be a criminal, then? Nonetheless, he's determined to destroy Captain Atom and Nightshade using the weapons he stole from Punch and Jewellee. Air Force radar operators detect a strange radio signature around the area of Cape Bay, which coincide with The Ghost's teleporting activity. Whether this is a deliberate ploy to lure our heroes into a trap isn't revealed, but The Ghost does trap Captain Atom and Nightshade in a strange energy-draining field. Luckily Nightshade is able to call on her mysterious shadow power (which still hasn't been explained to us readers) to escape the field and turn it off The Ghost's trap at the mains. Just as the fighting kicks off again, all parties are suddenly paralysed, and the weird Amazon women arrive to take The Ghost to their Hidden Land, where he will be inaugurated as their new leader.

Matching the sketchy writing is the equally sketchy art by Ditko and Rocke. It seems like Ditko is only delivering the barest of pencil layouts for Rocke to complete. Especially when you compare it to the finished art Ditko is handing in on the Blue Beetle backup stories in these same issues. (I will look at the Blue Beetle stories next time ... promise.)

A bit of a lacklustre issue - vague plotting, a bland villain and phoned-in art by Ditko/Rocke add up to not very much. Kind of disappointing.

Sad to say, it doesn't get a whole lot better in Captain Atom 87 (Aug 1967). Scripter Dave Kaler gives us another weak villain in The Fiery Icer, who projects heat from his right hand and cold from his left hand. When he applies first heat, then cold, the extreme expansion/contraction causes the affected object to explode. Oddly, the villain's lair is another sea-borne freighter. Maybe he bought it from The Ghost.

Just what The Fiery Icer's criminal plan is isn't too clear. All we get is that Captain Adam's missile base will put a crimp in his plans. It's pretty thin material, with a barely workmanlike art job by Ditko and Mastroserio.

The Nightshade back-up strip - Blue Beetle earned his own title last month - is a welcome addition, with slightly better scripting by Kaler and art from Jim Aparo.

Could this be a return to the glory days of Space Adventures and Strange Suspense Stories? Sadly not. Whatever Captain Atom is doing in outer space, it doesn't add up to very much.

Captain Atom 88 (Oct 1967) might look like a return to the space setting of the early 1960s Space Adventures stories, but it's another muddled effort from Dave Kaler. This time the Ditko pencils are inked by Frank McLaughlin whose inks overwhelm Ditko even more than Rocke's.

When the Air Force intercepts a distress call from a distant planet, Captain Atom is dispatched in an experimental rocketship to investigate. There he battles giant insects and is advised by an artificial intelligence that the people of the planet got bored and left (or died, it's not really clear), but the presence of giant insects has triggered automated distress calls. The AI requests that Captain Atom save the planet, though Kaler doesn't explain why. Thank goodness for the Nightshade bonus story.

At least we get to find out a bit more about the strange golden women who have kidnapped The Ghost and installed him as their figurehead ruler.

The final issue of the run, Captain Atom 89 (Dec 1967), sees the return of The Ghost and his golden Amazon women, and it's an improvement over the last two episodes. In the secret realm of the Amazon women, Alec Rois is finding that absolute power isn't all it's cracked up to be. He longs to return to the outside world where he can be evil. The Amazons aren't wild about that, until they discover that the US Air Force has discovered an advanced missile of alien origin which would allow the Amazon to rule the world, if they could just get their manicured hands on it. Reluctantly, they allow The Ghost to undertake Operation Swipe a Missile.

But as Rois begins his caper, he receives what looks like a crystal ball in the mail, and through that, a stern warning to leave the missile alone from a character calling himself 13. It appears that 13 has claimed the missile for himself, and thwarts The Ghost's attempts to steal it at every turn ... and Captain Atom's attempts to save it, if he gets in the way.

After a lot of thwart and counter-thwart, it's revealed that 13 is an agent from the future, working with the US government to remove the dangerous missile from our time era.

The story ends with a blurb for next issue, an adventure titled "Showdown in Sunuria", but the next issue of Captain Atom never showed up on the news stands ... and that was that. Or was it?

All things considered, this "final" Captain Atom adventure is a couple of notches above the rather disappointing Kaler scripted stories we were served in the last three or four issues of Captain Atom's colour comic.

Years later, in 1975, Charlton launched a pro-zine, in the style of Amazing World of DC and Marvel's FOOM, called Charlton Bullseye and in the first two issues (Dec 1974 and May 1975), we got the serialised version of ... "Showdown in Sunuria." With pencils by Steve Ditko.

Those pencils must have been lying around in a drawer in the Charlton offices since before the Captain Atom title was cancelled, likely around September 1967. Looking at the timings, it may well have been the cancellation of Captain Atom and Blue Beetle that triggered Ditko's move to DC, but I've not been able to corroborate that.

By the time Charlton published Bullseye, Roger Stern and John Byrne were on the Charlton staff and likely hatched a plan to finish up the work on Ditko's pencils and publish the final real Captain Atom story in black and white. And because of that, the finished episode is quite a bit better than what we'd been seeing from the Kaler/Ditko/McLaughlin team, and brings to a close the mystery of The Ghost and the Amazon women who hail him as their leader, The Faceless One.

The Ghost teleports Captain Atom and Nightshade to the Amazon realm Sunuria where he plans to finish them off. But directly before that Nightshade is injured in a battle with a giant robot, and the Amazon code demands The Faceless One tends her injuries, leaving Captain Atom to battle the Amazons by himself. Ultimately, just when it looks like Captain Atom's been defeated by The Ghost, a gloating Alec Rois reveals his face to his foe ... which also tips the Amazons off that he's not the real "Faceless One". From there, it's all downhill, with The Ghost buried under the ruins of Sunuria, The Amazon Priestess who helped treat Nightshade pulling a lever to complete the destruction and Captain Atom and Nightshade teleported back to our reality.

The inking second half of the story looks a little rushed by Byrne, and his lettering is too big and too rough, but it's satisfying to see the final chapter of at least The Ghost's story arc.

Captain Atom by Jim Starlin and Allen Milgrom, from Charlton Bullseye 2.

Overall, the first half of the mid-Sixties Captain Atom run was a lot more satisfying than the second half. It probably didn't help that Steve Ditko was caught up in professional turmoil as his perceived relationship with Stan Lee was deteriorating and he was casting around for a suitable escape route. My feeling is that Charlton turned out to be not that route, as Ditko was having to work with lesser talents that weren't showcasing his work in its best light.

A move to DC in late 1967 looked promising, but after completing five issues of Beware The Creeper and two of The Hawk and the Dove, Ditko took another break from comics. Some sources have stated the reasons for this are "unclear", but on the letters page of Beware the Creeper 5 (Feb-Mar 1969), editor Dick Giordano mentions that "Steve has been ailing of late", so it's likely that this was another onset of the tuberculosis that had plagued him ten years earlier.

Next time, I'll look over the other Ditko heroes published by Charlton in the second half of the 1960s - The Blue Beetle and The Question - and squeeze in a few words about some of the other Charlton heroes of the period.

Next: More Charlton Heroes