Many of the Golden Age and even Silver Age artists were true artists, having studied art in schools and ended up doing comics for quick easy money before moving on to better paying gigs like illustration or advertising.

They had the ability, many of them, to produce beautiful works, but graphic novels weren't around; the industry was in its infancy, and like I always say, you get what you pay for. How many ways to you divide a dime ?

I have posted before about Giolitti's beautiful work on the Gold Key King Kong comic from 1968. A sample...




  

There's some question about what is the earliest work Steve Ditko did in comics. I thought maybe this would be an appropriate place to post about that.

From Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko by Blake Bell...

Questions remain unanswered about Ditko having worked with classmates on published comics in 1953, allegedly with individuals like Seymour Moscowitz, a classmate of Ditko's at The Cartoonists & Illustrators School.

From CGC Comics chat boards, posted by Robert Beerbohm...

In early 1953 Gilberton, in an effort to keep their costs down, canned most all their regular creators and went to the cartoonist art school Steve Ditko was then a student at. They hired students to do their comic books at much lower rates, there is an approx ten issue run.

Classics Illustrated #107 May 1953 - it is clear Ditko did not do the entire book, but his hand is quite evident (to many of us) in some of the pages, about one third the book.

Ditko was still a student at the art school Jerry Robinson and Mort Meskin were teaching at the time these art story jobs came available. No diff than say when people come to the Kubert school for projects.

I would say Ditko was at least doing layouts on some of the pages of this Classics story. One can easily see there is zero Ditko in the back half of the book - completely different hands at work there.

Black Magic #27 (Nov 1953) (formerly earliest known Ditko published story, I was the guy who informed Overstreet this needed to be listed at the time some 25 years ago)

Panels from Classics Illustrated #107 by Seymour Moskowitz with comparison to other early Ditko credited art:


Another look inside #107:


Panel from Classics Illustrated #110 also by Seymour Moskowitz:


So, to summerize, Ditko was around at the exact time and place these Classics Illustrated comics were created by students where he was a student, is known to have worked alongside Seymour Moskowitz, but what... Mr. Moskowitz sometimes would do layouts looking very Ditko-like and most other times not at all? The more Moskowitz I looked at the more these parts from Classics looked obviously not typical at all of his work. It was common still at this time for artists to share studio space and for comics to be produced on an assembly line sort of set-up with pages passing through various hands. I've looked at a Golden Age pages that have so many hands involved as to be un-attributable, Matt Baker credited Fiction House work might have minimal Baker content and yet remain undisputed and that's with R.H. Webb and Jack Kamen working for the same people at the same time. I think this is very probably early Steve Ditko in part.

Certain panels of those you posted do indeed look very much like Steve Ditko's work to me, beccabear67.

Here's the earliest Ditko work I've seen, from BLACK MAGIC #28 (v.4 #4 / Prize / January-February 1954) Story by Jack Oleck, based on not one but TWO separate Edgar Allan Poe stories.

It deepens my appreciation of Steve Ditko that he was so individually unique at an early stage. I was not at all familiar with Moskowitz, or hadn't noticed his work particularly if I had seen it, but he has his own strengths. I am familiar with Mort Meskin art, and early Kubert. The Ditko content I see in what's available seems pretty potent. Very strong supporting evidence that he was right there in the immediate bullseye as it were where those comics were done, so to me after an initial reaction of that's not Ditko (overall), I think, yeah... he must've been involved, there is no Ditko in some bits, and then a lot of Ditko in others. Later on you'd think someone cribbed from him, but if there was nothing published at that time they could've borrowed from and Ditko was known to be right there next to them literally...

I haven't seen a lot of early Ditko outside Atlas, really just some of The Thing for Charlton. Beerbohm having handled a lot of early original art as well as having many of the original comics gives his opinion a lot of weight.

Filmfax: Outre magazine ran a series on Wally Wood in their pages and they reproduced some of his student/pre-professional work and it was absolutely fascinating. I would love to know if there has been any similar publication of pre-professional Ditko? Both so unique, and some of my favorite moments in comics was the combination of the two! I think these two make a great case for comics as a major form of Art alongside George Herriman, Windsor McCay, Rose O'Neill, Cliff Sterrett, Percy Crosby, Hal Foster, Ethel Hayes, Roy Crane, Charles Schultz and others from the comic strips. If only comics had always been business-wise as above board as the newspaper syndicates (although comics got increasingly better printing and strips got increasingly poorer and smaller).

That's the one signed 'S S' for Seymour and Steve, and what I based "is known to have worked alongside Seymour Moskowitz" on. I had one Ajax comic, a Vooda, they seemed to get decent quality paper unlike Star, Charlton, sometimes Atlas and E.C. among others. I don't know if I ever saw a Star with white pages, or an early '50s Fiction House either, always seemed to have tan to brown and brittle paper, like it was old when they were printed. I.W. and Super reprints were a lot like Charlton often that same way.