I like it when books get reviewed by multiple members. It's always interesting to see what different people have to say about a given book.

I love Andru's art on Spidey too. He's really underrated. I still place Romita and Ditko before him, in that order, but Andru's stuff is really, really good.

I've said many times before in the forum that nobody has ever depicted the precariousness of how high up spidey is when he's swinging through the city as well as Andru. I also love his dynamic layouts, his realistic (and often architecturally and geographically accurate) backgrounds, and his fantastic facial expressions. He also drew Gwen Stacy and Mary Jane every bit as sexy and beautiful as Romita had.

Lastly, but not least, his Peter Parker looked like a real cool dude, in flared jeans and a sheepskin-lined suede jacket.

I picked up the Monster Masterworks book from the late '80s for a good price off of eBay last week.




This collects a load of those old, weird monster tales that were published in late '50s or early '60s in comics like Amazing Fantasy, Tales to Astonish, and Strange Tales. The majority of the stories in this volume were produced by the team of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers, though there are a few Steve Ditko drawn stories in here too.

One of The Byrds best Dylan covers.

I thinned out my collection a fair bit a year or so before the pandemic, getting rid of pretty much anything that I thought I was unlikely to re-read. I still have a reasonably decent collection of something like 3000+ comics, but I've no intention of stopping collecting. The thrill of buying and reading new stuff that I've not read before is too great.

I think it's pretty well known and accepted that Ditko was the driving force behind Dr. Strange, and yes, almost certainly plotted and drew the majority of the good Doctor's adventures all by himself during his tenure on the book. But I don't think it's accurate to say "ALL of Dr Strange was Ditko".

For one thing, in the initial script for the Sorcerer Supreme's first appearance, he was known as Mr. Strange (shades of Mr. A perhaps?). Stan didn't think it was a dramatic enough name and rather too similar to Mr. Fantastic of the Fantastic Four, so it was agreed that he would become Dr. Strange instead. Given how important the whole "former celebrated doctor tragically blows it all, learns magic from an ancient mystic, and then decides to use his abilities to save humanity" aspect of his back story is, that is not a small change of Stan's. And frankly, that seems like a very Stan type of origin story to me.

The point I'm making in the above is that Ditko's initial idea was not the character that we know and love -- he didn't even have the same name! There was no origin in that first story (it may well have been pitched as just a one-off story), no visiting of mystic dimensions (Strange goes into a guy's sub-conscious, not a mystic realm), and the character may even have been intended by Ditko to be of East Asian ethnicity initially to heighten the tale's oriental exoticism (look at his eyes in that first story)...






Stan also helped Ditko out with dialogue on the Dr. Strange comics on occasion, if he felt that some of Steve's scripting was not up to par (I guess this could be called editing, but whatever...). But no one is gonna tell me that all those wonderfully florid verbal incantations that Strange recites weren't concocted by Stan Lee. His finger prints are all over phrases like, "By the hoary hosts of Hoggoth" or "By the power of the Faltine".

Anyway, I think it's clear, if you look into the creation and subsequent evolution of the character, that Stan had some influence on it. How much, we'll probably never know. But there undoubtedly were some aspects of the strip that were down to Stan's input, even if it was ultimately Ditko's baby, and that at the very least warrants a co-creator credit.

I thought Avatar was cringe-inducingly bad, as far as the story, scripting and acting were concerned. I'm also in a minority that didn't think that it was particularly impressive visually either. I mean, it may've been a technical triumph, but none of the CGI looked real. It was like watching a video game.

I've really enjoyed some of Cameron's films, Terminators 1 and 2, Aliens and Titanic especially, but I just don't see the attraction of Avatar.

EDIT: Cameron also made a great non-fiction documentary about his own dives to the Titanic wreck titled Ghosts of the Abyss, which I really enjoyed.