Missed It By That Much…

This will only interest you if you're really into the real minutiae of comic book history. It's a P.S. on that Get Smart sample I posted a few hours ago that I said was by Steve Ditko and Sal Trapani.

The weblog of someone who calls himself "Sleestak" has reproduced more of it over here. And now that I see the other panels, I see that it's not pencilled just by Steve Ditko. There's at least as much work on that page by Eric Stanton, who was then sharing a studio at 8th Street and 48th in Manhattan with Ditko and occasionally another artist or two. While Ditko was drawing Spider-Man and Dr. Strange, Stanton was drawing comics of women with huge breasts who had a tendency to wrestle and tie each other up. Stanton, in interviews shortly before his death in '99, claimed that he helped Ditko with his sixties' Marvel work and even suggested the idea of Spider-Man's web-shooters, and that Ditko helped him with the fetish comics. Ditko has denied both counts.

The timeline here is interesting to consider. Get Smart went on the air in September 18, 1965. The first issue of the comic book was cover-dated June, 1966. That meant it went on sale around March of '66. Generally speaking, a comic of that period would have a four month production period — one month for script, two months for art, one month for production and printing. This is all educated guesswork but what's likely here is that after the TV show went on and became a hit, Dell made the deal to do the comic. So it was probably written in late October or November and then it went to an artist to draw. And you know why that's interesting? Because Ditko quit Marvel the week of Thanksgiving, 1965.

Before around 1963, Ditko had freelanced for both Charlton Comics and Marvel. As Spider-Man and the other Marvel super-hero books grew in popularity, and as Marvel raised pay rates a bit, Ditko cut back on his Charlton work. Then in his last year at Marvel, he began drawing again for Charlton, primarily on a revival of Captain Atom, a super-hero he'd done for them from 1960 to '61. He must have been drawing at an incredible clip in '65 because he was plotting, pencilling and inking 20 pages of Amazing Spider-Man a month for Marvel, plus covers, plus the story he did for that year's Spider-Man Annual. He was also plotting, pencilling and inking 10 pages a month of the Dr. Strange strip in Strange Tales. That would be a pretty full workload for any artist, but he was also making time to pencil Captain Atom. One might assume he figured he might not be at Marvel much longer so he was re-establishing his relationship with Charlton.

Then he quit Marvel and right after that, his work for Charlton increased and he also began drawing for the two Warren magazines, Creepy and Eerie, and for Tower's T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents. Suddenly also, he was ghosting a lot of Sal Trapani's work. There were two stories for DC's Strange Adventures (in the May, 1966 and June, 1966 issues), a number of jobs for ACG comics like Adventures Into the Unknown and Unknown Worlds (credited to both) and the work with Trapani for Dell on Get Smart and a superhero book called Nukla.

Anyway, that Get Smart page was probably one of the first things Ditko worked on after he left Spider-Man. It also may have been one of the last things done in the Stanton-Ditko studio. The two men moved to separate workspaces some time in 1966 and yes, I know this is real trivial stuff. But some of us can't get enough of this kind of thing.