Rolling Comic Books 2019

but yes, Surfer: Black is excellent. You're right to make the Ditko connection with Moore.

(though I think Shade was good? I bought the first few back when the Milligan series started. Notably created and head-written by Ditko, which no doubt makes a difference.)

Oh yes, there are still plenty of highlights post-sixties - Avenging World (his densest, most intense tract where the word/text balloons REALLY go wild), the 'Killjoy' back-up strips in Charlton's E-Man, Stalker (a nice four-issue fantasy series inked by Wally Wood et al), Shade for certain, lots of things. But always the drawing is looser, cruder, than before, the panels larger and less detailed. I almost hate to invoke the phrase 'folk art' but there is a kind of individualistic intensity to Ditko's most engaged work that to seems to me beyond good and evil, left and right, just a unique personal iconography and mode of expression.

Do you mean "stick it to Stan Lee" by putting in more careful work for better money, or that Danforth, with his mustache and grasping insensitivity about art, is intended as a Lee dis?

Mostly the former, although Archie Goodwin wrote a number of variations on the grasping insensitive-exploited artist theme for Warren, and yes, the model is definitely EC. Goodwin and Warren used EC artists on Creepy and Eerie whenever the could, plus Ditko, Colan, Adams etc from the post-EC generation.

I think he was still doing some of his best work for Charlton in the early 70s.

Of his later creator owned stuff I prefer the loopiest things like Crackling Blazer, Missing Man and Mr Quiver. The drawing was a bit more oomph when he did humor. Then there was that ink wash thing he did for Strange Avenging Tales.