THE WORLD OF STEVE DITKO - COME TO 'LIFE'...

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You're looking at the cover of BLAKE BELL's book from 2008, The WORLD Of STEVE DITKO.  When myself and one of my pals, MOONMANDO, visited an art gallery recently and saw a display of giant heads, I remarked that they reminded me of Ditko in some way, though I wasn't quite sure why.  It was semi-regular com-menter McSCOTTY (in response to a post I did of our visit) who pointed out that the display was reminiscent of the cover of Blake Bell's book - which I've had in my collection for a good while.

Anyway, Moony played around with a couple of photos he'd taken of the display, transforming them from colour into black and white, and also photoshopping the suspending cables out of the picture.  He's graciously allowed me to reproduce them here and, as you can see, they're almost like the Ditko illustration brought to life.  I wonder if the display's creator was inspired by the co-creator of SPIDER-MAN - what do you think?

From FANTASTIC To FUTURE SHOCKS...

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Y'know, it's curious how seemingly unrelated things are connected in some way.  Case in point, the recently deceased STEVE MOORE, who started his not insignificant career as an office boy at ODHAMS, and then had a major impact on British comics over nearly the next fifty years.

At one time (after the demise of WHAM!) my favourite weekly comic was FANTASTIC, which Steve was involved with as a teenager, even appearing in a superhero costume (on the letters page of issue #50) which a reader had designed, stitched together, and sent in.

Steve also created the THARG'S FUTURE SHOCKS format for 2000 A.D., and it was one such strip which was my first professional IPC lettering assignment when I started freelancing for them at the start of 1985 (having been assured of work by editor STEVE MacMANUS in '84).

Just think - if Steve Moore hadn't created the format, there may never have been an opportunity for me to work for IPC, as it may have been harder for Stevie-Mac to put me on a strip already being regularly lettered by someone else.  The individual nature of the Future Shock strips however, allowed for different contributors per episode, thus giving me an opening into the comics business.

So, just as I'm grateful  to Steve MacManus for giving me a chance to work on 2000 A.D. to begin with, I'm just as grateful to Steve Moore (whom I never met as far as I'm aware), for creating the series that gave me my break into the industry, and a fifteen year career working on, amongst others, IPC's top-selling comic at that time.

As I said - curious how things are connected, eh?