I recently got through reading the Steve Ditko Omnibus Volume One published by DC back in 2011. Among other things, it contains the complete run of the 1970s series Stalker and Shade, The Changing Man, as well as 36 short stories that had appeared in DC’s various science fiction and horror anthology titles (e.g. Strange Adventures, House of Mystery, Weird War Tales, etc.) from the mid-1960s through the early 1980s. All of this material was new to me – but that’s not the point of this post.
The point, rather, is Ditko’s art and whether or not it was possible for someone to ink his work; I’m taking my cue from something our late, great founding member Greg Hatcher said in our round table discussion about Steve Ditko not long after the latter died. To wit, he pointed out that the Stalker series persuaded him that “(…) it WAS possible for someone else to ink Ditko… but only if it was Wally Wood.” And he provided some art samples from said series.
Now, even back then, in that same post, I pushed back a bit, noting that John Byrne, of all people, also did a fine job of inking Ditko’s pencils, providing my own counter-example.
And that leads us to the meat of my argument: there have been more than a few artists whose inks do justice to Ditko’s pencils – something the other Greg (Burgas) noted near the end of his own tribute to Ditko, highlighting, besides Wally Wood, Erik Larsen and Steve Leialoha.
And after reading the Ditko Omnibus, my opinion about others being able to properly ink Ditko’s pencils has only been cemented. Back in the mid-1960s, Sal Trapani did a really nice job of inking two Ditko-drawn stories in back-to-back issues of Strange Adventures (#s 188-89):
Ernie Chan did a bang-up job in a story that appeared in House of Mystery #148:
Unexpected #221 from 1982 contains a story “EM the Energy Monster” that was both scripted and drawn by Ditko and inked by one Gary Martin, with whom I am completely unfamiliar but who, again, did a really nice job.
An example that may surprise many (I know I was floored when I saw it) is that Vince Colletta inked two really short (2-page) pieces drawn by Ditko that appeared in Weird War Tales nos. 46 and 49 and did a really nice job of it:
And finally, I have to mention the really nice inks on Ditko’s pencils in the Starman (Prince Gavyn) series from Adventure Comics in the early 1980s (which isn’t, unfortunately, included in that omnibus that I have):
So yeah, while I tend to agree with the general assessment that Ditko is usually his own best inker, I don’t think it’s right to say that only a select few – like one or two – could be entrusted with inking his pencils. By the way, just as a sort of postscript, I’ll say that Ditko was probably one of Jack Kirby’s best inkers.
