April 16, 2007

Unusual Tales #6 [1957]

"You're gonna need a bigger boat."

It's almost impossible to pick a favourite of the Ditko cover-only images, but this one has to be a leading contender. This is fairly early in Ditko's return to Charlton in 1957, after a two year gap where he did a handful of stories for Marvel and not much else. He came back strong, as you can see, with an absolute masterpiece this time around. What really works about this cover is that it completely draws you in, you can't help but want to spend a dime on this, but it's also pretty much complete in itself. I don't know if there's a story in this issue to go with the cover, but do you really need more of a story than you get here, with a perfectly realized monster fish, the reactions of the fishermen, the chaos of the breaking waves.

And, one of the rarest sentences in the English language, kudos to the Charlton production team for some great work on the colour and overall composition of this cover.


No comments:

Post a Comment

Followers

Powered By Blogger