It's been soooo delightfully chilly in Florida lately! The usual year-'round heat makes me cranky sometimes. I don't know if I can live the rest of my life here. I'll be here a few years, though, as I'm not ready to move yet again. Also, Karen has a good job here. Florida is the fourth state I've moved to since being laid off in 1988. It was much easier then, when I had nothing to move, but you accumulate crap over the years and moves become increasingly arduous each time. I do feel oddly disconnected, knowing I could uproot again. I guess once I made my first move away from Pittsburgh, where the memories of my formative years were, the idea became more palatable.

   The cool weather has really improved my disposition of late (that, plus not hearing "...and I endorse this message." every thirty seconds). Living in Florida also reminds me that I miss the change of seasons and cloudy days. I'm a cloudy day kinda guy. When it's sunny every day, it gets tedious, as if the sun is saying "Cheer up, little camper, I'm here to make everything bright and sunny", like the chattiest, perkiest college student who's optimism refuses to dampen because real life hasn't happened to him/her yet. He's/she's singing 'Don't worry, be happy" while you're nursing a hangover. Shaddup and go away for a few days, sun! Sometimes, you just like to brood. I do not relate to people who are sun-worshippers. There are days where I definitely benefit from the emotionally-healing properties of sunshine, but I've never been one to lay out and tan. Bor-ing.

   Maybe it goes back to my youth when I would be nagged by friends or cousins to get out of the house when I'd be perfectly content drawing. Mind you, I didn't live boxed-in like a veal 24/7. I'd play football in the neighborhood and I'll have you know I was the most agile wide receiver on my block. I couldn't throw a football worth a damn, but I could lunge and contort myself to catch it, often at the expense of scrapes on my hand-me-down jeans.

   Random thought alert: Could we puh-lease put to bed the expression "It's like____ on crack!" as a 'cool' endorsement in entertainment reviews? It's become the new "Looks like we're not in Kansas anymore!"

   Last week, when I did my dissemination on (of all things) Super-Villain Team-Up, I thought the Evan Dorkin rant was going to fill up space sufficiently so I'd only have to write a few paragraphs and call it a day. Wrong! As I wrote, I found myself getting diarrhea of the blog. Holy smokes, that was a long-winded blog! I was a little annoyed at myself when I'd finished because I spent a better part of a day writing and editing! I should've split the blog into a two-parter. Live and learn. I give and I give...

   Recommendation of the week: DC Archives: The Action Heroes Volume One by writer Joe Gill, cowriter/ artist Steve Ditko and occasional penciller/inker Rocke Mastroserio. This hardcover reprints rare Captain Atom stories from the now-defunct Charlton Comics. I recommend this if your a hardcore Ditko fan. Twenty years ago, DC bought Charlton's superheroes, which was labeled "The Action Heroes line", and after subsequent incarnations of the characters, we're treated to seeing the original stories reprinted in Archive format! The reproduction is incredibly crisp and clean, a stark contrast from the original issues, as Charlton was notorious for some of the poorest printing quality in comics.

   The stories themselves are not exactly riveting stuff, but fun nonetheless. They served the purpose of allowing Ditko to grow as an artist. The stories reprinted in first half of this Archives edition are only five-to-seven pages long. Captain Atom's origin's only nine pages, but what pages they are! Breath-taking visuals, particularly the outer space scenes. These short stories were originally published in 1960 & 1961, a year before Spider-Man. The second half of the book reprints longer stories from 1966, when Ditko walked away from Spidey for the artistic liberation he craved at Charlton (who, as the lowest paying comics company, couldn't concern themselves with Ditko's idiosyncratic demands about creativity-could he really have left Spidey and Marvel over a dispute with Editor Stan Lee about the Green Goblin's secret identity?).

   Since I've brought this subject up, I thought I'd share an idle thought with you. I have no hard facts, merely conjectures, about the way Ditko, like Jack Kirby four years later, had left Marvel. According to several interviews with Marvel bullpenners at the time, both artists' departures were a surprise to everyone. If it were in their nature, perhaps Ditko and Kirby could've expressed their dissatisfaction openly with Lee, and possibly used their marketable talents as leverage to benefit financially and/or creatively as they saw fit. Instead, their departures were in a non-confrontational, almost passive-aggressive manner. Creative types often escalate conflicts into all-or-nothing situations.

   Perhaps they merely wanted to lock in their new work relationships with Charlton and DC, respectively, before officially leaving. In the old days, just a suggestion that you were talking with the competition could be grounds for dismissal for Joe Freelancer. Although Ditko and Kirby were artistic heavyweights, they might've been cautiously grateful to still be working in the comics industry after it's near-collapse a decade earlier. This may have caused them to smolder in silence, planning their leave without airing their grievances.

   Okay, back to The Action Heroes Volume One... Joe Gill was known as one of comics' most prolific writers ever, because one of his main accounts, Charlton Comics, only existed to keep their in-house printing presses rolling between their more lucrative commercial printing jobs.

   According to Blake Bell's foreword, "Gill could produce 100 to 150 a week of scripts to be dispersed to the various freelancers whose desire to raise the artistic level of the medium was an unaffordable luxury. The exception to the rule was Steve Ditko."

   Rocke Mastroserio, according to his bio in The Action Heroes Archives was "born in Barre, Italy and the majority of his illustrations work was for Charlton Comics. His credits include numerous adventure, mystery and science fiction comics in the 1950's and 1960's, as well as pencilling and inking over Steve Ditko several Captain Atom stories. In the late 1960's he illustrated a number of stories for Warren's Creepy and Eerie".

   I hope to see future volumes of The Action Heroes archives with Ditko's Blue Beetle stories. In the mid-1970's I remember picking up Ditko's Blue Beetle and Captain Atom issues, reprinted under the ironically-named imprint "Modern Comics". It didn't last but a few months at best. I don't know if it was a brand-name experiment by Charlton or a brief licensing deal, but it remains a curiosity.

   Oh, yeah, five new curiousities are added to the 'commmission work' section...