Ditko's Monsters: Konga! (Ditko Monsters)

Stories are goofy, but Ditko's artwork is interesting and occasionally transcendent. Clearly, Ditko was sometimes working quickly (page rate must have been dismal), but you can see flashes of Ditko being Ditko. The book is beautiful to look at.

In preparation for reading this collection I watched the KONGA movie from 1961. Not a great movie by any means but it added something to the earliest comics in the collection which are an adaptation of the film. Interesting to see how Ditko translated the movie to the page and how several major changes to the plot/characterization were carried out. The stories aren't great but KONGA did offer a vehicle for all sorts of conflicts for a giant ape from aliens to dinosaurs to Nazis. The book itself is a beautiful hardcover collection at a very reasonable price. No Ditko enthusiast should be without KONGA on their shelf!

Steve Ditko doing what Ditko does best , provide the reader with great artwork and great story to excite the imagination and take the reader on an remarkable trip. Highly recommended!

I was unaware of these Ditko collections, but I'm delighted at what a thick, well-produced volume it is, aside from the fact that it contains the full run of this crazy Carlton title, from issue one, an adaptation of the goofy film, through all of the title character's adventures with aliens and dinosaurs and monsters. There's also a well-illustrated intro. Loads o' entertainment!

Very well produced volume at a very reasonable price. The scans of the comics are very clear and distinct. This is just like having the actual comics, which is what I would want. I prefer this to the Marvel Masterworks type of book, where they reinterpret and recolor the comics.These are the original colors. If you're a Ditko fan then you probably have this already.

Yet again another, grafic novel for Son, for birthday, this novel among many on his wish list that he wanted

Great Book !

Ditko Monsters volume 2 features the Ditko covers and stories he drew for the title Konga published by Charlton Comics in the sixties.The scripts are by Joe Gill. You get tons of content , in short a lot of bang for your buck. Here's what keeps this book off a 5 star evaluation. First it's about 330 pages + a handful of ad pages in the back. I say about, because they didn't bother to number the pages ( only the original comic page numbers are there in the lower right corner). So if you went to the table of contents well don't bother there is none. No listing of which stories are on which pages. What a gaff! They do however list the stories with summaries which helps take part of the sting out. Still that's a little late. There's an interesting back story on the movie itself that Craig Yoe has added, worth checking out. The only other thing that could have been tweaked and was mentioned by a reviewer of the Gorgo Edition ( of Ditko Monsters)& I am paraphrasing, the white paper used didn't do the artwork any favors. While he is 100% correct, the size of the pages is the real villain here. After the first Konga story ( like the Gorgo edition)the art is less detailed. Smaller page sizes could really have helped this. All things said Craig Yoe & IDW are the first to bring these Ditko stories to us and I am grateful they did. 4 stars because the fine tuning needed adjusting. still it's a great read!

Cinema-goers were rightly distressed at the end of the 1933 original version of King Kong, when (spoiler) the great ape plummets to his death from the top of the Empire State Building. Nearly 30 years later, American International Pictures decided not to let a little thing like the death of the movie's eponymous star bother them and paid RKO Pictures $25,000 for the use of his name. While working on their film, however, they changed his name to Konga. They also gave Konga a different origin story and some new friends. The picture did pretty well.As part of the promotion for the film, it was decided to produce a comic book that could be either given away or sold cheaply in theatres showing the flick. When the word 'cheaply' is mentioned in the context of comic books, the name that immediately springs to mind is Charlton Comics. At a time when all comic books were cheaply printed, Charlton's were printed even cheaper. At a time when page rates from artists and writers across the comic book industry were low, Charlton's were lower. And yet the company had an ace in the hole in the compact form of Steve Ditko. Lauded for co-creating Spider-Man and Doctor Strange for Marvel, Ditko in fact did much more work for Charlton. Why? Because, unlike Marvel, they left him alone to produce whatever he wanted and never asked for pages to be redrawn.Naturally, when the Konga gig was offered to Charlton, they gave it to their best artist, Steve Ditko, and this volume collects the results. While far from Ditko's best work and reflective of the simpler times in which they were produced, the stories gathered here are still quite a fun read. A couple of them suffer from the sort of anti-Communist silliness that was so popular in comics of the early 60s.IDW have taken the very sensible route of reproducing the comics from high resolution scans of original comics rather than faff around having them partially redrawn and then wholly recoloured. I've always maintained that scans are by far the best way to reproduce comics from the 1960s and earlier. The print quality here is excellent. Interesting to note that Ditko abandons his usual nine panels per page, here averaging about five and throwing in lots of half page and full page splashes.Craig Yeo's introduction is great, giving loads of background info on the production of the movie as well as the comics. If you're a Ditko fan, there's plenty here to enjoy. If you're not familiar with Ditko's work, I'd suggest checking it out online before buying since his highly individual style isn't to everyone's taste. Personally, I love it!

Great!!

IDW legt hervorragende Nachdrucke US amerikanischer Comickünstler auf! Warum bleiben jedoch nach diesem klaren Satz immer noch zwölf Worte erforderlich? Das weiß wohl nur Amazon