The Ottawa Comic Book Guy

After a hectic few weeks away from the regular grind (as anyone with children can attest to), a few notes from the world of comics while I was away. The passing of Steve Ditko : Sometime on approximately 29 June 2018, Steve Ditko passed away. Co-creator with Stan Lee of Spider-Man and Doctor Strange at Marvel, creator of Captain Atom and the Question at Charlton, and the Creeper and Hawk and Dove at DC Comics, Ditko was known for the heart and soul he put into every character he worked on (usually by injecting qualities of himself into the astory.) Although he only did 38 issues of the Amazing Spider-Man , these issues defined the character. He created Doctor Octopus, the Lizard and the Green Goblin. He was also involved in the relaunch of the Hulk in Tales to Astonish after his own magazine died after 6 issues. After a fallout with Lee that no one (including Lee) understood what happened, Steve left Marvel and moved on to Charlton Comics where he revamped the Blue Beetle, a...

I picked up the following book last week as an impulse purchase (I don't know what attracted me to the cover.) What surprised me is that it is listed as Cover D. For a 15th issue in a series that, when reading the issue, didn't seem to have any large necessary impact on a killer story line (I found it better than average, but...) That's when I realized, although I am aware of just about a few issues really having a variant cover over the last couple of years (maybe five...ten), but the amount of variants  is almost becoming unwieldy. Back in the beginning days of comics, variants only happened by accident, either by a manufacturers defect (for example, double-stapled covers, missing inner pages, etc..), or a printer's error (number changes on issue, price changes.) There are very few examples of variants until just after the Second World War. At that point, Canada created true variants by limiting US cultural product importation (due to wartime import restrictions...