What's in a name? Let your inner-Otaku speak.

I have always been in awe of people who work, in any field, in anonimity. In the Art world it's pretty rare, unless of course it's a selling point, like Banksy being a real 'underground' tagger (oh yeah).

But there are practical occassions when cartoonists have done this, in the past in particular, for instance when one worked for one of the big two comics publishers here in the UK, one may well have been 'discouraged' from working for the rival publisher. The same was true of DC and Marvel at one point, I'm sure. Which brings me to my first question, 'when is Pat Boyette art, not Pat Boyette work'?

Seems like an odd query, I know, but when Steve Ditko left Charlton comics, Pat Boyette took over some of his stuff (there's a pair of drawing boots to fill), I am now informed. Now, I have a particular comic here that I have puzzled over for years, it's Ghostly Tales #43. I'm totally sure that the first story, where the art is credited to Pat Boyette, is in fact by the great Steve Ditko, it positively reeks of Spider Man and Doctor Strange and just too many Ditko touches for it to be a ghost work - I think.

However, just to be contencious, I'm contrasting it with an uncredited Ditko page, again from Charlton, this time from The Many Ghosts of Doctor Graves; and just for good measure, with another story where the artwork is credited to Pat Boyette. Now, for years I have just assumed that for contractual reasons a bunch of artists worked for Charlton on the fly, and used the psudonym, Pat Boyette, but I read on another site that Pat Boyette was real and worked for Charlton, so I'm confused and bewildered, so I'm throwing it open to you, here is the artwork for you to subject to close-reading and content analysis (you may begin, now:>):

I'm sure this is Ditko because nobody could ghost him this well, and surely nobody ghosting him would go so far as to include Ditko's almost trademark patterning in the work:


I mean, this uncredited page from The Many Ghosts of Doctor Graves is clearly by Ditko and not a ghost artist, precisely because of such detail:

And whilst this form of crosshatching might easily be used by many cartoonists, it adds to the feel of the work and the weight of line and the characterization that a comics fan; a geek, if you wish, can easily recognise.

So now we turn to the second work in Ghostly Tales #43 that is credited to Pat Boyette, and we can see that whilst it is really good art, with it's own style (I know people who prefer it to the Ditko style), it is clearly not drawn by the same hand as the earlier story:

Again, let me be clear, I really like the artwork on the second story, but which of these, if any, is drawn by Pat Boyette?

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While we are all here talking about Ditko, I thought I'd show you this; it's a fantastic example of the man's pencil and artwork from one of my favourites, The Creeper (which I purloined from Dial B for Blog, a great site):

Thank you DC/Wildstorm and the Albion team.

I was just made-up to recieve 3 copies of the collected Albion today (can I call it a graphic novel?), from DC/Wildstorm - courtesy of Fed-Ex. In addition to being a complete set of the comic, it carries a bunch of extras, a bit like a DVD, and has some wonderful old vintage British comic reprints: Janus Stark, The House of Dollmann, The Steel Claw, Kelly's Eye, (I loved the artwork of Solano Lopez) and others. The introduction by Neil Gaimen struck a chord and his rememberances of comics like Fantastic and Terrific and the transgressive appeal of The Spider seem like a shared collective memory to me, and will, I suspect, to many other comic lovers. As you will have guessed, I raced through it quickly so I can look forward to reading it later (see below about my problems with delayed gratification).

You know, there's just a couple of panels of me in it (see below), but they were kind enough to send me 3 copies. I think I had about 15 of my cartoons in National Lampoon's Favourite Cartoons of the 21st Century, and they only sent me 2 copies. Tight-fisted bastards.