Ditkomania is Back!

Steve Ditko is one of the best artists ever to draw comics. Spider-Man and Doctor Strange are but two of his many visual creations. It makes sense that such a great artist would have a fan following, of course.

Back in the 1980s, a fanzine entitled Ditkomania was produced by and for fans of the work of Mr. Ditko. I was drawing regularly for the Comics Buyer's Guide in those heady days, and CBG would forward to me letters that had been sent to me in care of them. A gentleman named Bill Hall was the founding editor and publisher of DM, and he wrote to tell me of the existence of Ditkomania and to invite me to submit Ditko-related drawings for publication in then-future issues.

I count myself among the many fans of Mr. Ditko's stylings, and so I agreed. Over a period of (I think) a couple of years, I did have some of my drawings published in DM. You can see some of them for yourself if you look here and here and especially here (my personal favorite). But then I got busy or something, and Ditkomania continued into the 1990s without me. Somewhere in there, it ceased publication.

Fast-forward to the present day, and imagine my pleasure to find out that Ditkomania has been revived for the new millennium! Rob Imes, another fine gentleman, has been given the go-ahead by Bill Hall himself to produce new issues of DM (and Mr. Hall is a regular contributor to the new incarnation).

I'm guessing Mr. Imes has used the internet to seek out many of the erstwhile contributors to DM, and he found me over on ebay (where, of course, I operate the Hayfamzone Dynasty). Mr. Imes sent me an ebay message to tell me of the revival of Ditkomania, and that's all I needed to hear. Of course I wanted to see what was up!

And now that I have seen a couple of the new issues, I couldn't be more impressed. The professionalism of Mr. Imes' fanzine has energized me to step up to the plate. Although I haven't lifted a pencil to draw anything for publication in quite a few years, I definitely want to be part of the New Age of Ditkomania.

Click here if you'd like to order an issue of the new Ditkomania for yourself, and maybe be on the lookout for something drawn by me in a future issue!