Book Review: Action Heroes Archives, Volume 2

The Action Heroes Archives, Vol. 2 by Steve Ditko

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This second volume of Steve Ditko's work at Charlton comics collects a ton of work involving characters Captain Atom, the Blue Beetle, and the Question. This is a massive nearly 400 page book, the largest of the DC Archive books which usually clock in at around 250 pages.

Captain Atom had been in previous volumes and he's streamlined somewhat here. For pure comic enjoyment, the Captain Atom stories are the money books. Captain Atom's powers and costumes change as a result of a radiation accident. He also garners some public suspicion as a menace giving him perhaps a bit of a Marvel feel. The character's two part adventure. "Finally Falls the Mighty" and "After the Fall A New Beginning" are great as are his adventures in battling the ghost. It appears on page 249, this will never be resolved as there are no more issues of Captain Atom, but the Charlton Bullseye stories towards the back of the book.

The Blue Beetle is Ted Kord who replaced Dan Garrett and I like the sense of mystery about what happened to Garrett, the original Blue Beetle. IT gave the character interesting problem. It would be like if with no explanation given to readers or the public, someone else became Batman and Bruce Wayne was missing.

The Question is Danny Gage, a local reporter who has a mask which allows him to see and breathe normally but completely hides his feature. The gas allows changes the color of his clothes for some reason. The Question's an interesting character but these early stories are a tad repetitive.

Ditko does the art but doesn't script most of the book. He does get into some class objectivist polemics when he does some of the later stories. This becomes problematic in Blue Beetle #4 and #5 in particular. In Blue Beetle #4, you have the closest thing you get to a team up as the Blue Beetle battles someone who wants to destroy works of art that suggest that there are heroic men or someone are better or achieve more than others. The story had something very important to say about the lowering of standards and the idea of self-esteem run amuck. And that way, it was almost prophetic. But the script was horrible for a comic as page after page was filled with overflowing text bubbles. Issue 5 focused on people objecting to scientists doing crazy things and was a defense of science and it had the same problem. Ditko could escape verbosity in scripts. While the stories are "wrong," it's wrong in a way that's interesting and worth reading to just wonder why Ditko thought this was a good way to communicate his message.

In this end, this is still a fun book and worth reading for the rarity alone. While there aren't classic villain and the only truly great story is the two part Captain Atom story that began the book, it's a fun look at some comics which provided the reading public an interesting alternative during the Silver Age of comics.



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