Steve Ditko and Alfredo Alcala Also

Last week I showed beautiful ink-wash covers by Dick Dillin/Jack Adler and by Jack Sparling, and before I leave the topic of grey tones behind for the time being I want to make particular note of a couple more gentlemen whom I would say mastered the medium.

Steve Ditko in the late 1960s drew a few stories for James Warren's Creepy and Eerie magazines with a fabulous gray wash, a sample page of which appears up above. When I first stumbled across these Ditko jobs in the mid-70s I was stunned by their beauty and I feel they are among Ditko's finest work.

And, in the late 1970s when Marvel Comics was starting to wind down its black-and-white magazine line, they teamed up Walter Simonson on pencils and Alfredo Alcala on grey-tone inks for a black-and-white Hulk series and the pairing was phenomenal. Below is an image of a great page I used to own from Rampaging Hulk #1.

Aside from an occasional Batman Black and White miniseries, these days there is no regular outlet for ink-wash, grey-tone artwork. I wish there were.