I’ve been doing a lot of research into Steve Ditko’s old comics over the weekend. He did a lot of work for Charlton Comics over the years, of which he’s best known for his work on Blue Beetle, Captain Atom, and The Question, but those titles only make up a minimal amount of his work with the company. He’d done hundreds of shorts from science fiction to horror for the group from the 1950s all the way through the 1980s.
The 1950s work is very well documented, reprinted in several places because this work has lapsed into public domain. The 1960s work similarly has most of it reprinted because of similar rules with copyright laws that didn’t get addressed until 1968.
But from that point forward, most of these short stories don’t have homes in graphic novels nor reprints that are easily available for someone to read. The Charlton work just evaporates into comic nothingness.
I did some research to find out why this weekend, talking with Ditko’s relatives, doing internet sleuthing, and no one seems to know the copyright owner of these works.
Last I can tell through the internet, a man named Roger Broughton bought the Charlton properties in 1985 under a name of Avalon Communications. Looking up both has not been helpful, as Broughton is a common name, and Avalon Communications now appears as some consulting website unrelated to comics.
So where did Charlton go?
It’s a mystery, and one I hope gets solved because it’d be so great to see these comics in a beautiful format collected together where they can be enjoyed.
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