This week’s digital releases include two masterworks: one contemporary, one classic.
Beginning at the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2014, and ending on January 1, 2015, Leslie Stein began drawing a comics page a night. Fueled by an urge toward visual and narrative experimentation and made possible by serendipitous bouts of insomnia, Stein has combined words and images in a series of comic strips, paintings, and collages that make up Bright-Eyed at Midnight.
Bright-Eyed at Midnight collects the best of the 365 pages she made in 2014. By turns funny, unsettling, charming, and improvisational, Stein explores her 1980s childhood, dreams, travel, drinking, playing rock shows, and bar patrons, along with quiet moments of introspection and loneliness in the most exciting city in America. Drawn in pen and ink and vibrant watercolors, and written in a minimalist poetic cadence, Bright-Eyed at Midnight can be yours through comiXology and Sequential.
Also available is the fifth volume of the Steve Ditko Archives: Dripping with Fear. This collection features another 200-plus meticulously restored, full-color pages from Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko in his early prime, at the time working in near anonymity for Charlton Comics in the then-popular horror/suspense genre.
Manipulating the traditional comic book layout with masterful results and sharing a Manhattan studio with fetish artist Eric Stanton, this volume chronicles one of the most exciting and inventive times in the life of a man who would go on to change American comics forever. These iconic classics are offered by both comiXology and Sequential.