the creeper

Denys Cowan and Bill Sienkiewicz are legends in comics, known for their groundbreaking art in decades past, and both have been a powerful influence on artists who have come after. Cowan is best known for drawing The Question in the 1980s and Hardware in the '90s, while Sienkiewicz is known for his work on Moon Knight and New Mutants in the '80s. Now both these artists are coming together, with Cowan on pencils and Sienkiewicz on inks, to help writer Christopher Priest tell a very important story in Deathstroke #11.

Despite the pedigree of being created by Steve Ditko, the Creeper has never really caught on. You'd think he would --- if nothing else, "What if the Joker was a good guy?" seems like a question that could result in some pretty compelling stories, even if that doesn't quite explain the preponderance of bright red back hair that he ended up with. Still, there's some potential there. It's just a question of how you can go about tapping into it. Well, if you happen to be Michael Fleisher and Steve Ditko and you're writing 1st Issue Special #7 in 1975, you might think that the best way to go about that was to have him fight a third-string Batman villain and hope for the best. And needless to say, that didn't really work out.

The Creeper isn't the greatest Steve Ditko creation, and it's not even the most Ditko-esque. (Maybe those are the same things.) But one thing the Creeper comics have going for them is that they follow their own unsettling dream logic, and Ditko commits to the mania that powers the title character...