Eight years before he teamed with Stan Lee to create Spider-Man, Steve Ditko nearly died at age 27. Stricken with tuberculosis, the artist spent a year recovering at his family's home in Pennsylvania, then embarked on an astonishing creative spree at Charlton Comics, where he cranked out nearly 500 pages of action-saturated science fiction, fantasy, Western and suspense stories in a single year.

A notoriously cheap outfit that stressed quantity over quality, Charlton paid contributors a pittance, but Ditko transformed hackneyed dialog and cornball plot twists into startling portraits of desperate souls. Tapping the dark streak that would inform his work at Marvel Comics in the 1960s, Ditko developed his eye for color, action and character psychology during the Charlton era.

A rich sampling of the illustrator's pre-superhero stories from 1956 and 1957 comes together in the new hardcover volume Unexplored Worlds: The Steve Ditko Archives Vol. 2, available Tuesday.

To understand the creative DNA that would later inform Ditko's iconic renderings of Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk and Iron Man, check out these Archive illustrations, accompanied by commentary from Unexplored Worlds editor Blake Bell.

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Out of This World No. 3

"Ditko's association with Charlton cemented his reputation as a man whose sole purpose on this earth was to be a comic-book artist," writes Bell, who penned the introduction for Unexplored Worlds: The Steve Ditko Archives Vol. 2.