On the other hand, I love Steve Ditko!
I’m in the middle of his AMAZING SPIDER-MAN run right now (as of this writing)—again!—and I’m just marveling (no pun intended) at the intricate details of the fingers and hands he draws, the fully detailed faces of characters like the Vulture, the designs of villains like Kraven the Hunter, the way he makes Peter Parker’s face completely sympathetic with just a few lines, and above all the fluidity of Spider-Man’s movements. AMAZING SPIDER-MAN ANNUAL #1 proves all this magnificently and is almost a textbook on how to make a great comic.
The simplicity of Ditko’s images belies the fact that they are perfectly laid out and tell the stories brilliantly. This is how a comic book series should start out.
I believe in God and His plan for the world, and I think His plan extends to little things people would never normally connect. Stan Lee and Steve Ditko bringing us SPIDER-MAN in the early 1960’s makes me think that God had His hand in the whole thing. Like Spider-Man HAD to exist, and this was the way He made it happen. I suppose you could say I see God’s hand in Ditko’s work. John Romita Sr., Ross Andru, John Byrne, and John Romita Jr. could come later, but it had to start with Ditko!
But it wasn’t just SPIDER-MAN—Ditko has produced thousands of comic book pages to stagger the imagination. (Literally!) Ditko’s DR. STRANGE was amazing to behold! He created new worlds of imagination. (Again—literally!) I think it was when I saw him reimagine Kirby’s MACHINE MAN in ‘79/’80 that I really first started to appreciate him. When I was a kid, I saw quite a few Ditko reprints of SPIDER-MAN, DR. STRANGE, and even the old monster comics, usually with a quirky ending. While Kirby cranked out a multitude of monsters, Ditko’s stories were usually spooky or had an alien tearing off his human-like face mask in the last panel. (Ditko’s super-hero and Twilight Zone-y types of storytelling collided in the first Tinkerer story!) Stories like this have recently been getting reprinted in good, hardcover oversized editions lately and they remind us what some people crank out as paycheck work is appreciated by another generation as true art.
I always liked Ditko’s hero designs. The Creeper was always a personal favorite! He’s so unlike any other creation. Only Ditko would give a tough action hero—what do I call it?—a fur boa? Who puts fur into his super-hero designs? Ditko gave Kraven the Hunter fur too—and those are the only two major characters I can think of with fur! Blue Beetle, Captain Atom, the Question—also all classic designs. As I often do, I have to point out that thinly veiled versions of these characters have attained worldwide acclaim in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ WATCHMEN series and the movie based on it.
A little while back, I bought back issues of most of Ditko’s CREEPER and BLUE BEETLE runs, and I find that his writing (or plotting) was right up there with the best. And, of course, there’s the recent argument that Kirby and Ditko were more responsible for the storylines in the early Marvel comics than the listed writer Stan Lee. There might be some truth to that, but I feel I have to point out that the work they did WITH Lee was mostly better than any work they wrote themselves. The argument can be made that Stan Lee was such a great writer that he could give his artist a page of plot and the end result couldn’t help but be magic. How about if we give them ALL credit and leave it at that?
So, with all this gushing, why did I say I wasn’t that big a Ditko fan? Maybe it’s expectations. I wouldn’t want to see a Ditko issue of DAREDEVIL in the middle of a Frank Miller run—but I also wouldn’t want to see a Frank Miller issue of the THE CREEPER in the middle of a Ditko run! And also, maybe his later work wasn’t quite as tight as his earlier work, just not as intricate or as electric as the earlier stuff. Was that simply another example of a comic artist getting older? Another example of an artist “parodying” his earlier work or phoning it in? No, I think it was just a matter of format. Format really matters. Ditko’s earlier work was done on much larger art board than the later standard of 11x17 inches. I think the newer, smaller boards just didn’t give Ditko enough room to do his thing. This is not any kind of slam, it’s just that his work looks better when reduced more. I remember Marvel did a few pocketbook paperback reprints back in the late 70’s, about half the size of a regular comic, and I seem to recall that the SPIDER-MAN and DR. STRANGE editions looked especially good! Of course, the recent oversized editions also look good! So, Ditko is a special kind of artist whose work just has to be presented properly and then it’s magnificent! I think there are a lot of comic book artists that would look really good reprinted in manga-sized editions, and Ditko is definitely one of them.
I found an old issue of MAN-BAT drawn by Ditko in a discount box at a comic con, and I snapped it up. That’s when you know you like something—when your first instinct is “Yes, I want that!” Anyhow, the issue guest-starred Batman and I never thought I’d see a Ditko version of Batman! And you know what, in every panel, Batman’s face was completely in shadow—and it worked! Leave it to Ditko to take something that a thousand people have worked on and find a new angle.
Like music albums, I wish there were some comics that were just based on the creator and whatever he wanted to do. If there were a John Byrne comic, I would buy every issue—or Neal Adams or Jim Starlin or maybe one or two others. I would definitely buy a STEVE DITKO comic! He could do whatever he wanted—horror stories, sci fi, fairy tales, any new creation he might come up with, or “covers” of established characters, especially some of the newer or independent characters we never got to see him do. Ditko versions of Vampirella, the Shadow, the Spirit, Popeye, or Howard the Duck would be AMAZING!
As of this writing, Steve Ditko is still alive—and still avoiding the spotlight. After four big SPIDER-MAN movies and Comic-Con a bigger event than ever, you KNOW that people are trying to get to him for interviews or appearances, yet he avoids it all. Like J.D. Salinger and Jack Chick, there’s no photo of him online from the last 40 years. Like them, he is (publically, at least) an American mystery. There are stories of him though, from people who worked with him. They paint an interesting picture. I just read that he was/is friendlier than I would have expected from his attitude towards the press or the mercilessness of some of his characters like Mr. A. Also, shunning the spotlight seems to be at odds with Objectivist philosophy. Oh well, aren’t all people contradictions here and there?
I would love to talk to him about Spider-Man or the Creeper or Stan Lee or Jack Kirby or what it was like in those halcyon days when legends were forged. At the very least, I’d like to know what he thought of Rorschach. But he probably never even read WATCHMEN or saw the movie.
But I’ll tell you this: If I had a comic book company (and it was maybe 20 or 30 years ago), Ditko would be one of the first people I’d call. “Do you have a character like the Question or the Creeper that you want to do? Great! Give me 100 stories!” But I’d present it properly.
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