I can’t stop thinking about The mad genius Steve Ditko, one of the greatest we’ve ever had. And a huge inspiration to me. The 1st comic book I bought was a Jack Kirby one, as I’ve recounted before. The 2nd was a Ditko one! 
t was one of those fat 25-cent reprint books Marvel put out in 1970, Marvel Tales #28. Had one of those goofy Marie Severin covers, where the limbs didn’t quite make sense.
But inside was Ditko! Here's the splash page, from pencil to finish! I haven't seen too many Ditko pencils.
Not only a Spidey story, but a Doc Strange, too!
That same week, I bought the current Spidey, a Lee-Romita one. Why is this Ditko story so much better, 10-year-old me wondered? And the Doc Strange, well, that was just insane!
As most of you know, or SHOULD, Ditko was one of the twin foundational giants of Marvel Comics, along with the great Jack Kirby. Together they are responsible for every billion-dollar film franchise currently clogging your Netflix feed.
A strange recluse, intransigent to the end, Ditko gave no interviews and posed for only a handful of pictures 60 years ago. For the past 20 years, he’s produced nothing but bizarre self-published zines chock full of Ayn Rand inspired screeds. Little is known of his life.
He lived modestly, like a comics monk, with a one-room studio in Midtown and a small apartment in the same building. If he received royalties from Marvel, he either didn’t spend it or tore up the checks.
For those of you who don’t grasp what a giant he was, here’s a rundown of what Steve Ditko created, because proper credit was important to the man, and we owe him that, or at least I do.
Understand that he was as wronged as Jack Kirby, maybe more so, because he chose to remain silent for much of the ensuing decades, instead of fighting back as Jack did.
Ditko created Dr. Strange. Stan took credit for it, of course, and plastered his name on every story as “writer,” until Ditko demanded that he stop, but Dr. Stephen Strange was ALL Ditko. When you read those stories, there can really be no debate.
In a Stan’s Soapbox, the monthly forum that ran in every Marvel book and where he created the Stan the Man character that would make him rich and famous, Lee promo-ed the debut of Doc in 1963 and admitted, for perhaps the only time, that Dr. Strange was Ditko’s creation.
By 1974’s infamous “Origins of Marvel Comics,” Lee was taking sole credit.
My beloved editor at Abrams has a great story of when he, as a young editor at DC, stupidly asked Ditko to sign his copy of Origins. It didn't go well. It's a fab story. We've talked about drawing it up one day.
There’s no trace of Stan in these stories or characters. Nothing else that he wrote comes close. Nothing else in any other Marvel book comes close. But it OOZES Ditko.
It was Ditko that designed the classic red-and-gold armor that is still the norm for Iron Man. Kirby created the character, but Ditko enhanced it.
Which brings us to Spider-man.
The world’s most-popular super-hero, an icon worth…. how much?… $100 billion? $200 billion? Legend has it that a visitor to Ditko’s studio saw some six-figure royalty checks from Marvel sitting, uncashed and gathering dust, on Ditko’s desk.
Steve would accept the full measure of what he was owed or nothing! True or just legend? Who knows! He was nuts.
In 1962, Marvel was building its line from scratch, mostly with characters dreamt up by the great Jack Kirby, and then Ditko. Kirby pumped out 4, sometimes 5, books a month, plus almost all of Marvel’s covers, and designed all the characters in almost every title.
Marvel could only put out 10 books a month in 1962, so leaning on Kirby and Ditko meant those books were of unmatched quality.
Ditko wasn’t as prolific as Kirby because he insisted on inking his own work. Jack only did pencils. Ditko was a masterful inker and it’s easy to see why he was reluctant to hand over art to the hacks that Marvel employed at the time.
I remember poring over this demonstration of Ditko inking, looking for clues!
Much of Kirby’s work was butchered in Marvel’s early days. Jack had a family to support, of course, and needed the income. The reclusive bachelor Ditko did not. And his inks are just pure beauty.
Lee has always claimed total ownership over Spider-man. We know now that was bullshit. Here's Steve's take on who created what.
Stan had a concept and the name of the new character. That’s all he had. So he turned to Jack, as always, to create it. Kirby delivered a typical Kirbyesque one, a muscular adventurer more like Capt. America than the Spidey we know. This is Ditko's recreation of it.
Stan, to his credit, wasn’t happy with it. He wanted something different, so he turned to his other genius, Ditko. Steve threw out everything Kirby had done and re-made the character into a spindly teenager. I love these early stories when Spidey was REALLY scrawny.
When Spidey became an instant smash hit, naturally, Stan took credit for everything. All the ideas were his, all the characters were his. They weren’t.
Just like with Kirby, Stan’s “writing” consisted of filling in word balloons on finished pages, plotted by the artist, and with dialogue based on the margin notes Kirby and Ditko provided.
If he made input on some character, it was tweaks in the editing phase after the pages were turned in. That’s what Stan was, a great editor with terrific instincts. It wasn’t enough for him.
Ditko and Kirby both have commented at length about this process, Steve in his History of Comics essays in his self-published floppies of the past 20 years.
What Lee added to Spidey, and it’s no small contribution, was the hero’s non-stop snappy patter and wisecracks. Spidey is Stan’s doppelgänger, a motormouth spewing out one corny line after another. But it was cool, because it was a superhero doing it, and we kids lapped it up.
That certainly wasn’t Ditko! It’s the only schtick Stan had, of course, and all his dialogue in EVERY Marvel book was infused with it. Except Dr. Strange, which, as conceptually wondrous as it was, was grim and humorless. THAT was all Ditko!
Steve’s doppelgänger was the lonely, shunned Peter Parker, always the outsider, but one who stuck to his beliefs, no matter the cost.
Ditko worked on just 38 issues of Spider-man, plus the debut in Amazing Fantasy #15. In that time, here are the characters that were introduced. All the domestic cast, Aunt May, J. Jonah Jameson, Flash Thompson, Gwen Stacey, Betty Brant, etc.
Most are formula archetypes, except the self-aggrandizing J. Jonah— who Ditko turned into a thinly-disguised, malevolent Stan Lee! Even Stan admitted as much— but they work well enough.
What made the book so intriguing is that gallery of bizarre villains, Dr. Octopus, the Sandman, the Vulture, the Lizard, the Green Goblin, Mysterio, the Scorpion, Electro, the Chameleon, villains the likes of which we’d never seen in comics, outside of Batman and Dick Tracy
After two years, Ditko demanded a co-writer credit, and his cut of the pay. Stan was livid. Other artists who pressed for the same demand settled for an increase in page rate and no credit, but Ditko demanded his due in the credit box.
Stan started taking potshots at Ditko. In an interview with the New York Herald-Tribune in 1965, Stan grumbled “Ditko thinks he’s the genius of the world.”
Look at THIS dig. Stan mocks Ditko's first credited issue. "A lot of readers are going to hate it"???? What kind of promo is THAT? "Buy it so you'll know what all the criticism is about"?? Well, since it isn't on the stands yet, the only "criticism" is from YOU, Stan!
So you can see why the Ditko Lee partnership went sour in a hurry. According to Steve by issue 25, Stan stopped speaking to him. I love the cover of that issue. Maybe my favorite.
Although a couple issues later, Ditko delivered THIS masterpiece! Aw, I can't decide. I love them both.
For decades Stan claimed Ditko stopped speaking to HIM. But y'know what, given Stan's track record on truthfulness, I believe Steve.
And I have to acknowledge what is imo the single greatest book of the early Silver Age, Spidey Annual #1. 64 pages of all-new Ditko art!
By 1966, Ditko had enough and handed in the art to for Spidey #38 to production manager Sol Brodsky and told him he quit.
His Spidey tenure just peetered out, with a couple subpar issues (for him), but Ditko's farewell to Doc Strange is a stunning piece of work, all splash pages and wondrous visuals.
And that was that. Ditko would never draw a Doc Strange or Spidey story again.
After Ditko quit, the writing chores did indeed fall to Stan, since Ditko’s successor, John Romita, although a wonderful artist, was no writer, by his own admission. Spidey was Marvel’s biggest seller by that time. The pressure was on.
Stan stayed on the book another 62 issues, a tenure nearly twice that of Ditko’s, and delivered exactly ONE character of significance, the Kingpin. Not that Stan didn’t try, but he had nothing.
Mostly, Stan brought back Ditko villains, one after another, for long story arcs, and these were great stories, beautifully drawn by Romita, and kept Spidey firmly on top, but the proof to Ditko's claims is right there on the pages.
Pardon me if I prattle on, but this only scratches the surface of Ditko's body of work. I left out the earlier Atlas stuff, which is fabulous. Fun, beautifully done, but mostly kid stuff, post witch hunts and all.
After Marvel, Ditko stomped away from Marvel and landed at Charlton Comics, the worst publisher in comics in 1967, and the one with the most mob ties! But that is another story. It was here that Ditko created…. The Watchmen.
Oh, not the actual Watchmen, that was, of course Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, but there’s no doubt where those characters came from. Dr. Manhattan is Ditko’s Capt. Atom, created by Joe Gill & designed by Ditko. Steve always gave Gill credit, too!
Nightowl is the Blue Beetle, updated by Ditko from a minor Golden Age character, Silk Spectre is Nightshade...
...and…. especially… the demented Rorschach is the Question, Ditko’s merciless, faceless man of mystery, spouting objectivist propaganda as he pummels bad guys.
Pretty heady stuff for 12-year-olds back in 1967! Of course, you could easily argue Ayn Rand appeals mainly to those with the intellect of 12-year-olds. Charlton didn’t give a shit, as long as the comics kept coming.
Charlton had it's infamous $5 page rate. Marvel's was $30 at the time. How did Ditko survive on that? The excellent Dial B for Blog site speculates Charlton matched Marvel's rate since Ditko was their star.
Too bad Charlton books are so low quality. The printing is awful. They're often out of register. And they didn'y use letterers, the used a typesetting machine, usually credited to "A. Machine" and it's horrible. But the stories are great.
Then Steve pops up at DC where he gives us The Creeper! The covers are especially awesome. These things just must have leapt off the spinner rack.
And Ditko wades into the Sixties civil war with Hawk & Dove. I don't know HOW this one got greenlighted at staid buttoned-down DC! This cover is a precursor to Ditko's Mr. A screeds.
Both titles only lasted a year. Apparently Ditko had a recurrence of TB and had to take a few months off, without pay, of course. The life of a freelancer. But hey, Ayn Rand would say, tough shit! Although she was on government disability herself.
So DC just killed the books, which is a damn shame. It would have been fun to see Ditko's politics play out in those titles. That would have been INSANE. The drawing really slips as he gets sick, too.
He doesn't go back to DC for awhile, for reasons unknown. But he DOES land at Warren, which offered much higher pay rates. And WOW does he bounce back, completely changing his inking style for the B&w mags! Just LOOK at the ink on this beauty!!
In this story, he uses wash. And it's all still 100% Ditko, instantly recognizable, totally unique.
When Warren ran into trouble and almost went bankrupt, Ditko retuned to Charlton. He spent the rest of the 70s drawing short stories for their mystery and horror mags.
These were all great, and Ditko had the freedom he insisted on. I bought them all.
He really fell out of fashion in the 70s. His stuff was too cartoonish in an era that preferred the realism of Neal Adams and Barry Smith. But equally cartoonish guys like Starlin, Ploog and Wrightson became stars. I dunno, maybe fans just tired of Ditko, as they did Kirby.
He did give us a few gems, like Shade the Changing Man for DC.... which was just totally BONKERS!
Unfortunately, this is when publishers switched to plastic printing plates from metal, and the quality of the repro took a HUGE nosedive. I'd like to see these stories printed correctly, because Shade is a nightmare come to life. What kind of mind conjures up this stuff? Ditko's!
In the 80s, he returned to Marvel, but not to Spidey or Doc Strange. A pity, since Spidey was horrible during the Ross Andru era. He also did work the emerging indie companies. I don't think the stories he did for Star•Reach books has ever been reprinted.
It's worth hunting down. It's still pure Ditko.
His last "significant" creation is Static, another crazed superhero, for Eclipse in the mid-80s. Ditko is 60 now and his drawing hand is starting to fail. These stories are a scream though.
Haha. Just look at this thing!
From the 90s on, it's some piecemeal work for publishers, but mostly his own self-published books with partner Robin Snyder. There must be nearly 100 of these things!
The artwork really slides as Ditko ages, until it's just doodles full of Randian rants and long screeds about who knows what. Much of it is completely indecipherable, but it's fascinating. I have about 20 of them.
And he scribbled away right up to the end, locked behind this studio door in midtown Manhattan. It was always inspiring to me that I knew Ditko was there, hunched over his board.
In fact, Ditko's final self-published book is due out in September! Snyder ran a Kickstarter to fund it and raised twice the goal!
I have always obsessively collected Ditko, especially from his peak years in the 1960s. At one time, I had a complete run of his Spideys, amassed when they were affordable.I'll never part with the ones I have left.
Ditko's work is like a textbook on graphic storytelling. I study it all the time.
