How Spider-Man Co-Creator Steve Ditko Changed Modern Comic Books
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Steve Ditko, the comic book illustrator known for introducing a cinematic storytelling quality into sequential art died four years ago today on June 29, 2018.
Ditko is significantly recognized a one of the co-creators of Spider-Man along with Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, and Dr. Strange at Marvel, the Creeper and Hawk and Dove at DC Comics and the Question and Captain Atom at Charlton Comics (more well known iterations of these characters are Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan of The Watchmen).
Ditko was also an adherent of the philosopher Ayn Rand whose theories peppered many of his stories.
Mr. Ditko’s first work in print was in early 1953, in a romance comic from a minor publisher. For three months he worked in the studio of Kirby and Joe Simon, the creators of Captain America, before heading to Charlton Comics, which had its headquarters in Derby, Conn. Charlton offered low pay and inferior production values but creative freedom, and Mr. Ditko would return there often over his career.
The introduction of the Comics Code Authority — a regulating body established by the industry in 1954 in response to Senate subcommittee hearings into the supposed influence of comics on juvenile delinquency — stifled Mr. Ditko’s Charlton output, which had largely covered horror, crime and science fiction.
Influenced by the artist Mort Meskin, a specialist in mood and noirish textures, Mr. Ditko had infused his pre-Charlton work with a sweaty anxiety and recurrent motifs of paranoia. In “In Search of Steve Ditko” — a 2007 British documentary narrated by the TV personality Jonathan Ross — the novelist and comic book writer Alan Moore says that in Mr. Ditko’s work there was “a tormented elegance to the way the characters stood, the way that they bent their hands.”
He added, “They always looked as if they were on the edge of some kind of revelation or breakdown.”
Spider-Man appeared in 1962. Kirby drew the cover of his debut, but for three years the character was Mr. Ditko’s baby.
Mr. Ditko helped develop other Marvel superheroes, including Iron Man and the Hulk. Of these, probably his best-known, besides Spider-Man, was Dr. Strange, a “master of the mystic arts,” who first appeared in 1963.
For Dr. Strange’s occult adventures and battles in alternate dimensions, Mr. Ditko created foreboding expanses of abstract shapes and patterns, ruled by evil sorcerers and supernatural entities.
But it was with Spider-Man that Mr. Ditko flourished. Marvel artists generally followed the “Marvel method,” in which artists built on Mr. Lee’s synopses and were encouraged to emulate Mr. Kirby’s outsize style.
Mr. Ditko, who focused less on fight scenes and more on Peter Parker’s psyche, had broad license with plotting and drawing “The Amazing Spider-Man.” Many fans regard Issues 31, 32 and 33 — which climax with the superhero, after reviewing his life, triumphantly upending heavy machinery that has pinned him — as a Ditko peak.
Mr. Ditko’s conception of the series had been shifting, increasingly influenced by Ayn Rand’s libertarian philosophy. Spider-Man’s villain the Looter was named after Rand’s term for those leeching from the creative elite, phrases like “equal value trade” crept into Parker’s words, and he voiced resentment toward student protesters. (Mr. Lee, in speaking engagements on college campuses, found himself in the awkward position of having to explain to irate young audiences that such a stance was Mr. Ditko’s, not his own.)
