03/08/23: STEVE & STAN: (Conclusion)
Hey y’all,
Today— is the final part(s) of my look at the work of Steve Ditko and Stan Lee.
PART 1 focused on their mutual success with SPIDER-MAN.
PART 2 was a look at Ditko’s Strange Psychedelia .
Below, I try to wrap this 9 pound burrito. Stick around for a more robust than usual LINER NOTES that follow the transcript below.
PART 3
Even if Stan Lee wasn’t encouraging of Ditko’s experimentation, there were still plenty of reasons to enable it.
Ditko’s approach to comics was thriving. A rising wave of popularity that gave Stan the perfect impetus (or excuse) to bathe in the adoration of the countercultures he met on his promotional college tours.
Increasingly distracted, Stan’s grip on the wheel loosened. Allowing Ditko the agency and space to become even more assertive, innovative, and bold.
A rare and mutual success… that would only tear the rift between them wider.
“... justice is objectively identifying a thing for what it is and treating it accordingly…
No one gets the unearned.” - Steve Ditko, (1987)
For Ditko, Peter Parker entering college meant the time for excuses was done. But when he pushed hard for Spider-man to mature into his vision of an objective hero— Lee first shut him down, and then shut him out.
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(Above: My recreation of Amazing Fantasy #15 page 11.)
From Lee’s vantage point, a man as philosophically rigid as Steve Ditko couldn’t have been easy to talk to. Especially in Stan’s often compromised position as bridge between Marvel’s creative staff and ownership.
Now locked in a cold, silent war often attributed to the same lack of credit, compensation, and control that fueled Lee’s feud with Jack Kirby— the tightening of the perimeters around Ditko’s philosophies would lead him to cast Stan’s silence as cowardice.
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He now saw his work for Marvel and with Lee with the same absolute division as the rest of his worldview.
Spider-man was HIS work.
Work for which he demanded either the appropriate credit…
Or none at all.
PART 4
His work with Stan Lee now untenable, Ditko felt morally obligated to walk away from Spider-man. But what then, would become of Doctor Strange?
As Strange stood firm, dead center of a swirling, mystic psycho-sea— he became a thin metaphor for the kind of fortitude Ditko believed necessary to navigate the chaos of the 1960s.
For someone who NEEDS to bring about the world he believed in through art— idly watching the co-option of his extraordinary, idealized man must have felt like being Bill Watterson stuck behind a urinating Calvin in traffic.
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Thus 1966— With the need for justice outweighed by his belief in self-actualization…
Steve Ditko silently left Marvel.
He’d taken the jobs. Done and been paid for the work.And if someone OBJECTIVELY better suited were to come along to fill his shoes? They deserved the spot.
With Ditko in what would become a lifelong retreat from the public eye, Lee was free to polish Spider-man to a shine suiting his tastes.
Either by mandate or simple demand, house art styles at Marvel grew into favor. Reducing much of Ditko’s influence to subtextual tones, and overt homages.
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But his stylistic influence transcends the superhero, leaving perhaps as great a mark on indie cartoonists of the 90s, who worshipped the peculiarity and individuality in his work.
As an essayist and indie cartoonist, his personal work is a large self-published bibliography of unfettered Objectivist philosophy and vigilantism.
A controversial, inventive, and life-long statement.
LINER NOTES:
-For all the shit I give Stan Lee, it’s hard to say he was stingy about handing out credit (or shifting the blame) in the press. At least not in the early days :
“Well, we have a new character in the works for Strange Tales, just a 5-page filler named Dr. Strange. Steve Ditko is gonna draw him. It has sort of a black magic theme. The first story is nothing great, but perhaps we can make something of him. ’Twas Steve’s idea.”
- Stan Lee, letter to The Comic Reader (1963)
“I don’t plot Spider-Man anymore. Steve Ditko, the artist, has been doing the stories. I guess I’ll leave him alone until sales start to slip. Since Spidey got so popular, Ditko thinks he’s the genius of the world. We were arguing so much over plotlines I told him to start making up his own stories.” —
Stan Lee, The New York Herald Tribune Jan. 9, 1966.
- Stan Lee claims the straw that broke Steve Ditko’s back was Lee’s intention to finally reveal Norman Osborn as the identity of the mysterious Green Goblin. First claiming it to be unrealistic, Ditko then (possibly) asserted that Norman couldn’t be evil because he had earned his wealth and status through talent, work, and Ayn Randian virtue.
- But by the time he finally publicly broached the topic decades later, Ditko had boiled their problems down to something simpler:
“Why should I continue to do all these monthly issues, original story ideas, material, for a man who is too scared, too angry over something, to even see, talk to me?”
- Steve Ditko, “Why I Quit” (2015)
“I have always considered Steve Ditko to be Spider-Man’s co-creator. … I write this to ensure that Steve Ditko receives the credit to which he is most justly entitled.”
-Stan Lee, an open letter to the press (1999)
-Excerpt from a Steve Ditko comics essay about who created Spider-man:
-People claim that Ditko never cashed another check for Spider-man, but much clearer is that the stark divisions he created between paid work and art sure got fuzzy when the rent was due.
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(Above: The Ditko GOBOTS art you never knew you needed.)
In refusing to “compromise” to corporate comics—Ditko would often agree to low oversight, basically unedited, work-for-hire gigs. Most notably at Charlton and DC where he helped create characters like The Question, Hawk and Dove, and The Creeper. Back at post-Lee Marvel he created the first iteration of Squirrel Girl and Speedball. But sometimes he’d take on grape-flavored bonkers shit like licensed Chuck Norris and the Karate Commandos comics, only to give what appears to be the bare minimum of effort.
“When I do a job, it’s not my personality that I’m offering the readers, but my artwork. It’s not what I’m like that counts [but] what I did and how well it was done.”
-Steve Ditko, to Marvel Main Fanzine (1960s)
That’s it for now. Thanks so much for reading. Hope y’all are all doing great.
More soon…
-j
Brilliant! and got my notification this time!!