Steve Ditko: Classic or Dud

Of course, I dunno much from Ditko after his Marvel glory days, but boy is he ever classic re: his work on Spider-man & Dr. Strange. Classic beyond a shadow of a doubt, ESPECIALLY for Dr. Strange. I mean, c'mon, THE ASTRAL PLANE!! (I hope there's an Essential Dr. Strange compendium out there.) But that's an "uh, duh" thing to say, and I can't comment on things he did for Charlton & afterwards, so I shall defer to Mr. Skidmore & others when they arrive.

As much as I adore John Romita's Spidey (oh, those clean & pristine romance comic lines are so dreamy), I can safely say that my awkward dinosaur-lovin' pre-pubescent self wouldn't've identified w/ the stylish red & blue tights so much were it not for Ditko nailing Peter Parker's awkward microscope-lovin' wallflowering mid-pubescent ways & means.

Another "uh, duh" moment - those ASM pages (in issue #37?) where Spidey's trapped under this big hunk of machinery (was he fighting Doc Ock?), & his aunt is dying from radiation poisioning due to a transfusion from her favorite nephew, & he strains & grapples with this big immovable hunk of metal & his own inadequacies & shortcomings (as always) until, through sheer strength of will (take that, Green Lantern!), he tosses the debris aside - awesome awesome awesome, especially the concluding splash page.

His _Spider-Man_ and especially _Dr. Strange_ stuff (the latter just reprinted in a $15 paperback that blew my mind all over again recently) is, as others have mentioned, extraordinary, and I'm pretty fond of his Question/_Mysterious Suspense_/Creeper period too (less so Hawk & Dove).

I think I actually first encountered Ditko's work on the thoroughly forgotten "Starman" serial he did for _Adventure Comics_ in the late '70s. I remembered thinking "obviously this guy can't draw as well in the usual sense as other people can, but there's something REALLY interesting about the artwork anyway."

Anyone know anything about his working relationship with Eric Stanton?

Barry and I also hated Jack Kirby. Dumb kids.

Thanks for the link, John - I totally forgot about stuff like Speedball & Dark Dominion! (Gee, I wonder why...)

(Tony 'Rock Me' Isabella???)

As a writer, he was a bonkers Ayn Rand disciple, but at least he was trying to address tough issues when few were, so a bit of credit for that. I have a signed set of the early crazed stuff (Mr A and all that).

My favourite Ditko story was from when Marv Wolfman and he collaborated on something (a back up in something silly like Coyote). They hadn't met before. Ditko invited Wolfman to his home - a flat over Times Square. MW says he was nervous about meeting this well known whacko, but he seemed very reasonable and friendly. When MW was ready to leave, Ditko told him to wait a moment. He grabbed a file card, drew a vertical line down the middle and shaded one half black with a marker pen. He held it up right in front of Marv's face, and pointing at the halves said "Good! Evil! Nothing in between! Remember that!"

Um... wow.

http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/blash/2009/04/06/steve-ditkos-toyland/

A is A!

Reading STRANGE AVENGING TALES #1. Tom & Al's Ditko-mage is tremendous in this light.

There's a two page bit about "The Undisplayer", who's this dude wearing a polka-dot bow-tie who gets mangled by fate's banana peel for the cardinal sin of leaving a shelf of books at a big box store in disorder. People need to know, you know?

Gigantic love letter to latter-day (70s-00s) Ditko by Jog:

http://comicscomicsmag.com/2011/02/the-avenging-page-in-excelsis-ditko.html

A hell of an essay - it inspired this purchase!

links right back to the long-haired college kids that served as an early audience for Marvel comics in between rounds of physically blocking the Individual’s rightful access to campus property whilst tacitly supporting the rule of collectivist Force by opposing the conflict in Vietnam.

^^^A+

Back when I was a comic-trading 5th grader, though, my friend Barry Benson (the only other kid at my school who was into comics) and I liked to while away Saturday afternoons laughing at Ditko frames and dismissing their amateurish qualities. Barry was a George Perez fan. I liked Jim Starlin: said to be heavily influenced by Ditko, but Starlin was v. serious, and I liked my comics artists all grave and mystical, whereas Ditko seemed almost chaotically playful.

Barry and I also hated Jack Kirby. Dumb kids.

This was me and my stupid friends at the same age. Nothing but contempt for Ditko and ESPECIALLY Kirby; why couldn't those two draw in lots of constipated little lines like our beloved Byrne and Perez? I think I was 20 when the scales fell from my eyes re: the power of Kirby. Meanwhile all that post-Neil Adams stuff of the mid-70s to mid-80s looks like total shit to me now.

For an example of relatively coherent (because professionally edited) late-era Randian Ditko, be sure you have a copy of Dark Horse's one-shot The Safest Place...

Ditko used to creep me out, especially the Dr Strange stuff - ditto with Kirby's deep-space artwork - I found it hard to look at for long. The artists I liked back then (Byrne and Perez included) were somehow more earthbound and reliable.

I've never read any late 70s/1980s DCs to speak of, I should check some Aparo and Garcia-Lopez out to see if it holds up.

I didn't "get" Kirby until I was well into my 30s. I still haven't gotten Ditko yet, not really. There's a lot of kinetic energy there, but I feel he falls back on a lot of often-repeated visual licks.

Despite my childhood love of Spidey, I always wished that Kirby would have drawn him instead of Ditko. Now I'm just happy that it all got done the way it did. Silver age marvel is stone cold classic, as is silver age Ditko.

Ditko is great, but I do think that you have to kind of grow into an appreciation of him; I didn't like him that much when I was a kid either...

I wonder why that is. Conversely, some of the artists I went apeshit for when I was about 11, like Todd McFarlane, look appallingly fussy to me now. Though I still love some of the same people, like Sienkewicz and Mazzuchelli.

Siencewicz knows how to draw and has an appreciation of art history-- he puzzled me as a kid, semi abstract and occasionally very scary...but intriguing because of it.

The less said about McFarlane and his spawn the better.

...Except that anything good about him he got from Art Adams, who can't be held accountable for what he wrought.

^right. Both McFarlane and Liefeld started out as Art Adams clones y/n?

why is this thread here and not on ILC?

It predates that board I think. I could move it if everybody wants, or leave it to try to lure in the curious.

eh no bother it's just odd...

I couldn't make it to the end of the essay, although it was definitely interesting. but moerover I jsut see Ditko's devolution as kind of sad. it's weird that his technique has actually DECLINED over time, and not just due to age.

I only read ILE and ILM so I wouldn't have seen this thread.

Art Adams, IMO, is in the same fussy lineage as Byrne/Perez/Starlin, though he has much more sense of style than those two. Y'all are probly right that he begat the stupefying hashmarks and penis-fists of the Image dudes, and right that he can't be blamed for it.

Besides Perez/Byrne et al, we all adored Michael Golden at that age too (circa his early Micronauts) which is interesting bcuz he was more of a clay-ey Wrightson kinda thing. I haven't looked at his shit in a long time but I might be able to admire it today...

Art Adams (over Bob Burden roughs and character designs) on the Gumby Summer Fun Special is one of the all-time greats.

Please keep it here - I never remember to visit ILC.

Had forgotten all about Art Adams - used to love his stuff. Wonder how it holds up now. Liefeld is horrible.

xpost that Gumby special was great! So was the one Rick Geary drew.

The Gumby one was the first thing I ever saw by AA. Loved it. I would agree (though I hadn't thought of it before) to put him coming out of the Byrne/Perez school but he injected a sense of fun and charm into it. I don't know that I'd call him a classic, but I'll keep my good memories of staring at Adams' pages.

re: why kids hate Ditko -- I just think his draftsmanship is a bit grotesque and unheroic...which is what made him so great on Spiderman, but if you're coming off John Romita's version of the character, let alone Todd McFarlane's*, his art is going to seem impossibly obscure and ugly.

There's more I want to say on this, and I think it's a really interesting topic, but I would have to search up on old Ditko Spiderman panels (I've yet to read his Dr. Strange stuff) and I'm not really up for that at this exact moment...

*I actually read somewhere that McFarlane had drawn Spidey in much more arachnid poses than anybody else had...so while his style was unabashedly heroic/dynamic, he probably did get closer to a certain alien weirdness that Spiderman embodied when drawn by Ditko

I just think his draftsmanship is a bit grotesque and unheroic...which is what made him so great on Spiderman

so otm.

art adams was my god, when i was 11.

"grotesque and unheroic"--it served him well both on Dr. Strange and the Tales of Suspense/Journey into Mystery shorts as well.

Ditko's work on Dr. Strange >>>>>>>>>>>>>> Spiderman imho

when romita started drawing spidey, it really underlined pete's switch from skinny dweeb to a college kid who could score with gwen and mary jane.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_QdqzY9glBkE/Su_AnLlFnPI/AAAAAAAAB9g/wsoq82In8Gg/s640/Doctor+Strange+Steve+Ditko.jpg

His Spider-Man covers are brilliant.

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I was about nine when I first saw those Dr Strange issues - scared the hell out of me.

right there with ya, Shakes. Two of those panels were featured in Douglas's excellent book. I mean, how can you not love an artist who incorporates Dali and Lovecraft* into the Marvel Universe?

*Lovecraft might have been more Stan Lee; I don't know...

I remember reading an interview with McFarlane where he said he based his Spidey look on what he remembered of Ditko's - big eyes, more webs, red & black with blue highlights. When he actually looked back he realised he'd got it not-quite-right - the eyes weren't in fact so huge etc.

Loved McFarlane as a 14-year-old (didn't think much of Ditko then), and his Spidey work still looks all right, mostly. He was good for a dramatic cover, but the two-page webswinging panels in every issue look gauche now. Can't stand his noses - or his faces in general. I associate him with a period when characters began to be drawn differently by every artist - so Peter Parker is identifiable only as 'the guy with brown hair' (think hair has always been the major signifier of character in comics, mind you; certainly all female characters of a similar age are anatomically identical otherwise). His Mary Jane in this respect was his worst crime: suddenly she had a perm and was usually seen prancing around in early-90s lingerie. Ditko, of course, never got to do Mary Jane, her first real appearance supposedly being held back until they had someone who could draw a genuinely sexy woman (i.e. not Betty Brant).

Jon mentioned Michael Golden upthread, and I think he's the urgent and KEY artist for most of these 80/80s dudes that ppl have been mentioning - i mean, art adams is basically michael golden figurework + george perez-like detail rendering (a adams also seems to be one of the first mainstream american comic bk artist to show some manga-influence, esp in terms of his cartooned faces/expressions.) jim lee has def studied p closely m golden's work, esp whenever golden was inked by terry austin (whose post-giordano, ultradense inkline is again HUGELY influential on the whole Image look.)

ppl are also right to mention the sheer power and spectacle of kirby's marvel and after career, but up to the point the abstractions (of bodies and anything resembling a recognisable interior space) took over, kirby's work often had supreme elegance and grace, too - especially in pencil form.

http://www.imgspark.com/icache/0109/683eb1475af4e06eb8787d3c66fa4227_l.png

i'm not quite sure why shakey mo seems so surprised that ditko's technique has declined over time. the sheer hard fucking work/concentration/hand-eye co-ordination required to make a great comic bk artist p much always makes it a young person's game, especially when yr on the monthly corporate comics treadmill. the only artist i really thinks draws better in old(ish) age than at any point in their career is r. crumb - and that's part of what makes crumb so exceptional. ditko was v. ill in the late sixties - the details, as ever w ditko, are somwhat obscure, but the illness meant he left DC and took refuge at Charlton Comics, where he spent most of the seventies cranking out routine ghost stories for pitiful rates and minimal editorial interference. i don't think he was ever quite the same artist after that period of ill health - just after he left marvel, prior to his illness,ditko did a handful of black-and-white stories for warren that are absolutely superb, maybe the peak of his career - he never again drew with such care, variety, attention to detail or imaginative intensity. but i love lots of the later stuff, especially Mr A:

http://schulzlibrary.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/witzendmra.jpg?w=435&h=652

i'm not quite sure why shakey mo seems so surprised that ditko's technique has declined over time. the sheer hard fucking work/concentration/hand-eye co-ordination required to make a great comic bk artist p much always makes it a young person's game,

yeah I don't disagree with this at all, it's just that with Ditko it seems like more than just age at work - that essay linked above practically makes it seem like an ideological decision on his part to make his art cruder/more simplistic

also OTM about Crumb

Kirby definitely declined in his later years (as he was well aware), although he was definitely still brimming with ideas

I can't bear to look at the stuff he did after leaving animation to go back to comics -- recycling the Fourth World ideas over and over again.

his 2001 series is a thing to behold, I'll say that much

Yeah, that was pre-animation, I'd like to find .cbr's of that and Devil Dinosaur.

this thread is making me incredibly happy today

There should be a video version of the "What If...?" title.

What if Steve Ditko went into animation storyboarding instead of Jack Kirby?

What if Chuck Jones had done Jonny Quest instead of Doug Wildey?

Yeah, that was pre-animation, I'd like to find .cbr's of that and Devil Dinosaur.

I have the first few issues. It's such a weird concept - a series adaptation/expansion of a motion picture that was already 10 years old at that point. Takes some serious conceptual liberties (as you might expect) but a lot of the artwork is still a ton of fun. I think I also have some issues of Silver Star, which was later iirc...

Vaguely challopsy, i actually prefer Jack's 70s Marvel comics - Eternals, Captain America, Black Panther, 2001, Machine Man, Devil Dinosaur etc - to his stiffer 70s DC comics, on the whole (tho' i do have a big fondness for The Demon, a weird black magic horror comedy that seems to me quite unique within and without kirby's kareer.)

By post-animation, i'm guessing WmC is talking abt the stuff kirby did for Pacific Comics (Captain Victory, the semi-interesting Silver Star.) Certainly by that point the scripts were increasingly incoherent and eccentric and the artwork had declined severely - not helped by some fuckin' awful inking - but again, i think it's the 80s DC stuff that represents the real nadir of kirby's career, especially his revisited Fourth World comics, just dreadful.

the last volume of the Fourth World reprints contains that last Fourth World graphic novel, and yeah the decline is really apparent - the figures are simpler, the script less coherent, the composition falters. Even so it does contain one of my all-time favorite Kirby double-page collage spreads - the one depicting the destruction of Apokolips, which is just amazing.

Eternals is the business! I haven't been able to find any of the Captain America or Black Panther run though, has that stuff even been reprinted?

http://kirbymuseum.org/blogs/dynamics/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/KirbyWorking2e.jpg

man, never seen that pic before, outstanding!

yeah, the eternals, 70s captain americas and black panthers are all available in full colour paperback reprints.

Yeah I agree with Ward-- 70s Kirby is actually my favorite Kirby of all-- his vision had ripened to the verge of decadence but not quite over the edge yet, and I LOVE his dialogue from this era. Cap + Falcon, Black Panther, 2001, Demon, Kamandi, obv 4th World, I live and breathe that shit.

Sad that one can only assume 2001 will never be reprinted due to copyright... some amazing shit in there. Devil Dinosaur has no such legal hurdles, has that not been collected?

Meanwhile a whole separate think-thread is probably needed to address the deep causes of the male child's seemingly universal, instinctive preference for thin, busy or fussy linework (Perez and ilk) over bold brushstrokes.

more drawing = better drawing in the mind of that young man

^^^yep

it's the same childlike logic that concludes that music that has more notes is therefore harder to play and is therefore better

and then you look at shit like Charles Schulz or Joe Matt and it's just as easy to conclude the opposite is true

it's not like I was reading Snoopy at age 13 and marveling at the storytelling...

immature folx live and die by surface elements

anyways I think the grotesque elements of Ditko's style run a little bit deeper than draftsmanship

I found Kirby repellent as a kid, but loved the early Ditko Spidey (still can't get with Romita) (and tbh the only full run of anything Kirby I've ever read is Jimmy Olsen - Stan gets in the way too much for me on the early FFs and X-Men)

Meanwhile a whole separate think-thread is probably needed to address the deep causes of the male child's seemingly universal, instinctive preference for thin, busy or fussy linework (Perez and ilk) over bold brushstrokes.

This is a pretty wild generalisation - Archie, Harvey, Gold Key et al built on the back of bold brushstrokes.

god I hate Stan Lee

>>Meanwhile a whole separate think-thread is probably needed to address the deep causes of the male child's seemingly universal, instinctive preference for thin, busy or fussy linework (Perez and ilk) over bold brushstrokes.

This is a pretty wild generalisation - Archie, Harvey, Gold Key et al built on the back of bold brushstrokes.

Well how about this-- the little boy loves the things you mentioned, with their bold strokes and open areas; then when it is time to be all I AM NOT A CHILD he gravitates to the opposite (busy tech-pen detailing are serious). Because that's definitely not kid stuff.

I used to look down on Stan Lee, but he was one of the top five lightning-in-a-bottle catchers of the 20th century. I don't begrudge him any of his movie cameos. I wouldn't give you Bill Gates' last nickel for anything he's done in the last 40 years though.

eh I think his role is VASTLY overstated

Well, I can't hate stan because all my favorite comics have his name on them.

Plus I adored his intros to Spider-Man & His Amazing Friends. Just one of those adults that I trusted as a kid I guess.

yeah, jesus shakey... hating on stan lee is like hating on the brothers grimm, imho...

CLAMP hair is Todd McFarlane webbing for girls

haha!

Think it's pretty easy to hate on Uncle Stan, really - guy was a MAJOR credit thief and corporate apologist who never created a single interesting character without major input from kirby, ditko etc etc, tho there's no denying he had a certain genius for marketing, publicity and self-promotion, or even that he was an outstanding editor, a great talent-spotter who was 'loyal' to his most favoured creators (Romita Sr and John Buscema, especially.) As a writer he had a glib turn of phrase and a way with snappy dialogue (tho' this of course has dated p badly, now) and was able to impose some kind of narrative coherence on Kirby's wilder flights of fancy, which certainly made commercial if not always aesthetic sense. Lee always liked Joe Sinnott's inking on Kirby, for the way Sinnott's immaculate brush lines smoothed and rounded up the rougher edges of Kirby's work, at the expense sometimes of dynamism and power; the same could be said of Lee's dialogue over Ditko and Kirby's rawer, wilder storytelling.

the only Hulk I read as a kid was a Marie Severin paperback; first year uni - by which time I was well aware of Lee's credit hogging, value-inflation and corporate cuntery - I made a concerted effort to give Kirby a go, with the help of a large collection someone had donated the library*. Within this was one Hulk short in which Kirby had drawn the big dude on top of a train rushing towards a bridge; he crouches and braces; leaps to grab the railing and by force flips himself over the whole bridge, to land again on the rushing train on the other side.

Thrilling, clearly drawn action sequence, right? Objects in action clearly depicted. Body language communicates action and emotion. Panels make perfect sense. So Stan clogs up half of each panel with a turgid wodge of Feldsteinian text about how the Hulk is so strong that his very brain can levitate him over the bridge, in contradiction of what the artist and actual writer has cartooned. At that point I said "fuck this dude," and have never read another Lee comic on purpose. (I'll finish the Ditko Spidey run sometime, I guess.)

*mainly though I raided this for UGs, Spirit magazine reprints, and the long shitty fallow patch of LoSH between baby Shooter and Levitz

How anyone in the internet's home of EXCELSIOR could hate Stan is beyond me
(xpost)

I used to look down on Stan Lee, but he was one of the top five lightning-in-a-bottle catchers of the 20th century.

Just want to say here that I'm not complimenting him as a writer, just his ability to recognize and hitch Marvel's wagon to the zeitgeist.

kirby 'clicked' with me when i was about 12... i had a glossy reprint of iron man's first appearance w/a kirby cover and i was like man that owns... i dont think he did the interiors though which i found disappointing... he was the only old timey superhero bro i was really into i guess (loved all the classic MAD guys)

i still dont have much of an opinion on ditko. did he design spider-man's original uniform? i've always been impressed by the timelessness of that design.

this guy's great, i love how he throws chairs

in just abt the only interview he's ever given (for a vv early 1960s comics fanzine) ditko claims to have designed the spiderman costume, inc. things like the web shooters, and there doesn't seem to be any evidence to contradict this.

Well, I can't hate stan because all my favorite comics have his name on them.

yeah didja ever wonder how his name actually got on there... hmmm

Ward's evaluation of Lee is OTM imho.

I think it was one of Kirby's last interviews - the super-long career-spanning one in Comics Journal - that really turned me against Stan. The bitterness and loathing that Kirby had for him was unbelievable. And then I got to thinking about some of the assertions in the interview - that Lee had never created anything significant on his own (after his partnerships with Kirby and Ditko expired, dude has like NOTHING to claim, which is very suspicious), that his position at Marvel began as nepotism that enabled him to slap his name on everything, his relentlessly annoying penchant for self-promotion, the whole kerfuffle in the 80s about Marvel refusing to return original artwork to Kirby - and it all lines up with other people's accounts of the man and his practices. He seems like a total shitheel. And yet to this day he is the most famous name associated with Marvel comics.

i have no doubt stan's a douche as a publisher - i do love his dialogue though

cosign by the hoary hosts of hoggoth

Love his cod-shakespeare shit, kinda hate his hipster patter shit.

how instrumental was Stan in the idea that all the Marvel heroes existed in a close-knit interconnected universe?

In re: Mr. A, above, and "Only fools will tell you that money is the root of all evil!"

That's because the correct adage is: The love of money is the root of all evil. Which makes a hell of a lot more sense, even if the ascription of "all evil" is not strictly true. I would identify the love of power as a still more fundamental force for evil and it is only the power money gives one that people fall in love with.

Eh. Comic books. Not the best source of philosophy (a trait they share with song lyrics).

And operas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSdZETnEacA

how instrumental was Stan in the idea that all the Marvel heroes existed in a close-knit interconnected universe?

I'd be more inclined to attribute this to Kirby, given that he was doing the initial layouts/pencils for the vast majority of the early books that established this via multiple cameos (Fantastic Four sees Thor fly by etc) but who knows, really. Obviously there was a huge marketing advantage to plugging other characters/books within various titles so maybe Stan came at it from that angle. By all accounts the way they worked was that Kirby would do the layouts/pencils, often with dialogue+captions written in the margins (as is evident from existing original artwork), Stan would then add in his own dialogue and exposition (sometimes completely ignoring Kirby's notes in the process and thereby fucking up continuity/storytelling etc as noted in the above anecdote), and then turn it over for inking and coloring, etc. Where accounts differ has to do with Stan's lifelong claim that he would give Kirby character and storyline ideas prior to Kirby doing the artwork, and that he would hash these out with Jack. Kirby vehemently denied this, especially in later years, and in a number of cases Lee's claim is quite obviously highly suspect (the Fantastic Four bears a striking similarity to Kirby's previous Challengers of the Unknown, Thor is very clearly a product of Kirby's lifelong obsession with mythology, etc.)

Ditko, incidentally, refuses to discuss how his "partnership" with Stan worked.

really? so the whole "Marvel" way of doing a comic book (writer comes up with plot, gives it to penciler to do roughs, then the writer comes up with dialogue, then everything is lettered, inked & colored) was nothing but a sham? I figured it seemed so counterintuitive that it had to seem legit...

"had to be legit..."

The Marvel Method was a real thing; the dispute is in how much involvement Lee had in plotting each issue before the pencilling.

the whole plotting before pencilling, and then writing of the dialogue, this just seems like such a strange way to make a comic book. I imagined that it must have been the way that Stan Lee preferred to work and then he just kind of mandated the method company-wide once he got other writers in there. Otherwise, why split up the writer's job like that?

in order to cover up the fact that you can't actually write, duh

makes sense

http://www.comictreadmill.com/CTMBlogarchives/2006Images/Day11Funky.jpg

http://www.guiadosquadrinhos.com/ShowImage.aspx?path=./upload/personagens/3095person_2276.jpg

http://www.supermanartists.comics.org/silverage/FunkyFlashman-MMiracle06.JPG

"I'll just sip my martini by the ocean -- and wait for the next fish to jump!!"

Words to live by.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_tHVfHpnv17g/TPJ3MMqJPwI/AAAAAAAAMsc/bfaUVvIDNIo/s1600/Screen%2Bshot%2B2010-11-28%2Bat%2B9.11.37%2BAM.jpg

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_4N6ybVLERfQ/SYMMpfkgk7I/AAAAAAAAIIs/jUkxApZdO28/s320/Mr+Miracle+06-22+Funky+Flashman.jpg

did i already tell you guys my george perez story? i'll make it quick in case i did somewhere. i went to the opening of forbidden planet in nyc when i was kid - huge lines and a big mob scene - and perez was there doing marker drawings for ten bucks a pop. i sat down to get one and he asked me what comics i liked. he asked me if i liked the teen titans - his big book at the time - and i said yeah! i liked the teen titans! he said great! so what character did i want drawn? and i said: nightcrawler!

did he draw Gar Logan transformed into Nightcrawler?

Ok, I think I may have found a reason to hate on Stan Lee

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/nov05election/detail?entry_id=86075&tsp=1

thanks universe

he did a nice quick bamfing 'crawler. dude was a pro.

x-pst

that was my chillwave x-post.

stan is stan. the man never met a dollar or a reason to have his picture taken that he didn't like.

he's old school corrupt. he probably thinks he's doing you a favor all the time.

hahahaha OTM. He's a Boss Tweed kinda guy.

thanks universe

Stan announces a new cartoon co-developed with a public figure every second Wednesday at 3pm, this will never actually happen

http://lh5.ggpht.com/_EBqnetSEcQw/SeX7o5kcL-I/AAAAAAAAAHQ/-gOKdn8nzec/Stan%20Lee%20realistic%20caricature%20as%20carnival%20barker.jpg

stan is doing manga now. he's new wave.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d5/Heroman_Vol_1.png

Joseph Carter "Joey" Jones (ジョセフ・カーター・“ジョーイ”・ジョーンズ, Josefu Kātā "Jōi" Jōnzu?)
Voiced by: Mikako Komatsu
Joey is an orphaned boy living with his grandmother, working at a restaurant to make ends meet. His life changes when he fixes the Heybo that he names Heroman. He is able to issue commands to Heroman via a controller that forms a gauntlet around his left hand. This controller also gives Joey his own powers, such as super speed and the ability to create force fields.
The name "Joey Jones" was chosen by Minami at the behest of Stan Lee to choose a name that had identical initials, much like various other Marvel protagonists such as Peter Parker.[11]
Komatsu was chosen to voice Joey because of her boyish voice and the difficulty in finding a young man that had the voice the production team wanted.[11]

With great robot, comes great... uh....

was flipping though the first issue of Kirby's Silver Star - had totally forgotten this contains a dozen-page long full-color backup feature by Ditko called "The Mocker" which basically looks exactly like 60s-era Ditko. 1981, I think...?

cool find!

d'oh, number 2, not number 1

"According to Ditko1, he first started working with the concept in 1981, drawing the first ten page story and working on the breakdowns for the next episode. The page story found its way to Pacific Comics and was published in Jack Kirby's Silver Star #2. Ditko was not aware of this sale and was not pleased with the format. (The story was meant to be magazine size, or twice the size of a comic book page; and had been colored when it was meant to be published in black and white.) The original story (restored to black and white) and the others were published in a 1990 graphic novel published by Ditko and longtime partner Robin Snyder.

The originally intended format of the book influences much of its look. Planned to be published in a black and white magazine, the art is a study in various methods of adding texture with pen and ink. The Mocker's special power is signified by squiggling thin lines, various characters have an affinity for pinstripe suits or polka dots or have distinctive facial hair patterns that display the various skills Ditko had mastered in decades of comic work. The book was never published in magazine size, however, so the sixteen panels per page are slightly cramped.

Much of the dialogue and especially contents of thought balloons is in sentence fragments. The basic concepts floating around in the characters mind are tied together with commas, partly to display the characters' confused, unfocused, state, and quite possibly partly due to economy of space in the small panels."

color is actually really nice

http://carlscomix.com/when-i-got-a-letter-from-steve-ditko/
http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Screen-Shot-2015-06-28-at-5.02.16-PM.png
http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Screen-Shot-2015-06-28-at-5.02.34-PM.png

!

love

Thank you for inventing Spider-Man.

90 was a hell of a run.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/steve-ditko-dead-spider-man-creator-was-90-1125489

oh no!

v sad news. his run on spider-man is one of the all-time great works in comics.

steve wilkos still lives

it's kind of wild how much some of the self published stuff resembles Ben Garrison cartoons (though better drawn, obv)

https://blogintomystery.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/awc.jpg

Sending my psychic condolences up the I-5 to Bellingham.

RIP to a truly gifted lunatic

reading the obit now and

Ditko maintained a Manhattan studio until his death, where he continued to write and draw, though how much, and what unpublished material remains, is unknown.

a) why not ask Snyder, his publisher and only trusted collaborator of the last three decades, rather than include this vagueness

b) "how much" can be pretty easily estimated by actually adding up his output. it's very clear that he thought what he published was what was fit to publish, and he's generally been putting out around 100pp a year (!) since getting really busy again this decade.

Comic book creator Graig Weich of [...]

"He wasn't 90. He seemed like a young, cool artist who happened to have an aged body," Weich tells THR. Weich recalls asking Ditko about his relationship with Lee, and says the artist looked down and told him, "We're peaceful."

wtf at using a repugnant scam merchant as your source!!? unchecked and without caveat!

also eeesh, Ditko's latest Kickstarter may have finished the day he died. that's some 'Schulz dying the day his final Sunday was shipping' timing

^ belay that, I misread the "two days ago" bit

Graig is promoting his own new comic in a selfie-stick-shot youtube video titled "STEVE DITKO FOUND DEAD AT 90 - CO-CREATOR OF SPIDER-MAN & DOCTOR STRANGE IN NYC Dies NOT STAN LEE"

May we all have “NOT STAN LEE” on our gravestones

I think he had a bigger impact on me than any other artist of any kind. Meant a massive amount to me.

I'm curious about what will happen to all his unseen art in his studio, I assume it'll never be seen, I though he might have burned or shredded the stuff already because he really didn't want people seeing it, some said there was unseen Dr Strange stuff that were like an unabridged version of the ending he did to his run. Still keeping my fingers crossed that he changed his mind and will let people show it all.

I thought that Graig guy is the one who broke the news?

That doesn't mean you take his reportage of other peoples' words at face value, after the last 20 years of his reportage.

(and the disgusting motivation behind it! is it likely that Snyder had been notified by the NYPD, and knew that Ditko wouldn't want the news publicised?)

Mike Dean obit at TCJ.

aww rip steve

one of the all-time greats both in artistic achievement and total swivel-eyed lunacy

after the last 20 years of his reportage.

― kelp, clam and carrion (sic), Saturday, July 7, 2018 4:10 AM

Is he that well known? I never heard of him until now.

https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-iH7JIpCRKg4/V1Qs3Iv3CwI/AAAAAAAAQQM/uh6EeC4CopM_AjM6g49UUj4XnKfH-MCOgCLcB/s1600/ditko_spiderman_creation.jpg

<3

I thought you meant Weich's reportage.

I really liked this Jeet Heer thread about Ditko and Kirby, also the Gail Simone thread he links to

1. This is a good tweet in a good thread & I want to expand on this point. Kirby & Kirby both had styles that were curiously at odds with their politics. https://t.co/5kJacKlCwB

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) July 7, 2018

xpost: I did.

yeah, good stuff - lot to chew on there

I think sometime during the mid-60s Ditko made his characters bolder and more handsome and it was good and different but perhaps not quite as compelling as the earlier look. But there's something different and special about many periods of his work, at least up til the mid 70s when there is a noticeable decline.