Steve Ditko: Classic or Dud

http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/comicbookcartography/77oKN0RfG4xZR1fgIqIsIUDZkSaICgPhDQ9F7VlhtF91h1mqabqodspTwr9D/DrSEternity3ST146.jpg.scaled.1000.jpg

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