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STRANGE & STRANGER: THE WORLD OF STEVE DITKO | | This exclusive excerpt from historian Blake Bell's new biography of the reclusive art legend provides a sneak peek into Spider-Man's tumultuous creation | | | By Blake Bell (novel excerpt) | | Posted 8/19/2008 | |  | |  Like many of the faceless crimefighters that populated his comics pages, Steve Ditko is something of a mystery.
The co-creator of Spider-Man, the artist refuses to speak publicly about his work, a policy in place for quite some time. Which is what makes Blake Bell's new biography such a treasure chest to open.
Bell's Strange & Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko (Fantagraphics, $39.99, on sale now) delves deep into the life, work and mind of the acclaimed comics legend. What's more amazing (pun intended), Bell unearths an enormous amount of quotable material from Ditko on a variety of different topics throughout a good chunk of his career.
We learn that Ditko was a meticulous and passionate member of the comics community when he made his bones in the 1950s. We learn exactly why Ditko crushed thousands of fans' hearts by departing Amazing Spider-Man in 1966—and it wasn't due to a disagreement over Green Goblin's identity. We are treated to Ditko's creation of Blue Beetle (Ted Kord) and The Question (Vic Sage). And we get Ditko's side of how Spidey himself came about in the following excerpt. Setting the stage in 1962, prepare for a fascinating account you never thought you'd read.
| |  Stan Lee's revamping of Amazing Adult Fantasy involved only two changes. Fearing that retailers were afraid to sell the title to children, he renamed it Amazing Fantasy, and spurred on by the strong sales of Jack Kirby's The Fantastic Four, he decided to showcase a new superhero.
"For me, the Spider-Man saga," Steve Ditko recalled, "began when Stan called me into his office and told me I would be inking Jack Kirby's pencils on a new Marvel hero, Spider-Man. I still don't know whose idea was Spider-Man."
Ditko was presented with five pages of a Kirby-penciled story featuring a teenager who had a magic ring that transformed him into an adult hero named Spider-Man (without the hyphen that was later added by Lee). The other pages showed the teenager living with his uncle and aunt.
The uncle, according to Ditko, was "a retired police captain, hard, gruff, the General Thunderbolt Ross type (from the Hulk series) and he was down on the teenager...The only connection to the spider theme was the name." The last page consisted of the teenager entering the house next door where a scientist-type was conducting an experiment.
But comic-book aficionado Ditko alerted Lee that this Spider-Man was little more than the Joe Simon character, The Fly, created for Archie Comics three years earlier (Kirby had even penciled a few stories in the first two issues). Ditko's comment may have persuaded Lee to believe that the younger artist would have a fresher approach to the character.
"Stan called Jack about The Fly," says Ditko. "Days later, Stan told me we would be doing Spider-Man. I would be penciling the story panel breakdowns from Stan's synopsis and doing the inking. Kirby's five penciled Spider-Man story/art pages were rejected. Out went the magic ring, adult Spider-Man and whatever legend ideas that Spider-Man story would have contained."
The decision by Lee to script the majority of the Marvel line of superhero books—to create a cohesive universe of characters—forced the editor into devising what is now known as "The Marvel Method."
Lee presented his artists with a one- or-two page synopsis, allowing them to break down, and embellish, the plot in any way they saw fit. This gave Lee the necessary time to run the business end of Marvel.
For their new character, Lee presented Ditko with the synopsis of a teenaged bookworm who develops spider-like powers after being bitten by a radioactive spider during a science experiment. It was then left to Ditko to add flesh to those bones. What followed was the first truly revolutionary comic-book superhero since Superman.
Aside from bringing his idiosyncratic visuals, characterizations and costume designs, Ditko became the first work-for-hire artist of his generation to create and control the narrative arc of his series. Over the next four years, he would fight tooth and nail to maintain the strip's integrity, before simply walking away from a multimillion-dollar franchise approaching the peak of its popularity.
Instrumental to the success of The Amazing Spider-Man over the past 45 years was Ditko's initial insistence that the strip be grounded in the civilian life of Peter Parker. Ditko battled to maintain this element during his tenure, believing Peter must have matching "screen time" with the costumed hero to resonate beyond comics' prepubescent demographic.
Stan Lee has often claimed that he is responsible for one of the strip's key innovations—a teenaged superhero beset with regular human problems. Ditko, however, is quite insistent that Lee, as head of Marvel Comics since the 1940s, was prone to the formulaic trappings of the comics he had presided over. Even before the first story was published, the divide between Ditko's premise for the strip and Lee's was evident.
"I drew the first cover from a subjective viewpoint," says Ditko. "I wanted to put the reader/viewer up front with the swinging Spider-Man, to be a part of the activity, to see and realize the danger in falling, in having a sense of swinging along with Spider-Man." But Ditko's cover wasn't majestic enough for Lee and was rejected. A second cover penciled by Kirby and inked by Ditko was used instead to introduce Spider-Man in Amazing Fantasy #15 (cover dated August 1962).
The ideological difference lay in Ditko's desire to bring Spider-Man down to street level, on par with the reader and normal human beings. Kirby's version was as grand as all his 1960s strips, with a disassociation between hero and spectator; the former an untouchable icon viewed as if in the heavens. In Ditko's cover, onlookers loom over Spider-Man from their apartment windows "to be part of the activity," as Ditko explained.
Ditko also fended off Lee's attempts to corrupt the strip's integrity with the introduction of too many far-reaching elements of the "fantastic" that would be incongruous in a strip about a plausible teenager. | |  The first example of this occurred after Amazing Fantasy had been canceled following Spider-Man's first appearance, when the hero made his debut in his own title in March 1963. The story featured him rescuing the son of J. Jonah Jameson (Peter Parker's boss and publisher of the Manhattan newspaper, The Daily Bugle) who was trapped in a runaway space shuttle. "I preferred that we have Peter Parker/Spider-Man ideas grounded more in a teenager's credible world," says Ditko. "The story idea undercut the teenage context. It's like having a high-school football player playing in the Super Bowl."
But before Ditko could convince Stan to stay away from similar fantastical elements, in issue two Lee introduced space aliens into Spider-Man's world for the story of the Terrible Tinkerer.
Twelve issues later, Ditko finally put his foot down with the introduction of the Green Goblin. Lee wanted a movie crew to find an Egyptian-like sarcophagus containing an ancient, mythological demon that would be released and come to life. "I rejected Stan's idea," says Ditko. "A mythological demon made the whole Peter Parker/Spider-Man world a place where nothing is metaphysically impossible." Instead, the Goblin's origin is built as a mystery to be slowly unveiled; his face hidden by shadows, hinting only that he is a wealthy figure with a lust for power.
To placate Lee's desire to see more of Spider-Man in costume, Ditko contrived visual devices such as placing half of Spider-Man's mask on Parker's face to imply the presence of the hero when the teenager was dressed in everyday clothing. "Stan liked, wanted, to see Spider-Man in action on every page or as soon as possible, as often as possible," says Ditko.
The artist does concede a point to Lee with regards to keeping the story grounded in the teenage context. The introduction of Betty Brant, Jameson's secretary, proved problematic because she was perceived by the readership as being too old for Parker. "I had the idea we establish a real romance between Betty Brant and Peter Parker and then have her die in some kind of accident—nothing criminal, just the kind of unfortunate tragedy that happens in real life," relates Ditko. "Stan said no, and he was right," Ditko acknowledging that Betty's death would have cast a pall over the entire strip, cloaking Peter in even more "heavy negative emotional baggage" than had his Uncle Ben's death.
Ditko also faced interference from readers to keep the strip from losing its revolutionary scope. The advent of the organized movement known as "comic-book fandom" had been building, thanks to DC editor Julius Schwartz publishing fans' letters in his comics. Lee exploited this development, designing an entire marketing plan to make fans feel part of the "in crowd," and paint Marvel as the alternative to the staid competition (i.e., DC). While representing a minority of any book's readership, the letter writers' opinions began to significantly influence company policy, and Ditko contended they were able to sway many of Lee's editorial decisions.
For instance, Lee had originally liked the split-face Parker/Spider-Man idea, as well as Ditko's invention of the spider senses, but fan mail convinced Stan to challenge Ditko for their removal. "Stan had the tendency to take write-in complaints too literally," Ditko recalled. "Stan was too unsure of his own judgments. He felt he had to appease the others/outsiders, the complainers, because they knew what was best (ideas, values, etc.) in Spider-Man."
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