Comics creator Steve Ditko passed this weekend at the age of 90. As you may know, Ditko co-created Spider-Man and was responsible for the art chores and certainly deserves co-writing credits with Lee on the early years of the wall-crawler's adventures. He was behind some of my favorite Spidey villains like Sandman, The Lizard, Electro, Doctor Octopus, and - of course - Green Goblin. Not bad.
I'm not much of an expert on Doctor Strange, and just last week was asking my LCS manager about early Ditko and Doctor Strange - but, yup, that was him as well.
At Charlton, he created two of my favorite characters from my middle and high school days - Vic Sage as The Question and Ted Kord as Blue Beetle. At DC, Ditko created The Creeper and Hawk & Dove.
I salute Ditko, even as I am aware of Ditko's politics (with which I do not align) and rejection of his own creations and fans of those creations. To me, Ditko achieved what he stated he wanted - to be known for his work, not for who he was as a person. Honestly, I couldn't pick him out of a line-up at any age, I don't know that much about him, and the only bit of his work that I've spent time with was really reprints of his Spider-Man stuff. I'm glad he created other characters I'd enjoy, and I'm a bit sorry reprints of his versions of those characters have never been readily available.
He also created his own characters for self-publication and wrote a lot of screeds and manifestos about how great it is to take Ayn Rand seriously. So.
There's plenty online elsewhere about Ditko, his politics, his work and his relation to his Marvel creations. So, we'll just wish the man Godspeed and hope he's happy wherever he is.
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| and we'll just ponder this panel vis-a-vis Spidey's whole deal and Ditko's love of Ayn Rand |
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