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Rowing against the Tide: Steve Ditko

Steve Ditko was born among a generation of comics talent from the twenties who got to see the birth and flowering of the superhero comic in its first days in the Golden Age. Born in 1927, he might have seen the first Superman stories appear in 1938; and would have achieved his majority just as the last of the first-generation superheroes vanished into the no-man's land of commercial inviability.

In spite of his rather subdued presence in the comics of 1999, Ditko nonetheless served as one of the key architects of the birth of Marvel Comics from the ashes of Timely and Atlas. He probably created Spider-Man without outside input, though different stories tend to sometimes credit Stan Lee more and occasionally refer to an undeveloped Kirby character that may have served as a prototype.

One or two pages generally suffice to imprint upon a reader the characteristics of Ditko's way with story art. The idiosyncratic body language, odd hand positions, and treatment of surreal or "cosmic" elements all announce a piece as truly from Ditko's pencil.

Ditko, if we do recognize him as one of the Doctors of Comics, nonetheless eludes fans today by a curtailed output and loss of relationships with editors and publishers. While we must regret not seeing his work in print, the history of his career as early as 1966 demonstrated traits that, perhaps, made this an inevitable outcome of an uncompromising personality trying to perform in a business world built on (frequently ill-considered compromises).

We may, after all, characterise the man by the intensity of his work; and such intensity constitutes the obverse of his inability to compromise.

The Education of Ditko

Steve Ditko studied at the Cartoonists' and Illustrators' School under Jerry Robinson, one of the earliest hands to depict Batman in the 1940s. If his style does not reflect Robinson's work from the forties, we would not expect it to do so; Ditko, from the earliest, preferred to work without editorial interference and after his own vision of comics.

From there, we find his first recorded work appearing in 1953, in Ditko's mid-twenties. His earliest work involved horror, mystery, and science fiction titles for Charlton, in works that frequently borrowed stylistically from the deceased EC line and often included just the sort of shocking violence that had begun EC's troubles a few years previously.

Although one rightly associates Ditko with the early success of Marvel Comics, he came earlier to the doors of Charlton Comics. This company, before its final demise, often distinguished itself by cheap paper and cheaper printing, but would enjoy more Ditko work over 30 years than would Marvel, if we compare page counts. Within Charlton's precincts, Ditko would develop his storytelling style and the idiosyncracies that had set in his work before he ever submitted a page to Atlas/Marvel.

Ditko might walk away for years from the big gun comics companies. He always seemed to return to Charlton, and many Ditko collectors prefer his work under this label. If we assume that pecuniary concerns motivated these choices, the facts would sink any such claims; Charlton did not provide the place to become rich.

What Charlton did provide - and what makes Ditko enthusiasts more inclined to collect his work that appeared under that trademark - was the ability to work without the intrusion of meddlesome editors. Charlton allowed Ditko to start with ideas and materials and turn in completed pages without hovering over his shoulders. The Charlton titles, therefore, included the purest Ditko, unadulterated by some editor's designs for his characters, and undistorted by outside visions.

Furthermore, Charlton would provide a place for Ditko to return when things became too ugly between him and other publishers. For instance, although Ditko sold a story that would appear in the first Timely comic after that company took the Atlas label in 1957, Atlas' hard times necessitated a moratorium on purchasing new stories. Charlton provided a place for Ditko to continue his work even as Atlas moved to become Marvel; and it made possible his later participation in the Marvel Revolution by keeping him in the business.

During the fifties, for Charlton, Ditko created the first "Cold War" superhero. Captain Atom's powers came from the nuclear energies that still terrify those of us living in the post-atomic age; and his enemies generally served the globe-devouring goals of Krushchev's USSR. The post-war Captain America and other heroes had fought communists, and later characters (most of Marvel's early-sixties stable) would connect their powers to radiation, but Captain Atom connected both worlds in his conception.

Atlas and Marvel

When Atlas came up for a last breath or two, prior to its (seemingly) inevitable death throes, Ditko found a place he could sell more of his work, and added his distinctive five-page stories to the formulaic monster books that collectors relish but readers did not buy enthusiastically. These stories typically manipulated the reader with bizarre twists and shock endings that can still disturb readers jaded by the intermediate decades of comics.

Atlas, however, still suffered from its mortal financial wounds, and would only recover with a change in emphasis as the label became Marvel Comics and began to enter the waters of Superhero comics, a medium enjoying some renewed success as DC managed to recreate old characters like the Flash, Green Lantern, and the Atom, in updated versions. Ditko continued with his science fiction, giant monster, and horror work, but added the newly-developing stable of heroes to his projects, and by 1961 had increased his page output to compare with that of his Atlas/Marvel peer, Jack Kirby. Ditko would become part of a powerhouse troika with Jack Kirby and Stan Lee; and, by 1963, the newly-born Marvel Comics would begin to enjoy a remarkable and unexpected success.

A number of observers consider this period one of the most fertile for the principals involved, involving the most interesting creations and the most vehement storytelling to date in superhero comics. Ditko's work enjoyed the smoothing effects of Lee's dialogue, which could take away the harsh cast typical of later Ditko work (at the same time watering down the concept somewhat).

In this period of frenzy and vision, Ditko developed Spider-Man and Dr. Strange.

Spider-Man and Dr. Strange

Ditko's formula for Spider-Man melded well with the Stan Lee editorial model which dragged superheroes down to a level of human beings (however powerful). Ditko cleverly involved Spider-Man in the problems of late adolescence, managing thereby to provide someone with whom young readers could identify and setting the stage for a continuing interest when these readers, and Spider-Man, became college students.

Sales figures vindicated Ditko's approach, and Ditko went on to create Dr. Strange, a character so permeated with Ditko's approach to comics that no subsequent talent team would repeat his success with the character, although reader interest in the character never seemed to fail. One might well assume that a character with so much of its creator in it could not succeed in other hands.

However, after a success peak of only perhaps four years (starting with the creation of Spider-Man), Ditko and Lee fell out over the ongoing plot in Spider-Man. Lee demanded a shock-value revelation that made the villainous Green Goblin the alter ego of some known character; Ditko felt that the character, like real criminals, should be some nobody turned to crime. When Lee asserted his will, Ditko came in one day in 1966 and left the company.

Ditko's New Tack

Ditko continued in fine form when he returned to Charleton in 1966, and he revived Captain Atom and created the Blue Beetle and the Question, two characters that might appear today in Marvel titles but for an argument over thirty years ago. In the pages of his work containing the Question, Ditko would begin to infuse the rhetorical/philosophical element that distinguished his subsequent approach to comics and sometimes invited the derision of readers who either disagreed with his views or simply found the preachiness some of these stories contained unpalatable.

By 1968, Ditko would also do work for DC, where he created the Creeper and the Hawk and the Dove. The latter creation would provide another venue in which Ditko could explore ethical issues in superhero comics; the characters themselves actually provided more of a rhetorical conceit, with Hawk personifying a proactive and pro-violence viewpoint and Dove representing a pacifism that frequently precluded action. Their father, a judge, served as an arbiter to the moral issues, as he pointed out the flawed reasoning into which one or another of the boys might wander in the course of a Hawk and the Dove story. Like Dr. Strange, later talents would have little idea how to handle Hawk and the Dove, and no subsequent treatment of these characters would succeed. DC disposed of them by 1994, after occasional abortive attempts either to present them within their own title (in more than one incarnation) or to tie them to the Teen Titans.

Editors, like death and taxes, must have seemed fairly inevitable to Ditko, but he kept trying to find a solution that let a creator go straight to the press without the interference of intermediaries who seemingly cared about little more than watering down the message that Ditko wanted to convey.

Ditko created the philosophical Mister A as a vehicle for presenting his views on morality, many of which relied on the Premise of the Excluded Middle: Something is either good or bad, never both; something is either right or wrong. The muddy-headed morass of sixties political thinking, which frequently failed to distinguish a desire from a right or a duty and ended up serving little more than hedonism, nihilism, and narcissism must have shaped his viewpoint, since Ditko's Mister A does not represent a perspective one would view as especially "sixties."

In the process of getting Mister A published in the late sixties, Ditko helped invent the independent creator/cartoonist movement that would finally flower in the eighties. He used this tool differently from the names that succeeded in independent publishing, however; he brought his credentials into independent publishing rather than using this channel to create credentials. Furthermore, he found in this approach a way to reach fans without a middleman.

At this point, we may say Ditko finally began to publish the work he wished to create: an uncensored philosophical treatise that took the form of a superhero comic, created solely by Ditko himself, including concepts that inherently rendered the work non-commercial. Such work represented what Ditko wanted to say rather than what publishers thought they could sell.

Back into Commercial Work

Ditko had become increasingly reclusive, doubtless in part because of his unhappy experiences with the capital-driven normal superhero comics market, but he did not depart altogether from the medium. For instance, he resumed work for Charlton in the 1970s, since this provided him the closest to unfettered opportunity to create.

He also worked intermittently for his nemeses, the Big Two comics publishers. In 1975, he created and depicted the adventures of the odd Shade, the Changing Man, a title that ran over a year before DC decided to cancel it. At this point, Ditko hedged his bets by doing work both for DC and Marvel. The late seventies saw him working on his creation the Creeper, Kirby's Demon, and Starlin's Starman for DC and Marvel's Micronauts, Machine Man titles and the short-lived "Captain Universe". At this point, if Ditko found he must somewhat sell himself to an industry that tended to keep away from him the very things he desired, he at least managed to reach more of his loyal following.

Into the eighties, Ditko would continue Marvel work, including some (ironic) back-up pieces in Spider-Man titles into which Ditko tried to infuse some of the sixties magic he remembered.

Jim Shooter, Fantagraphics, and Beyond

Jim Shooter felt some kind of connection to Ditko that showed in his ability to find him work at Marvel (while Shooter occupied a ranking position there), Valiant Comics (while Shooter enjoyed a ranking position there) and the Shooter-founded company Defiant Comics.

One must wonder what happened at this point. Ditko managed to swallow his pride enough to handle Marvel and DC characters; he managed to tolerate Valiant's second-hand stable of Gold Key characters like (Dr.) Solar and Magnus, Robot Fighter. However, when Shooter assigned Ditko a project called "Dark Dominion," about an underworld filled with blind monsters and the one hero who could see and fight them, Ditko pulled out, claiming that he would work in pure politics or pure fantasy, but not that project.

In the mid-nineties, Ditko would work less and less, to a rumored nadir in 1996 that may have included only enough pages for a single book-length story. We can, perhaps, assume that this rumor has some basis in truth, even if the numbers seem questionable; Ditko's increasing absence from comics shelves argues more eloquently than any such speculative figure.

The end of the nineties seemed to provide a new opportunity for Ditko to bring about another renaissance of self. Fantagraphics issued Strange Avenging Tales, a magazine that bore covers reminiscent of Creepy and Eerie in the 1970s. However, after one complete issue, and two covers, Ditko would do no more work for Strange Avenging Tales, and some credit the editors at Fantagraphics for this withdrawal, particularly in the context of some ribbing of Ditko contained in the back of the first issue; rumors (found on the web on Ditko-themed fan and news pages) suggest also suggest that someone tampered with some of the Ditko art in a manner that Ditko decided not to tolerate.

Ditko Today?

Steve Ditko, fortunately, refuses to disappear from comics altogether, although the perennial conflicts between him and editors seem an inevitable feature of his work. Even as I type, he has recent work on the shelves for DC comics (a story in an anthology one-shot including Hawkman, Spectre, and Silver Age Doom Patrol stories.

His work in that piece appears under inks that somewhat curtail his characteristic style, and I have to wonder if this represented an assignment that Ditko wanted or something he merely tolerated to contribute work to a paying customer. If, with age, he has lost the patience necessary to deal with the editorial side of the business, this by no means offers anyone a happy ending, cheating Ditko of the opportunity to work and depriving fans of new inventions by an imaginative mind.

His work, after all, has strengths beyond those of nostalgic appeal, and not all of his admirers have grey in their beards. His work testifies for itself, and many want to hear that testimony.