Steve Ditko Was More Than Just the Guy Behind Spider-Man
Let's get the obvious out of the way first. Yes, Steve Ditko is the man behind Spider-Man and Doctor Strange, both of which he co-created with Stan Lee. And, sure, he’s a comic book artist and writer whose work displays a trippy aesthetic unlike anything in comics before or, truthfully, after his time. Ditko is known for drawing some of the best hands in comics, too. But those are are just the bold-print facts wonks list off in comic-book shops—and Steve Ditko was so much more than that.
In addition to his work on Peter Parker and Stephen Strange, Ditko, whose death at age 90 hit the news late last week, also introduced the most iconic Iron Man suit of all time: the first armor in red and gold—a color scheme that would come to define the character. He also refined the helmet design from "a bucket on someone's head" to its sleeker incarnation. Ditko also, reportedly, was the one who decided Bruce Banner would transform into the Hulk in times of emotional stress and anger, instead of just when provoked by the multiple triggers the series had been using.
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Ditko parted ways with Marvel in 1966. There are still multiple versions of the story behind his exit, ranging from disagreements over the direction of Amazing Spider-Man (and, specifically, the yet-to-be-revealed identity of the Green Goblin) to a general mismatch of attitudes between Ditko and Lee. Regardless of what happened, Ditko moved on from the publisher and continued creating. He alternated work for horror publisher Warren's Creepy and Eerie anthologies with new superhero work for Charlton Comics, for whom he created Blue Beetle, the Question, and Captain Atom. (All three of those characters would, two decades later, become the basis for Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen, which without Ditko arguably wouldn't exist at all.) He moved on to DC, where he created the Creeper and Hawk and Dove. While working on the small press series witzend, he created what might be his true trademark character: Mr. A, a reporter who fights crime in a particularly uncompromising (almost cruel) manner that reflected Ditko's own objectivist beliefs.
Impressively, this burst of creativity that produced characters and concepts that would shape comics—and pop culture as a whole—for more than half a century all occurred in a six-year span, from the debut of Spider-Man in late 1962 through the creation of the Creeper, Mr. A, and Hawk and Dove in mid-'68. Ditko continued to work for multiple publishers, including Marvel, after that but his star had started to fade.
Despite this, there is all manner of greatness to be found in his later material; it was during this period that he created paranoid thriller Shade the Changing Man for DC—revived to great success a decade or so later by Peter Milligan and Chris Bachalo and part of the original line-up of DC's Vertigo imprint—and, in 1991, he co-created Squirrel Girl, who has recently become one of Marvel's biggest break-out characters amongst younger readers. During this period he also pursued personal work that examined his own beliefs, releasing it independently with editor Robin Snyder. Although he officially retired in 1998, that work was never fully completed.
By the time of his death, Ditko's name wasn't as well-known as that of contemporaries like Lee and Jack Kirby. Famously reclusive in his later years—a 2007 BBC documentary even used his distaste for publicity as its hook—his focus moved away from the mainstream characters that had gained him notoriety. His lingering audience shrunk, and he was largely forgotten about beyond his most obvious creations, and even then he was only remembered when a movie was coming out and the Content Machine needed to be fed.
To call that a shame feels like too much of an understatement, yet to call it a tragedy feels like something Ditko himself—who had little interest in how he personally was perceived—would have disapproved of. Instead, let's say this: Steve Ditko was a creative genius who never truly received his due. He was an auteur in comics long before "comics auteur" was a common descriptor. Even now, there is no measure for what's been lost.