Ditko

I was finishing up the week's batch of new comics last night, and before I read Doctor Strange, I decided to take a Twitter break. Appropriate timing for getting the news, I guess.

Obviously, I never knew Steve Ditko--did anyone?--so all I have is what most people have today--reactions to his work.

Which is how he wanted it, I think. As he said in an interview, "When I do a job, it’s not my personality that I’m offering the readers, but my art work. It’s not what I’m like that counts what I did and how well it was done. I produce a product, a comic art story."

What I remember most about Ditko was his fingers, they way he draw them. Most famously Spider-Man's webshooting and Doctor Strange's gesticulations, of course, but in all his work, characters' hands were always twitching, the fingers always looking odd, splayed at impossible angles.

It freaked young snell out...but it was also quite a tell, and was one way I always recognized his art--those fingers.

One of the most important things about his work was the way he drew things that were impossible, how he managed to present things that just couldn't be real but somehow he made them real.

I always said, pre-CGI, that you couldn't do a proper live-action Spider-Man, because he was just too inhuman in his movements. No one could capture it like Ditko did:

Ditto with Strange. How do you portray astral planes and impossible dimensions and eldritch energies in a way that the reader can follow yet still be mysterious and breath-taking and insane?

Ditko did.

Obviously, Ditko's politics and philosophy got a lot of attention, because he published a lot of that for us to see. And I believe that he wouldn't want us to forget that portion of his work.

But therein lies the irresolvable tension between a creator's beliefs and his work. For as didactic and strident as some of his screeds could be...

...is there a less Objectivist sentiment than this?

Is there a less Randian hero than Peter Parker?!?

There are doubtless doctoral theses that could be written untangling Ditko's work from that of his co-creators, and examining how a guy with such beliefs ended up giving us so many heroes who explicitly rejected selfishness and sacrificed their own happiness to help others?

Ah, too deep a thought for a Saturday morning.

Anyway, a final tip: if you want to catch up on Ditko's pre-Marvel work, Fantagraphics' Steve Ditko Archives are free to read if you subscribe to Comixology Unlimited (and are still fairly cheap if you don't). Some great, great stuff there.

R.I.P., Steve Ditko.