Steve Ditko: An obituary for the signatory "Spider-Man"

In the 1960s, Marvel Publishers saw itself as a snake pit – with the comic Stan Lee as the royal cobra, and the characters as victims that dragged on.

Let's take "Spider-Man", appeared in 1962. Lee claimed to have invented this figure after seeing a spider climb on the wall.From there, Lee would have developed the plot of a harbaded student who is bitten by a radioactive spider, from which he receives proportional powers, and makes bizarre gangsters fall in a red and blue suit.

That's how it could have been. C & # Was like that – maybe – but not at all Lee's contribution to the creation of "Spider-Man" was "almost nihil", almost nothing, noted in 1988 the favorite artist Eric Stanton. could know: Stanton shared the studio with Steve Ditko, the draftsman of the first episode "Spider-Man", in the 1960s. </ p> <p> According to Stanton's description, Ditko developed the figure by himself. Ditko imagined looks, costumes, abilities and antecedents.

But cel It can not be true either. Because before Ditko had already had Jack Kirby, legendary co-inventor of Fantastic Four, drew a story of "Spider-Man" in the order of Lee. Rejected by the editor for being "too heroic" – Kirby drew a sprawling and explosive style, while Ditko's pages were first removed, quiet, almost inhibited.

Random Marvel

In the Marvel Snake Pit Steve Ditko had slipped by chance. Born in Pennsylvania in 1927, he first served in Germany after the war, then drew horror comics for a Connecticut publisher, before suffering from tuberculosis for nearly a year. ;a year. After recovering, he moved to New York in 1955 and found work at Atlas Comics. They were known to produce quickly and cheaply, paying only half of what was then the standard fee. Ditko drew the first horror cartoon there.

In 1957 the publisher changed his name to Marvel Comics. In 1961, the first issue of Jack Kirby's "Fantastic Four" appeared, which, with its pop-art appearance, ushered in a revival of the super-hero cartoon in the United States, barely read since the end of the Second World War.

Relatively fast, the editor changed his program into superheroes. First "Ant-Man", then "Hulk", and finally "Spider-Man". The first appeared in "Amazing Fantasy", one of the last horror books of the publishing house, in issue 15 in August 1962. Although skeptical about the heroic hero, the The publisher had just deleted half of the magazine for "Spider-Man". The rest were scary stories with headlines like "The man in the sarcophagus!". It did not seem to interest anyone. "Amazing Fantasy" was dropped, "Spider-Man" received a comedy series under his own name a month later, designed by Ditko.

Ditko has made good sense in the stories that comics of superheroes had been up to then. His "Spider-Man" was anti-heroic literally, a scourge that only uses his powers as a hero because he feels responsible for them. Already graphically without his suit a person, flipped, of average height, impotence in sight, only in costume any one. Again and again, Ditko created situations that graphically expressed the pressure on the figure. Legendary scene in which "Spider-Man" held a whole house fell on him.

Break with Stan Lee

Ditko proved that he could do it differently from 1963. "Doctor Strange" was an attempt to combine the Atlas horror comics with Marvel's superhero comics . Strange was a master mage without doubt and modesty. Clbadic comics of the pulp in which a mage with a coat and an amulet fight demons, it is Ditko's sprawling graphics that have made the magazine one of the favorite comics of counterculture. Strange acted in more and more surreal landscapes, permanently changing spaces. The highlight was his encounter with the formless form Eternity, the incarnation of all life in the universe.

Although very successful, Lee broke with Marvel in 1966. Ditko, notoriously shy by interview, never commented on why. Commercially, the pause for Ditko was a decline. None of his titles after that could reach a mbad audience. Figures like "The question", "Shade the Shanging Man" and "Mr. Not only did Dr. Strange's strangeness go on: titles that always gave more questions than answers, with characters barely aware of themselves. were. Ditko has hardly found an audience with her. To earn money, he continued occasionally to draw comics of superheroes, and even Marvel for a short time in the 1980s.

Artistic integrity was more important to him than the celebrity or a stable job. When the independent publishing house Fantagraphics wanted to publish a Ditko series in the 90s, the designer stopped the cooperation after only one problem – the publishing house had slipped a color error on the cover when of printing. Even a new corrected edition could not calm Ditko. When bestselling author Frank Miller ("Batman", "Sin City") offered to make a cartoon "Mr. A" with him, Ditko declined: no collaborations, no collaborations with his work. When his creations were successfully made in films from 2002, he showed no interest in being involved in the revenues.

As a human, he completely disappeared behind this work. From 1968, he stops giving interviews. When the BBC wanted to interview him in 2007 for a documentary, he did not even open the door. Although he had little income at the end of his life, he used his original Spider-Man pages, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars of collectors, as drawing material for new comics instead to sell them. He did not care about his past: "I do not care about the story of Steve Ditko," he once said, "When I draw a comic, I do not offer to the readers my personality, but my drawings. "

On June 29, police found Ditko dead in his New York apartment. He had already been dead for several days.

Stefan Pannor, * 1975, works in Leipzig as a freelance journalist and translator for the Marvel and DC comics