Steve Ditko was a comic creator ahead of his time

& # 39; Spider-Man & # 39; and & # 39; Doctor Strange & # 39; are just two of the many gifts the creator has given to comics.

For most people, Steve Ditko will be remembered for co-creating one of the most iconic characters in Marvel Entertainment, Spider-Man. He was the artist who not only illustrated (and, increasingly, drew on) the early years of the crawler's existence, but co-created most of his iconic gallery of thugs, including including Green Goblin, Dr. Octopus, Sandman, Lizard. and many, many more. For anyone it would be an impressive creative legacy, but for Ditko, whose comics world is dead, it was only the beginning.

Like his contemporary Marvel Jack Kirby, Ditko was a creative powerhouse who continued to create characters even after separating with Marvel and Stan Lee. Along with Lee, he also co-created Dr. Strange and most of this character's mythology and, more importantly, iconography; Strange de Ditko is literally impossible to separate, just as the Fantastic Four remain permanently married in Kirby. Ditko protruded from Marvel almost five years before Kirby left, for reasons that neither he nor Stan Lee have ever fully explained, but were supposed to be related to creative freedom and differences. approach between the two men in charge of Spider-Man's history

This meant that one of the two men behind one of Marvel's greatest successes, still on a creative and niche niche commercial, was suddenly on the market at a time when superheroes were a big deal – something that attracted competitors, who were generally willing to let him follow his muse, no matter where he was going. The result was a number of comic creations that, although not as famous as Peter Parker or Stephen Strange, were equally individual, equally fascinating, and equally full of possibilities.

For Charlton Comics, he creates Blue Beetle. an insect-themed character, which in many ways reflected a straighter, less neurotic Spider-Man, as well as the Question and Captain Atom, all three characters who were literally ahead of their time; all three would succeed under different writers and artists as they relive for critically acclaimed races in DC, while simultaneously inspiring Nite Owl, Rorschach and Doctor Manhattan in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons Watchmen . For DC himself, he created a panoply of newcomers, Hawk and Dove – two ideologically opposed brothers who received powers from a mysterious mystical force who had to work together to save the day – Shade the Changing Man, a former secret agent whose -Vest allowed him to reshape the very same reality as the political landscape around him was moving in a series of increasingly paranoid. Other creations of DC included the Creeper, a reporter whose secret identity allowed him to fight injustice and lies in a much more direct way than mere writing.

Even though he retreated almost to retreat, he never retreated completely; In 2016, he was still producing a work that, for all intents and purposes, was self-edited with editor-in-chief and friend Robin Snyder – he continued working freelance and creating new characters. He returned to Marvel to co-create Speedball and Squirrel Girl, the latter now being one of the biggest successes of the company outside the fan-centric live market. At other publishers, he invented Missing Man, the Mocker, Static and, reflecting his own political views, the objectivist Mr. A.

The trait that all these characters had, in addition to Ditko's trademark aesthetic that focused on the eyes and hands to an almost fetishistic degree at times, was that all were … strange . (No pun intended.) Ditko's characters were always a bit out of the mainstream, a celebration of the individual and the alien even at a time when these things were rare and the superheroes traditionally aspired to be agents of the status quo. Ditko's creations, even those theoretically designed to be family-friendly like Speedball and Squirrel Girl, were still just a little something scary and weird … which was what made them memorable, and even adorable. 19659003] Throughout the decades he has worked and introduced new ideas and new characters to the world, Ditko has challenged trends and followed his own offbeat muse; he was an author at a time when few existed in comics, and everyone and everything he was working on demonstrated. As I wrote above, he was a creator ahead of his time in terms of ideas – even Squirrel Girl took two decades of creation to become a success, a gap strangely similar to that between the beginnings and the commercial peak of his characters Charlton – but also in terms of attitude.

Without the sense of (because his interest was always simply to do his own thing, he was an objectivist, after all), Ditko demonstrated the value of following your own creative impulse years before Image Comics or the landscape l & # Surrounding, existed; without knowing it, he showed the future. Comics is a smaller place without him.