“It’s like when Stan Lee and Steve Ditko invented Spider-Man,” Sheldon Cooper once remarked on the CBS comedy The Big Bang Theory. “Stan Lee may get all the credit, but Steve Ditko knows he was just as important. Even though Stan Lee gets to be in all the Marvel movies, and he’s far richer, and he’s a household name. Whereas if you say Ditko, that sounds like a company that makes Dits.”
Over the summer of 2021, the Bottle Works Ethnic Arts Center in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, set out to change that characterization with a special Hometown Heroes exhibit. Steve Ditko – who died in 2018 at the age of ninety – was born and raised in the small Western Pennsylvania enclave, and still has family in the area. Despite the impact he had on the comic book industry, however, Ditko’s preference for privacy kept him out of the public eye and little is known about his personal life. The goal of the exhibit was thus two-fold – to pay homage to the co-creator of Spider-Man and Doctor Strange and raise awareness of his achievements in the town that he once called home.
Stephen J. Ditko was born on November 2, 1927, the son of a carpenter and seamstress. Raised during the Great Depression, the primary form of entertainment for the Ditko family were the Sunday comics, especially Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant. By the time young Steve reached the age of twelve, the superhero comic book phenomenon was in full swing and he became infatuated with Batman, especially the narratives constructed by artist Jerry Robinson. A few years later, Will Eisner’s The Spirit began appearing in the local newspaper, and Ditko decided shortly thereafter that he wanted to become a comic book creator and artist as well.
It’s not often that one gets to learn their chosen craft from the person most responsible for their career choice, but Steve Ditko was able to do just that when he moved to New York City after World War II and enrolled in the Cartoonists & Illustrators School. Jerry Robinson was one of the instructors there, and immediately took the young man under his wings.
“They must understand the story’s structure and characterization,” Blake Bell quotes Robinson as saying about his students in the 2008 book Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko. “Steve understood all that. He could work with other writers as well as write his own stories and create his own characters.”
In 1953, after having sold a small number of illustrated narratives for such publishers as Ajax-Farell and Gillmor Magazines, Ditko landed a job at the studio founded by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, the duo who created Captain America for Marvel in 1940. While there, Steve Ditko further honed his craft under the tutelage of former DC artists Mort Meskin and Joe Kubert. The introduction of the Comics Book Code a year later, however, resulted in a tightening-of-the-belt within the industry and the collapse of numerous small publishers. Fortunately for Ditko, he was able to find new employment with one of the few still-standing companies, Marvel Comics.
It was while at Marvel that Steve Ditko achieved his greatest success, as well as left an indelible mark on popular culture. While the initial Iron Man of Jack Kirby, for instance, was fitted with a round clunk of grey armor, it was Ditko who streamlined the suit into an outfit similar to the one later be worn by actor Robert Downey Jr. In the hands of Kirby, the Hulk was originally a greyish beast – again it was Ditko who turned the Bruce Banner alter-ego into a green monster while likewise adding the twist that the Hulk only appeared during fits of rage.
Despite such relevant tweaks, however, it is Spider-Man that remains Steve Ditko’s most significant creation, and the character itself would no doubt have been a totally different superhero if not for Ditko.
“Unlike Kirby, whose heroes had a stocky majesty, Ditko populated his stories with rail-thin, squinting malcontents, placing the protagonist, Peter Parker, in a constellation of sneers, jabbing fingers, and angry eyebrows,” author Sean Howe wrote in his 2012 book Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. “All of this was balanced, brilliantly and precariously, with breezy acrobatic action sequences. Ditko’s rendering of athleticism was quite different from Kirby’s, more about gymnastic dodging than knockout punches, but it was just as exciting.”
While Steve Ditko obviously influenced the physical appearance of Spider-Man, he also played a key role in the storylines as well. Marvel Comics of the early 1960s resembled a factory line, with Stan Lee scribbling a few paragraphs of plot on a piece of paper before handing the notes off to the likes of Jack Kirby to flesh out and illustrate, with Lee then adding dialogue to the finished pages. Not so with Spider-Man, as Ditko had his own ideas regarding the famed webslinger. By the time the eighteenth issue of The Amazing Spider-Man appeared, Ditko was the one in charge, not Stan Lee.
“It was entirely plotted by Ditko, who’d been having disagreements with Lee about the direction of the comic and gradually taking more control of storylines,” Steve Howe explains. “Ditko resisted Lee’s requests to soften the harsh edges of the supporting characters that surrounded Spider-Man. He also argued against overwhelming the title with fantastic or mystical elements, preferring to keep the stories ‘grounded more in a teenager’s credible world.’ Lee called for a maximum of costumed fight scenes; Ditko pushed for more scenes of Peter Parker.”
Stan Lee confirmed their arrangement in a 1965 interview with the New York Herald Tribune. “I don’t plot Spider-Man anymore,” he said. “Steve Ditko, the artist, has been doing the stories. I guess I’ll leave him alone until sales start to slip. Since Spidey got so popular, Ditko thinks he’s the genius of the world. We were arguing so much over plot lines I told him to start making up his own stories. He won’t let anybody else ink his drawings either. He just drops off the finished pages with notes at the margins and I fill in the dialogue. I never know what he’ll come up with next, but it’s interesting to work that way.”
Unfortunately, it wouldn’t “work that way” for very long. Although Steve Ditko co-created Spider-Man, the character itself was owned by Marvel Comics, which meant that Ditko did not receive any compensation from merchandising or a potential Saturday morning cartoon television series that was in the works. In 1966, his growing frustration led him to quit Marvel, leaving the character he helped create in someone else’s hands. A firm believer that it was the story that most mattered, he consented to very few interviews throughout his career and virtually no public appearances, resulting in his relative obscurity.
In addition to the Hometown Heroes: Steve Ditko exhibit – which featured a small handful of original comic art and other memorabilia – the 2021 summer-long celebration in Johnstown featured the staging of a two-act play called Ditko written by Rhode Island resident Lenny Schwartz in July and culminated with a one-day Ditko Con in September.
During Ditko Con, comics historian Arlen Schumer told the audience that he had eaten breakfast at the local Flood City Café. Although he enjoyed the meal, he couldn’t help but think of a day when the city wasn’t known for its many tragic floods but the comic book artist who had been born and raised there. In Schumer’s mind, Steve Ditko would be like a Phoenix rising from the ashes, achieving the status of not only a hometown hero but cementing his recognition as one of the truly great practitioners of the comic arts.
For anyone who has ever marveled over the wonders Spider-Man and Doctor Strange, it is a sentiment that they obviously share.
Anthony Letizia