“I never talk about myself. My work is me.“

July 2, 2024 3:45 PM

One crispy Christmas during the early 1960s, Mark, only four or five, asked his uncle to sketch him a picture of a gorilla. Using only a pencil, his uncle cast a spell across the paper, and there he was: Konga, in all his glory. “Uncle Steve,” Mark beamed. “You are really good.”

–The Secret Life of Steve Ditko: Spider-Man Co-Creator’s Family Opens Up by Jay Deitcher [archive].
posted by Kattullus (3 comments total)

There's a lot less here about Ditko's family than I was hoping for; we just don't know a whole lot about Ditko's personal life. Of course, it doesn't sound like they did, either! The article seems kind of axe-grindy against Stan Lee in a way that, anymore, feels like a red flag to me -- I don't think there's any question that Ditko and Kirby plotted their stories, but it's clear from both artists' work away from Lee that his dialogue humanized the characters in a way the artists would likely not have done left to their own devices. This seems critical to the appeal of Marvel. While I love, for instance, Kirby's New Gods and Ditko's The Question, I think it's significant that these visually striking characters have not had the larger success that the artists' Marvel creations had.

I do have to take exception to the frankly bizarre idea that Ditko pioneered decompression -- in the same passage where the author mentioned Ditko's use of the nine-panel grid. A multitude of panels is pretty much the opposite of decompression, which allows scenes to play out for pages when they could as easily (but with less nuance) take place in a few panels. No one in the Silver or Bronze Ages was drawing decompression. Decompressed comics work best when collected into long books. In Ditko's era, a single issue comic was seen as a vehicle for a complete story.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 5:10 PM on July 2 [2 favorites]

Kattullus, thank you for this! i needed some decompression (whoever invented it :-)
posted by HearHere at 5:55 PM on July 2

Ditko was a nut, but he was a talented nut.

Also, that photo of him from the 50s shows that the Libertarian/Objectivist look hasn't changed much at all. All he needs is a katana to fit right in with them today (although I suspect he'd be offended to be lumped in with mere Libertarians).
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 6:03 PM on July 2 [1 favorite]