Spider-man creator Ditko dead at 90
Steve Ditko, a comicbook artist best known for his role in creating Spiderman, one of the most successful superhero properties ever, was found dead June 29 in his Manhattan apartment. He was 90.
The death was confirmed by Officer George Tsourovakas, a spokesman for the New York Police Department.
Ditko, along with artist Jack Kirby and writer and editor Stan Lee, was a key player in the 1960s cultural phenomenon known as Marvel Comics, whose characters today are ubiquitous in films, television shows and merchandise. Although Ditko had a hand in the early development of other signature Marvel characters — especially the sorcerer Dr. Strange — Spider-man was his definitive character and, for many fans, he was Spider-man’s definitive interpreter.
Ditko was noted for his cinematic storytelling, his occasional flights into almost psychedelic abstraction, and the philosophical convictions that often colored his work. Scrupulously private, he had a mystique rare among industry superstars.
The initial visual conception of Spider-man did not come from Ditko; according to Blake Bell’s book “Strange and Stranger:
The World of Steve Ditko” (2008), that image came from Kirby, who penciled an origin story for the Marvel title Amazing Fantasy in 1962. When Lee, Marvel’s editor, assigned Ditko to ink it, Ditko noticed similarities between Spider-man and the Fly — a Kirby creation for Marvel’s competitor Harvey Comics from 1959 — and raised his concerns with Lee. Kirby’s take was rejected, and the character’s origin was revamped to eliminate those similarities. (Out went a magic ring, among other elements.) Lee gave Ditko a synopsis to flesh out.
Ditko ran with the character. Spider-man made his debut that year in Amazing Fantasy No. 15, and the character’s popularity led to his own title, The Amazing Spider-man, which Ditko penciled, inked and largely plotted between 1963 and 1966.
Stephen Ditko was born Nov. 2, 1927, in Johnstown, Pa., to Stephen Ditko, a steel-mill carpenter, and his wife, Anna, a homemaker. His father bequeathed a love of newspaper strips like Hal Foster’s “Prince Valiant,” and the young Stephen devoured Batman and Will Eisner’s noirish Sunday newspaper insert, “The Spirit.”
After graduating from high school in 1945, Ditko joined the Army and was stationed in Germany, where he drew cartoons for a service newspaper. In 1950, under the GI Bill, he attended the Cartoonist and Illustrator School (which later became the School of Visual Arts) in New York.
Ditko’s first work in print was in early 1953, in a romance comic from a minor publisher. For three months he worked in the studio of Kirby and Joe Simon, creators of Captain America, before heading to Charlton Comics, which had its headquarters in Derby, Conn. Charlton offered low pay and inferior production values but creative freedom, and Ditko would return there often over his career.
In 1954, tuberculosis forced Ditko back to Pennsylvania, where he nearly died. After a year, he returned to New York, where he approached Lee, at the time a writer-editor for Atlas Comics, a precursor to Marvel. Lee, impressed with Ditko’s speed and proficiency, hired him.
Cutbacks at Atlas brought Ditko back to Charlton, where he and writer Joe Gill created the nuclear-powered Captain Atom, before returning to what was now the Marvel Comics Group. Marvel was in a rebirth, starting with the publication of The Fantastic Four in 1961, and continuing with Thor and the Hulk. In 1962, Spiderman appeared. Kirby drew the cover of his debut, but for three years the character was Ditko’s baby.
Ditko helped develop other Marvel superheroes, including Iron Man and the Hulk. Probably his best-known character esides Spider-man was Dr. Strange, who first appeared in 1963.