The Creation Of Spider-ManA Story by Tony Z Sienzant An essay detailing the Marvel Method and who if anyone can claim "authorship" rights to The Amazing Spider-Man: Stan Lee, Steve Ditko or Jack Kirby. For Pics, go to Facebook page: Vision Angles. THE CREATION OF SPIDER-MAN PROLOGUE
When Amazing Fantasy #15 hit the news stands in the summer of 1962, no one would have guessed that the odd character swinging across its cover would become a multi-million dollars franchise spanning publications, household items, children toys, an animated television series, a daily newspaper strip, video games and Hollywood blockbuster movies some 50 years later.
It would catapult the lowly Timely Comics into the Marvel Age to become the comic book industry leader by the decade’s end. And it would make its Editor in Chief, Stan Lee, a household name, overshadowing the other creators who had a hand in bringing Spider-Man to life on the printed page.
Not bad for a comic book title that was slated by its publisher Martin Goodman to be cancelled with that issue. Not bad for writer Stanley Lieber (Stan Lee) whose lifelong dream was to author the great American novel.
AMAZING FANTASY
The Marvel comic book Amazing Fantasy began life as Amazing Adventures in June of 1961. As an anthology of sci-fi, monster, magician and Twilight Zone-type stories, its two feature artists were the legendary Jack Kirby -- who with Joe Simon created Captain America in the 1940s -- and the inimitable Steve Ditko, with stories written by Stan Lee.
For its first six issues, Amazing Adventures was indistinguishable from the other monster fare that Marvel (then called Atlas Comics) put out such as Strange Tales, Journey into Mystery and Tales of Suspense, with Kirby contributing monsters that ran havoc through the streets of Manhattan or through the villages of some sub-continent and Ditko offering up his brand of psychologically-tinged morality tales with twist endings.
But for issue #7, the title Amazing Adventures was changed to Amazing Adult Fantasy, with the sub-heading “the magazine that respects your intelligence,” and the book was given over entirely to Ditko’s illustrations and storytelling.
Ditko’s talent for storytelling was unique. If Kirby gave a story a dynamic feast for the eye based in realism, with out-of-this-world technologies and cosmic interplanetary landscapes, Ditko injected his narratives with a mood of paranoia, fear and suspense. And every one of his tales for this title had a surprise ending to foil readers’ expectations.
At this time in his career, Ditko’s style was a more minimalistic rendering: the backgrounds of his figures were often absent, completely blank, to concentrate the viewer on a character’s body language and facial expression. Such renderings gave a clean, elegant, open look to the entire composition of the page in question, yet counter-intuitively, imbued it with a claustrophobic quality due to his use of a repeating grid format of nine picture panels.
Unlike Kirby, Ditko inked his own pencil drawings. Ditko’s use of shadow and the calligraphic flowing black lines of his brushwork stood out from the pack. It was well understood by fans and peers alike that no one could ink Ditko better than Ditko himself.
These monster comics provided the breeding ground for the Marvel superhero revolution: the Hulk first appeared in Journey into Mystery (the book then had a long run with Marvel’s answer to Superman, namely Thor); Iron Man appeared in Tales of Suspense; Strange Tales inaugurated Ditko’s Doctor Strange, sharing the bill with Nick Fury, Agent of Shield. And with the last issue of Amazing Fantasy #15, the “adult” tag was dropped for fear of retailers not selling to kids, and the world got its first glimpse of a strange new superhero called Spider-Man.
But the genesis of Spider-Man is shrouded in some mystery, controversy and debate. A big part of the controversy is due to Stan Lee’s oft-touted proclamations of “The Marvel Method.”
In this article, you will learn what that method is, what exactly is known and what is not known about the creation of Spider-Man. And who, if anyone -- Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko -- can claim authorship rights to the character’s creation.
THE MARVEL METHOD
Unlike Marvel’s competitors over at National/DC, whose writers scripted the stories for Batman and Superman with a page by page, panel by panel breakdown for the artist to follow, Stan Lee just provided the bare bones of a storyline idea and would leave it to the artist to plot and pace it. Artists were expected to create scene segues and literally fill in all the detail missing from Stan’s original premise.
The fact that Marvel stories were not broken down ahead of time panel by panel is evident in much of Kirby’s pages of that time.
For the early Fantastic Four title, Kirby liked to divide the action into five scenes, like separate acts in a play. Each scene was about 4 pages long. Because neither Stan nor Jack paced the story ahead of time and only used a rough idea of what each part would contain, often the book’s final pages were crammed with smaller panels in order to get everything in that needed to be seen.
Thus, many concluding sequences of action, which should have been expounded large for the eye to see for a more stunning climax, possessed a much lesser visual impact. That wouldn’t have been the case if the action was broken down panel by panel for each page ahead of time.
The panel by panel page breakdown remains to this day as the standard method for producing comic book stories. The writers for Marvel even use it now, because of copyright concerns and for securing the rights to any characters they may create.
In fact, the issue of ownership and fair compensation for one’s creations were at the heart of Ditko’s decision to abandon the Amazing Spider-Man title when it was approaching the peak of its popularity.
Despite the glowing camaraderie of a team of inhouse artists toiling at their drawing tables which Lee propagated in his monthly “Stan’s Soapbox,” Ditko and Kirby, as well as the majority of the other artists in Stan Lee’s ‘bullpen,’ were actually freelance artists. They worked from home and came into the office only when needed to drop off their work. They were paid by the page and their character creations remained the exclusive property of Marvel.
Both Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby left Marvel when verbal agreements made with publisher Martin Goodman were not honored. Both co-creators had the understanding that if the books they were shepherding took off and became hits, they would then enjoy a percentage of the royalties. Even a small percentage of Marvel’s profits from the myriad characters the two created would have been a boon to both artists who were paid dollars per page.
Comic book historian, Sean Howe, states in his book “Marvel Comics, The Untold Story” that the Marvel Method “required that the artists could break down a basic plot into a finely paced, visually clear story over which Lee would write his dialogue. He wanted the panels to function like silent movies, to minimize the need for verbal exposition. Ideally, the artists would also contribute their own narrative ideas -- characters, subplots -- to the stories, just as Kirby and Ditko did.”
Perhaps Stan’s own words best flesh out how the “Marvel Method” worked: “All I had to do was give Steve a one-line description of the plot and he’d be off and running. He’d take those skeleton outlines I had given him and turn them into classic little works of art that ended up being far cooler than I had any right to expect.”
While Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby enjoyed the unbounded freedom this method granted to create scenes, pacing, subplots and even new characters, other artists such as Golden Age great Wally Wood, frowned upon this extra work for which they would not be paid.
Comic book writer/historian Mark Evanier says that Stan Lee’s approach was born of necessity because “Stan was overburdened with work.” Lee, knowing the value of artists like Kirby, wanted “to make use of Jack’s great skill with storylines.” Writer-editor Dennis O’Neil corroborates that in the mid-1960s “plots were seldom more than a typewritten page and sometimes less.”
But Lee and Kirby most often did not even work from a page set in type. They’d have a story conference in a car on their way somewhere or verbally over the phone. According to John Romita, the artist who ‘ghost drew’ Spider-Man after Ditko’s departure, “They didn’t always remember what the other had said. Jack would say one thing and Stan would say another thing. They only remembered their own suggestions, not the other guy’s suggestion. That was true when I plotted with Stan too.”
Romita continues, “Many times, I thought I had convinced Stan that we were going to go in a certain direction in the storyline. And then when he would get the work, he would say, ‘No, that’s not what we agreed on.’ And I’d say, ‘Yeah don’t you remember?’ I used to go home with a very vague idea of what Stan wanted. I had a couple of prominent things like who the villain was, the general premise of the story and what kind of personal life to weave in and then the rest of it was up to me. And I would have a tough time bridging sequences. I would have all these nightmare problems with trying to make it work. Why did they break up the fight and how do they get together again? It was nerve-wracking.”
Because of the Marvel Method, Lee often had trouble finding suitable artists who could plot and pace a story in addition to rendering their panels in the dynamic eye-catching way that Ditko and Kirby did. When a new artist took over a book, Lee would often have Kirby do rough layouts for the artist to follow, to insure the pacing from panel to panel was up to snuff. After a few issues with that sort of ‘coaching,’ the new artist would then be left to his own devices.
And when Lee brought in artists from the Golden Age era or from rival companies to illustrate his contemporary line of comics, it often brought trouble. The title of Daredevil is a case in point.
Stan understood that creative consistency was vital for any new book to succeed. The look and feel of the artist’s renderings set the tone for each superhero comic and readers came to identify a certain style with that hero. Not fulfilling such expectations could be a title’s downfall. But the first few months of Daredevil was a revolving door of three separate artists, making it difficult for the book to establish itself aesthetically as a particular ‘brand.’
Before Golden Age artist Wally Wood was chosen to illustrate Daredevil, two other artists tried but couldn’t meet Stan’s deadlines. Bill Everett, creator of Prince Namor/Submariner in the 1940s, was already working 15 hours at his day job and was drawing by night. Lee probably picked him because of Everett’s successful track record for writing the Submariner stories as well as drawing them. But when the artist handed in only two thirds of Daredevil’s inaugural issue and Ditko had to finish it up at the last minute (he just happened to be visiting the office that day), Everett was let go.
Joe Orlando then came on board as the Daredevil artist for a short stint of three issues. But he couldn’t take working under the Marvel Method.
“The problem was that I wasn’t Jack Kirby. Jack -- or Ditko, or just a couple of others -- could take a couple of sentences of plot and bring in 20 pages that Stan could dialogue in an afternoon or two,” Orlando explained. “When I drew out the story my way, Stan would go over it and say, ‘this panel needs to be changed’ and ‘this whole page needs to be changed’ and on and on. I didn’t plot it out the way he wanted the story told so I wound up drawing at least half of every story twice. They weren’t paying enough for that so I quit.”
Lee was not shy about promoting the kind of action packed panels he wanted to see, using Kirby’s grand style as the template. “Stan wanted Kirby to be Kirby, Ditko to be Ditko… and everyone else to be Kirby,” lamented Iron Man artist Don Heck. When Heck took over Kirby’s Avengers title, the letters pages thundered with Lee’s preference:
As for Wood, he left Marvel disgruntled and had this to say about Stan Lee: “Did I say Stanley had no smarts? Well, he DID come up with two sure-fire ideas. The first one was ‘Why not let the artists WRITE the stories as well as draw them? And the second was ‘ALWAYS SIGN YOUR NAME ON TOP …BIG.’ And the rest is history. Stanley, of course became rich and famous, over the bodies of people like Bill [Everett] and Jack [Kirby]. Bill, who had created the character that had made his father rich wound up COLORING and doing odd jobs.”
In contrast to Orlando and Wood, artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko felt more at ease in bringing their individual touch to each and every story. They were true creators, in that their expertise extended beyond their stylists as visual artists, to excel as storytellers whose ongoing plots and supporting characters were woven through their series in issue after issue after issue.
This mindset is vastly different from the graphic illustrator merely ‘doing a job’ by following a detailed script. Both Ditko and Kirby welcomed this creative control and the gratification -- at least in the beginning -- that came from knowing their editor was relying upon their skills in these areas. Both naturally became more emotionally invested in the books they drew because they were creating entire worlds, setting up their characters like chess pieces and steering the story arc of their titles like seasoned directors.
They were, in fact, writing the stories in pictures. Stan, for the most part, had little idea what exactly he’d be given by these storyteller artists every month.
Artist Gil Kane supports this conclusion, stating, "On each page from 1964 to 1970, next to every single panel, Jack wrote extensive margin notes explaining to Lee what was taking place in the story. It took Jack about 2 weeks do a single story. It may have taken Lee as little as 4 hours to add text to Jack’s art."
Hence, the Marvel Method was not only a collaborative process in the most meaningful use of the word “collaboration” but blurred the neat division between the role of writer and artist. Since the actual stories weren’t written by Stan beforehand but only scripted with narration and dialogue by him after the fact using the artist’s directive notes, it is somewhat disingenuous for Lee to credit himself with ‘authoring’ the final story. But in the case of the stories for The Amazing Spider-Man, there’s a further twist.
STORYTELLER STEVE DITKO
Sometime around issue #10, Lee gave Ditko greater latitude to plot Spider-Man. And it would only be a matter of months before Steve would fully take over the reins as its storyteller when Stan and Steve stopped speaking to each other.
Once in the driver seat, Steve made sure the stories put a finer focus on Peter Parker’s life at home, at school, and at work, such that these generated interweaving plot lines that directly related to his Spider-Man battles.
As the artist began steering the narrative his way, Stan Lee stopped having any kind of story conferences with Steve Ditko at all. This happened sometime around issue #18 of The Amazing Spider-Man, and most likely before, as #18 is nestled in between a three-issue story arc of Parker quitting as Spider-Man to take care of his Aunt May -- a very Ditkonian concept.
For that story, Steve handed in 20 pages where Spider-Man doesn’t even battle a foe. The tale mainly centered on Parker and only showed Spider-Man running away from the Sandman, because our hero could not take the chance of getting seriously hurt. Lee, uncertain of how such a tale would be received by Spider-Man fans, promoted the issue this way: “A lot of readers are sure to hate it, so if you want to know what all the criticism is about, be sure to buy a copy !”
The fissures between Stan and Steve were starting to show.
More evidence of their disagreements over the trajectory of Spider-Man and the credit for authorship of the stories came in the barbs Lee made on the title page in issue #20. Stan made it into a joke: Stan’s name was written second in the credits blurb but it was twice the size of Ditko’s. And the inference that unnamed readers brought this up in the first place, may be Stan’s way of saying it was Steve Ditko himself, who read every issue when it came time for the artist to ink his drawings.
It seems worthy to note that Stan picked a particularly ironic occasion to make light of Ditko’s contribution. For issue #20, Ditko unveiled a new villain for Spider-Man, a significant one who has lasted over half a century now: the Scorpion.
In any case, when the magazine was still in its teen numbers, Stan left the succeeding storylines in their entirety up to Steve, not knowing what the stories would be at all, except perhaps for the name of the villain. To these, Stan only made minor edits.
Still, the new credit blurb was the more accurate description of the Marvel Method. The wording, dialogue and narration were only scripted by Stan according to what the pictures showed him. While this method helped Lee, who was managing an entire slew of comic books to come out on schedule, it sometimes caused confusion and gaffes in continuity when plot developments were continued in subsequent issues. And stories suffered under the fate of lesser artists, not well-schooled in telling a story.
The character of Spider-Man, however, was in good hands with Steve Ditko.
Ditko thought Lee was too eager to please letter-writing fans, taking their gripes too literally instead of following his own creative instincts. Says Steve, “Stan liked, wanted, to see Spider-Man in action on every page or as soon as possible, as often as possible.”
Ditko also made pains to keep Lee’s more fantastical elements out of Spider-Man, feeling they were foreign to the entire tenor of the book and beyond the scope of a teen’s life experience. “It’s like having a high-school football player playing in the Super Bowl,” he said.
Although he bowed to Stan’s proposals for the earliest issues -- drawing Spider-Man atop a space capsule in the outer reaches of the earth’s atmosphere and in a shorter story, foiling an alien invasion of the planet -- he put his foot down afterwards. “I preferred that we have Peter Parker/Spider-Man ideas grounded more in a teenager’s credible world,” Ditko related.
A good example of this is issue #14. Stan originally had the Green Goblin born from an Egyptian tomb as a mystical demon from the ancient past.
Ditko rejected it.
Perhaps even more startling, Ditko didn’t even bother to explain who this villain was. He supplied no “origin” for him. He just appears, tinkering with his jet glider, fully garbed as the green and purple ‘demon’ in his villain lair. Throughout his run on Spider-Man, Ditko never exposed who the Green Goblin was and in the later stories, he ratcheted up that mystery, as Spider-Man continued to add up the bits of evidence as to his nemesis’s true identity.
Ditko also made sure that the private life of Peter Parker was at the fore: it was what gave the book its teen angst emotional resonance. Ditko’s great flare for easily weaving the personal side of Parker’s life into the villain fights with Spider-Man gave a cause-and-effect interconnectedness that made the narratives more realistic. It also opened up possibilities for plots that were often humorous, poignant and ironic in the way that true life is.
Issue #25 is one of the best examples of this. All throughout the school day, Peter is shown distracted, looking out the window, inadvertently dropping books. He’s aware that Doctor Smythe’s robot, who can sense and track the vibrations of Spider-Man, may arrive at any time, unexpectedly, while Parker is at school, home or walking down the street. But his schoolmates all believe that Pete is jittery because he’s afraid of Flash Thompson, who challenged Parker to an after-school fight.
Ditko develops this into a great scene whereby the robot is chasing Parker on the crowded pavement, pushing people out of the way to find Spider-Man somewhere ahead, while between them Flash and his cohorts are in hot pursuit, thinking “chicken Parker” is running away from them. When Flash and friends notice the robot behind them, with Jameson’s face aglow in the robot’s head screen glass, they think the publisher has turned into some sort of a monster !
And once Parker manages to change into his Spider-Man costume -- Ditko depicts him hopping along in his bare feet, trying to put on his Spidey boots -- Flash catches sight of his hero, forgets all about Parker and tries to help Spider-Man.
Betty Brant, Jameson’s secretary, tries to help him too.
She cannot believe that it was Peter himself that urged Jameson to listen to the ‘nutty professor’ Smythe in the first place. Parker was confident that Smythe’s contraption was a hunk of junk until its tentacles shot out and ensnared him, when it was supposed to entrap the spider Parker held in a glass bowl. Jameson, annoyed that Betty is getting under his feet, pushes her out of the room, when she pretends to accidentally drop some papers to put her closer to the wall outlet in order to unplug the robot controller from its electricity source.
Ditko, like a great novelist, seemed to instinctively understand the motivations of all his characters and how they would respond in different situations, under different circumstances. He always made sure to put his characters under unique scenarios that would inevitably lead to the Spider-Man battle and he was always pushing toward a truer, more realistic rendition of how things would turn out.
It was Ditko’s insistence, for example, that when a villain is unmasked in real life, it’s usually not someone you would know. It’s not the butler or the minor character shown on page five. Hence, when the Crime Master is unmasked in issue #27, Spider-Man is completely dumbfounded. He has no clue who the guy is.
Ditko also brought the darker psychological elements of Peter Parker’s guilt complex over his Uncle Ben’s death to the reader in a way that wasn’t done before, animating many Spider-Man tales. He created a villain, the aforementioned Green Goblin, with no intention of ever revealing his origin or identity. Rumor has it that Stan and Steve would argue over this aspect. The first thing Lee did with Steve’s departure from the book was reveal the Goblin’s identity.
Ditko even created a minor character who was never seen at all by the comic book reader during his authorship on the title. The first time he did visualize her, in issue #25, her face was obscured by a household plant.
And Ditko did the unheard of by uprooting the established setting in which the protagonist found himself, having Peter Parker graduate high school. This was never done before in a comic book. Publisher Martin Goodman was full of trepidation at such a move.
But Goodman was never a very good man at knowing what would whet the comic book reader’s appetite.
When Lee first brought the concept of Spider-Man to Goodman, who was pleased at the success of the Fantastic Four a year prior, his reaction was one of ‘are you crazy, that’s a terrible idea, nobody likes spiders !’ But Lee, who claims he came up with Spider-Man by going through the alphabet thinking of bugs (A for ant, B for bee, etc.), intuitively felt that he had something with a teen who was not a mere sidekick to an established adult superhero but was the main hero in his own right. (Stan always hated sidekicks -- Robin to Batman, Bucky to Captain America, Superboy to Superman -- so when Lee returned to work after his wartime enlistment, he called for Bucky to be shot.)
Lee also reasoned that any person who possessed the powers of a spider would scale walls, leap far distances and spin webs. It seemed like a natural vehicle for storybook pictures.
Stan Lee figured that Goodman wouldn’t notice, or care, if he slipped the origin Spider-Man story into Amazing Fantasy #15 knowing that the title was slated for elimination. If it clunked, it wouldn’t matter, the book was on its last issue anyway.
JACK KIRBY’S SPIDER-MAN
For years, Jack Kirby has been credited with creating the original costume for Spider-Man. But recently it’s come to attention that this costume looked nothing like the one that Steve Ditko drew. Ditko went on record to say that Kirby’s garb for Spider-Man bore marked similarities to the Captain America costume of old -- the flared boots and no web lines -- than to the Spider-Man one we know of today. Ditko rejected Kirby's rendition entirely and designed a unique costume whose web lines run along a part of the arms, taper down the chest to the belt, complete with under arm threads stemming from the elbow to the waist and a big emblem of a spider on the back. Kirby's Spider-Man also had a gun that shot webs. Ditko changed this to wrist web-shooters (it is said his studio art partner Eric Stanton suggested this particular revision but that has yet to be verified). Finally, Ditko dispensed with the goggles Kirby had given the hero, turning them into flaring eyelets whose flexible frosted lenses allowed him to see out but no one see in. In total, Ditko's suit was the more original, imparting a more threatening appearance. (Ditko also created Iron Man’s more streamlined suit, which is still being used to this day.)
In fact, he did.
Before Ditko even heard of a character named Spider-Man, Jack Kirby handed into Lee a few pages of illustration for the Spider-Man origin tale. Stan Lee knew Kirby had a tremendous past with creating superheroes (Captain America has lasted over 70 years now) and he had just hit a home run with bringing the Fantastic Four to life.
So it was Lee’s modus operandi at this time to entrust at least the first few issues of any new superhero to Kirby, to establish a title’s footing before handing it off to another artist. Kirby was also illustrating the bulk, if not all, of the covers of the Marvel comics at this time as well, all of which helped them sell. It only made sense to give Spider-Man to Kirby. And that’s just what happened.
But then fate intervened.
Steve Ditko was summoned into the offices on a certain day in 1962 to meet with his editor Stan Lee. Stan wanted him to ink over Kirby’s pencils. Ditko was a great inker and somehow when he inked Kirby he seemed to bring out something subtle in Jack’s style, giving the characters ‘weight’ the way Dick Ayers did, but his embellishments had a clean, light and elegant line that were almost Disneyesque.
Lee handed him a few pages of Kirby’s pencils and asked, “What do you think of this?”
Ditko was seeing the first 5 pages of the Kirby origin story for Spider-Man.
It showed Parker’s home life as being a place of little solace. In Kirby’s depiction, Peter Parker’s uncle was a retired police captain, more like a General Ross type in the Hulk saga, belittling the boy, constantly down on him. Furthermore, Jack had teen Parker use a magic ring to transform himself into an adult Spider-Man. The last page showed teen Parker entering a neighbor’s house, where a scientific experiment was going on. When Ditko was done, he accessed it unerringly.
“Well, it’s a retread of the Fly.”
Stan was puzzled. “The Fly ?”
“It’s something Jack cooked up with his pal Joe Simon a few years ago for Archie Comics.”
“I never heard of it.”
Ditko said, “There you go,” as if to prove his point.
Stan sighed. He certainly didn’t want his latest creation given the second-rate handling Kirby was giving it. Using a plotline from a failed comic wasn’t an auspicious beginning for Spider-Man.
He said to Steve, “Well, see what you can do with it.”
(Editor’s Note: the aforementioned interaction was a dramatized retelling of what actually occurred, based on real life recollections of Steve Ditko. ~ Truthteller Tone, lol)
Ditko was given little more than the basic synopsis: the protagonist is a bookworm teen who gains his spider powers through a freak accident when a radioactive spider bites him.
DITKO VERSUS KIRBY VERSUS ROMITA
It’s interesting to note that in Kirby’s origin story, Spider-Man was an adult hero. The teen Parker changed into him the way that teen Billy Batson transformed into the adult Captain Marvel (“Shazam !”) in the Comics Golden Age. There was nothing revolutionary about that. Perhaps Kirby submitted these pages without much discussion and Stan intuitively felt something was ‘off’ in what he’d seen. Or Jack got Stan’s instructions wrong, which is feasible. Or they both were looking back to the past, playing it safe with what had worked before.
Ditko was not one to play it safe.
Looking at his entire career, and the Ayn Randian type of characters such as Mr. A that he created after leaving Marvel, only supports this conclusion. He brought many innovations to the world of Spider-Man, such as the aforementioned character who was never seen by its readers and a villain whose identity remains unknown.
No, Ditko’s version of Spider-Man was one of being a true teen with super powers -- bringing the teen psychology, the teen mindset, the teen world (absent magic rings) -- with him when the hero dons his mask.
Stan Lee iterated time and again that he decided to give the illustrating duties of his fledgling hero to Steve Ditko because Jack Kirby’s rendition of Spider-Man was “too heroic.”
Still, Lee rejected Ditko’s original ‘unheroic’ Spider-Man cover, with its vantage point looking down on the character, in favor of Kirby’s more heroic pose: Spider-Man arched back in an extreme yoga position, hurtling forward with one arm extended straight behind him gripping his web line, the viewer’s upward perspective one of awe, likening the figure to a ‘god’ above men.
In Ditko’s handling, the viewer was placed close to Spider-Man to be part of the action, with the onlookers placed around him on the same plane. Pictorially, Ditko’s composition brought Spider-Man down to a human level, which was the entire premise of the book’s message: a realistic hero with human problems.
But Stan Lee as editor rightly put sales potential ahead of such character-based concerns. Kirby’s cover is clearly the better one, being eye-catching and dynamic. And covers sold comic books.
The striking differences between how the two artists handled the cover shot extended to the interior pages of the original Kirby story and the final Ditko one. Chief among these was the concept of a true teen superhero and having the stories center on the experiences of the teen’s family and contemporaries at school.
This is something that Ditko, as the artist plotting the narrative panel to panel, issue to issue, made certain remained as a constant throughout his run on Spider-Man. He gave his 41 issues a story arc that culminated beautifully in having his characters grow and mature, such that Parker ‘becomes a man’ in issue #33 in order to save Aunt May’s life (a scene now known as "Spider-Man Shrugged" in a nod to Ayn Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged").
In Ditko’s hands, Spider-Man’s motives directly relate to what is happening around Peter Parker. When John Romita took over the drawing chores, Parker’s personal life was kept, but in the most rudimentary way: Peter obsessing over his many problems. It was rare to see the inventive interconnectedness of the Parker/Spider-Man exploits during those years, something that virtually animated nearly every single tale of Spider-Man at its inception.
This change only makes sense when seen through the lens of Steve Ditko as Spider-Man’s chief architect.
With Steve’s departure, and without the luxury of a full-blown Stan Lee script to work from, artist Romita did his best at faking it. Between the 30 days of Ditko’s final issue #38 and Romita’s first #39, the Ditko-created characters of Gwen Stacey, Harry Osborn and Flash Thompson, all college contemporaries of Peter Parker, switch from despising Parker to allowing him into their inner circle.
Many fans were aghast. Many dropped the title soon after. But others, especially the newly turned-on college students, were drawn to the new Spider-Man who had graduated high school and was now in college himself.
Peter Parker, the down-luck kid whom no one had liked, whom Flash Thompson bullied all through high school, was now popular. He was so cool that Lee/Romita gave him a motorcycle to wheel around on. And he looked Madison Avenue too, ever-smiling, his hair hardly mussed.
John Romita himself seems to have sensed he was trying to fill some big shoes: “I’ve been calling myself a ‘paid illustrator’ for years and the reason for that is guys like Steve Ditko. The difference is that when you’re in their world, you don’t have to look around to see which part of it reminds you of them -- everything reminds you of them. So when you talk about artists like Steve Ditko, you have to put them in a special category. They are what I call creators. The rest of us are illustrators. We illustrate as close as we can to what the editor wants us to do. That’s not false modesty --- it’s the truth.”
Soon, the never-to-be-seen Mary Jane Watson whose face was obscured by a plant, who was the incidental running gag character as envisioned by Ditko, became under the auspices of Lee/Romita a recurring glamour girl who liked to party, party, party. A few years later, she supplanted Gwen as Pete’s heart throb because try as Lee/Romita may, they could not make the character of Gwen as interesting, as passionate, as dynamically full of life as Mary Jane on the page.
Hence, a minor character Ditko created with the intention of never allowing the reader to actually see, leaving her startling beauty to one’s imagination, today is married to Peter Parker. The green-eyed redhead has become a staple character of the title, as integral to the stories as Parker himself. And the eye-popping tits and a*s quotient she supplies for pubescent boys makes her even more popular.
This was not how Ditko envisioned her role at all. By any measure, Ditko was bringing some lofty, existentialist, unorthodox, ironic and truly innovative handlings to his character of Spider-Man.
DITKO’S TWIST ENDING ?
In the interviews with Stan and Steve, neither explicitly says whether that’s true or not. But Ditko did say, “I still don’t know whose idea was Spider-Man.”
Meaning, when he came into the Marvel offices that day, Stan told him they have a new superhero but no mention if Kirby conceived of him on his own. If Kirby did, that would explain the discrepancy between Stan’s teen hero and Kirby’s teen/adult one. On the other hand, Stan was always generous in letting it be known when an artist conceived of a new character: Ditko’s Dr. Strange, Kirby’s Silver Surfer. (Although, in the case of the Silver Surfer, Stan made sure to reject the origin story Jack had planned for him and instead quickly devised his own behind Kirby’s back, giving it to John Buscema to illustrate.)
Will Eisner, creator of “The Spirit” which ran in numerous newspapers in the 1940s and 1950s and the one illustrator who is lauded as the father of the comics medium (The Eisner Award is named after him), noted that other comic book artists harbored a certain amount of animosity toward Stan Lee.
Eisner knew that Jack Kirby had always maintained that he brought the idea of Spider-Man to Stan. But for years, Lee took sole credit for the creation of the Marvel characters and it wasn’t until the release of the 2002 movie that the Spider-Man credit was split between Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, with no mention of Kirby at all.
It may be worthwhile to note here that in the current box office lineup of Marvel movies, the names Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby may be momentarily splashed across the screen but it is not known if that translates into any financial arrangement for the creators of these Marvel characters. In the Doctor Strange movie, the words “based on the Marvel comic by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko” appear in the credits. Likewise, in the Captain America films, “based upon the comics by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby” are displayed.
But facts are facts.
The facts are that Steve Ditko created Doctor Strange, as Lee himself told fans back in February of 1963 in a letter to The Comic Reader #16: “We have a new character in the works for Strange Tales, just a five page filler named Dr. Strange. Steve Ditko is gonna draw him. It has sort of a black magic theme. The first story is nothing great, but perhaps we can make something of him. ’Twas Steve’s idea.”
And although many people assume Stan Lee created the Marvel character of Captain America, and he’s done little to disabuse them of the notion, the true creators behind Captain America were Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, months before Stan Lee even joined the company as a teen.
Both Ditko and Kirby felt that Lee and his boss, publisher Martin Goodman, had slighted them in terms of credit and remuneration for the characters they had a hand in creating and for the stories they brought to life on the page using little more than a few sentence synopsis from their editor or often no direction from Stan Lee at all. “Stan wasn’t terribly popular among other artists either. He was regarded by and large as an exploiter,” Will Eisner revealed, “which is the fate of all publishers. Creators will always regard publishers as exploiters. I guess it is something that psychiatrists can discuss better, but I have always regarded it as a child/parent relationship. Artists need somebody to hate. In the comics field, the publishers are close at hand.”
When Ditko left Marvel in the mid-1960s, he tried to convince Kirby to go with him, thinking that the impending loss of Stan’s two top artists would give urgency to their complaints. Kirby, always aware of his hard upbringing during The Great Depression and fearing loss of steady income, didn’t go. But five years later, dissatisfied with his new Marvel contract, he did leave and immediately created many new titles for Marvel’s rival DC. In one, “Mister Miracle,” Kirby parodied Marvel Comics as a slave plantation and drew Stan Lee as the manipulating character called Funky Flashman, and his sidekick as the man Lee hired to help with scripting, writer Roy Thomas.
There seems to be some truth in Kirby’s parody. Stan Goldberg, the artist for Millie The Model and the colorist for the Marvel books, recalls, “Stan would drive me home and we’d plot our stories in the car. I’d say to Stan, ‘How’s this? Millie loses her job.’ He’d say, ‘Great! Give me 25 pages.’ And that took him off the hook.”
Another time, Goldberg was surprised at Lee’s response when the artist told him he couldn’t come up with another plot.
“Stan got out of his chair and walked over to me, looked me in the face and said very seriously, ‘I don’t ever want to hear you say you can’t think of another plot.’ Then he walked back and sat down in his chair. He didn’t think he needed to tell me anything more.”
When an interviewer suggested to Goldberg that he was writing the stories and not Stan Lee, Goldberg agreed. “I was.”
This may be a good time to spotlight Stan Goldberg, easily overlooked in Marvel’ success. As colorist, he had choices to make, especially when it came to the hues of a new superhero’s garb. Creating a visually striking color combination for a hero’s costume, one that sticks with the reader, is a responsibility that carries some weight.
For the Fantastic Four, he gave their uniforms a plush light blue, keeping the number 4 on their chest surrounded by white. Simple but effective. He could then play off of their one-color uniforms by giving their villains complimentary colors and darker shades: browns, burnt umbers, purples, yellows and greens.
For Spider-Man, he used two primary colors: red for the webbing and a darker cobalt blue for the rest. This was really a great choice because when Ditko inked Spider-Man, he saved the shadow areas for the parts of the uniform that were colored blue. This made it seem that the material was dark but shiny, reflecting light back along its edges, something like vinyl. For the webbing, Steve used very thin lines. Altogether, the color, the inking, made the figure of Spider-Man a memorable one.
Now back to our subject at hand. The twist ending to Spider-Man’s origin story.
Whether the surprise ending was something Steve or Stan thought up together or alone, one thing is certain: Stan had given Amazing Fantasy over to Ditko to completely illustrate back in issue #7 precisely because of those surprise “O Henry” endings. It was a “Ditko book” and those trick endings seem to have been something Steve Ditko was particularly good at conjuring up.
In the Ditko/Lee Spider-Man origin tale, Peter Parker gains his spider powers and then puts them to use not as a crime fighter, but to make money. The capitalist imperative for young teen Parker is strong, the reality of his family’s financial edict similar to everyone else’s: “me first.”
Everything is going swimmingly for Spider-Man. He’s become a media sensation, appearing on late night television shows while the headlines are filled with the mysterious figure that Peter Parker created. After one particular TV appearance, Spider-Man allows a thief to go free, laughing it off and essentially telling the pursuing lawman, “it’s not my problem.”
Oh but it is.
The twist ending, morality tale is thus: the thief that Spider-Man did nothing to apprehend, scant pages later goes on to shoot his Uncle Ben to death during a robbery gone awry.
But Spider-Man doesn’t realize this until the story’s final page when he captures his uncle’s killer and sees it is the same man that he had let go earlier. It is in that moment -- the one and only time that Ditko visualized Spider-Man’s eyes as lone dots in his reflective eyepieces to accentuate the epiphany -- that Parker understands how everyone’s own small decisions and lone actions vibrate along the interconnecting web of life to create our world writ large.
In the final panel, as he walks away stunned, Stan Lee imparts the famous moral lesson: “With great power there must also come - - great responsibility.”
One must consider the surprise ending of the first Spider-Man story because it is the essential ingredient that defines Peter Parker’s character and what casts a pall over his role as Spider-Man throughout the entire series. He is the only superhero whose life changes not for the better, but for the worse, because of his unique powers.
As if to drum home this theme, Lee and Ditko had Spider-Man branded as a renegade public menace in his very next story, appearing in his own title of issue #1 of “The Amazing Spider-Man.” Parker’s expectations surrounding Spider-Man’s rescue of astronaut John Jameson, who was helplessly in orbit around the planet Earth, backfire. Instead of the media celebrating Spider-Man as a hero, the astronaut’s father, publisher J. Jonah Jameson, writes an editorial in The Daily Bugle with the heading “This Newspaper Demands That Spider-Man Be Arrested And Prosecuted.”
With this second trick ending, the creators of Spider-Man had upended the accepted notion that being a superhero was a ‘good thing.’ It showed young readers that real life was tricky, beyond one’s control, with chance and one’s fate intertwined. The Spider-Man persona caused all kinds of problems and neuroses in the life of young Peter Parker. This darker psychological element in the Parker character was what made him so intriguing, so authentic.
A superhero filled with guilt and doubts about his powers. That in itself was revolutionary !
DITKO’S PSYCHOLOGY
There was no storytelling artist at that time better suited to this unusual psychological formula of the Peter Parker/Spider-Man ‘identity crisis’ than Steve Ditko. Long before other comic book writers like Alan Moore explored the superhero insanity theme in his series “The Watchmen,” long before the current television series “Legion,” whose mutant antihero struggles with schizophrenia and super-powered split personalities, Ditko used his protagonist’s guilt and frail psychological underpinnings as the basis for a number of plots.
As early as issue #13, Ditko has Spider-Man visit a psychiatrist to get an emotional handle on living a double life. In issue #24, titled “Spider-Man Goes Mad !,” Parker begins to unravel, apparently hallucinating the appearance of his prior villains. And in the first Amazing Spider-Man Annual published June 1964, Spider-Man temporarily loses his super powers due to a psychosomatic trauma of guilt over his part in the death of his Uncle Ben. Undoubtedly, this was the first time ever the word “psychosomatic” was used in a comic book tale !
The psychology of the Marvel Universe, with the characters of Spider-Man and Dr. Strange (another Ditko-drawn hero) in particular, began resonating with the counter-culture college students in the mid-1960s. The hints of psychedelia they saw in the Dr. Strange books, with Ditko’s imaginary landscapes of mind-twisting parallel dimensions, the shaggy cigarette they saw between Stephen Strange’s lips in his origin story and the “ISO-36” element that figured in Aunt May’s medical treatment in issues #31 to #33 of The Amazing Spider-Man comic, all meant more to these erstwhile students than what was intended.
Many were convinced that such things were hidden messages, like the Beatles’ ‘clues’ “Paul is dead” that made headlines a few years later. The shaggy cigarette that sailors roll became a marijuana reefer. The whacky dimensions Ditko drew meant the artist had to be taking LSD in order to conjure up such imagery. The “ISO-36” element was a code word for, you guessed it, LSD-31.
When Stan Lee was invited to college campuses to speak, he was inundated with philosophical questions and the psychological jargon that was on the minds of these young thinkers who were questioning everything from politics to religion.
The New York Herald Tribune weighed in with an article gushing about Stan Lee and Marvel’s new super-heroes on the magazine stands. Meanwhile, Sally Kempton, writer for the Village Voice, honed in on the Spider-Man mythology/psychology. “Spiderman has a terrible identity problem,” she wrote, “a marked inferiority complex and a fear of women. He is anti-social, castration ridden, racked with Oedipal guilt and accident prone.”
She went on to call out the “phallic-looking skyscrapers towers” as well as Peter Parker’s submissiveness to his frail and aging Aunt May.
But Steve Ditko, a very conservative figure whose societal views were being increasingly shaped by the political philosophy of Ayn Rand, was not the liberal, counter-cultural rebel his young followers imagined. He didn’t take drugs. And even though he was sharing a studio with artist Eric Stanton, who did sexy bondage illustrations for men’s magazines -- some of which Ditko inked -- grave doubts remain that the Spider-Man artist was thinking of “phalluses” when he sketched the myriad city scenes that filled the comic every month.
Yes, too much can be made of the psychological aspects behind the character of Spider-Man.
Still, as an illustrator, Ditko was well-schooled in film noir techniques. He studied their use of shadow, tilted frames and severe facial expressions to symbolically express an ‘unbalanced’ environment and extreme emotional states. These were put to great use throughout his Spider-Man run, creating different moods and textures to each plotline.
The plastic contortions of James Jonah Jameson’s face alone were truly something to behold under Ditko’s pen, from shock, dismay, annoyance, shame, fear, smugness, pride, to the glee that made him look like a grinning hyena. Ditko didn’t freeze Jameson’s countenance into one eternal expression of anger, no matter the surrounding circumstance, with which his successor John Romita fixed his puss. Furthermore, Ditko possessed an intuitive grasp of how body language injects meaning into the relationship of the characters on his page. The way his characters stood and moved gave them a dramatic bearing or a humorous one. Their placement in the panel and their relative sizes showed who held the power in that particular situation. Since comic book storytelling is essentially a pictorial medium, this went a long way in laying a sturdy foundation for Stan Lee’s word balloons. Before learning to read as a young kid, I could understand the interactions among characters of any Spider-Man story simply by looking at the pictures. (For an excellent analysis of the aforementioned, please watch this short video called "Strip Panel Naked" which essentially shows you how a non-reading child would 'read' the story in only pictures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjtEjQqZuc4 )
Ditko was not, however, without his limitations. His depiction of cars was the most rudimentary kind, seemingly forever stuck in the year 1955. The wardrobes in which he clothed his figures seemed to come straight from a vintage Thin Man movie and did not reflect the changes in fashion that the 1960s heralded.
But if there’s any doubt which co-creator, Ditko or Lee, was directing the story arc of teen Peter Parker/Spider-Man from issue to issue, one only need read the following quotation from Sean Howe’s book “Marvel Comics, The Untold Story:”
“In Amazing Spider-Man, Peter Parker graduated from high school, and broke up with the Daily Bugle’s Betty Brant, the first girl who’d been kind to him -- he realized she could never be happy living with a constantly endangered crime-fighter. He went to college, where he met Gwen Stacy, Harry Osborn and Professor Miles Warren -- all of whom would become significant characters.
“All of this happened without Steve Ditko and Stan Lee speaking to each other.”
A great example of the story arc Ditko supplied, like one would see in a good TV serial that plays out over time from season to season, concerned the issue at the very heart of Spider-Man’s powers: the radioactivity in Peter Parker’s bloodstream. Of course, it was the radioactive spider in Spider-Man’s origin tale that irradiated Parker’s blood. Ditko revisits the ramifications of this over time, each time amping up the danger quotient to keep readers on the edge of their seats and propelling the Spider-Man narrative, and the reasons for his battles, ever forward. In issue #10, Aunt May is in the hospital in desperate need of a blood transfusion. Parker is there with the same blood type so the doctors assume he will donate his blood. But Pete, aware of the radioactivity in his bloodstream, worries that this might harm Aunt May more than help her. And he cannot express any of this to the doctors because their questions may reveal his secret identity. When Peter hesitates, Flash wonders if “puny Parker” is afraid of the needle. Peter gives in and his blood is used.
Some 20 issues later, what Peter feared has come true. After Aunt May suffers dizzy spells, her tests show a nuclear isotope in her bloodstream and the hospital specialists have no idea how it got there. She’s at death’s door in the ICU and the doctors only have one way of treating it. They call for a shipment of a rare nuclear medicine from the west coast -- the ISO-36 -- (the same locale where LSD-31 was tested and used before spreading across the country).
But Ditko had already laid the plot line that someone named the Master Planner was directing his men to obtain all the nuclear material they can. The reason why was revealed some issues later. This set up a three-issue battle, with Spidey tearing up the entire city to find the nuclear medicine that was stolen, culminating in the so-called famous “Spider-Man Shrugged” scene: he’s trapped under tons of fallen machinery, Aunt May’s life-saving medicine is in a canister just feet away, and water is pouring into the facility to drown him. You can’t get a much better cliff-hanger than that. And that was all Steve Ditko’s brilliance.
In rereading these classic Ditko tales of Spider-Man, I’ve concluded that a significant plot thread was dropped by Lee with Ditko’s departure. I’m certain Stan didn’t even realize it at the time. It had to do with the important figure of Betty Brant, Parker’s first girlfriend, who was introduced in issue #4. (As a young employed female living on her own, while Parker was still a teen in high school, it went without mentioning that she was a few years older than he -- the envelope of another societal convention being pushed by Spider-Man’s creators.)
In issue #30, Ditko depicts a blowout scene between Betty and Peter in which they break up. The last panel of that issue shows the ghost figure of Spider-Man with arms outstretched separating the two lovers. This could be a symbolic rendition of Ditko’s feelings concerning his one-time writing partner, Stan Lee, as well: Stan and Steve on the outs with each other, not even speaking, with the image of Spider-Man being the source of their estrangement. For the next eight issues, the aftermath of the Betty/Peter breakup is revisited by Steve time and again until his final drawn issue of #38. The backdrop of the plot is Betty’s inner conflict in considering Ned Leeds’ proposal of marriage while still being obsessed with Peter.
Betty is last shown by Ditko in issue #34, having awoken from a nightmare in which Peter rips his shirt open to reveal his Spider-Man costume. Ditko, in another psychological twist, was purposely putting the figure of Spider-Man as the barrier between Peter and Betty. Betty realizes she must make a decision.
But the reader never learns exactly what happens to Betty after that. Instead, Ditko teases the reader with Parker discovering that Betty quit her job. Pete assumes that her disappearance, along with Ned Leeds booking a flight to California, meant that the two had eloped. In subsequent issues we learn this is not the case, as Parker and Leeds have it out, each believing the other knows the whereabouts of Betty Brant.
The reader is left hanging with the mystery as to what transpired with Betty Brant.
Ditko ends issue #35 with another dramatic scene concerning Betty, Parker throwing a framed picture from Betty’s desk that she had left for him. He reads the picture’s inscription, “With love from Peter” then muses “I wonder when I wrote that?” As its glass shatters in the metal trashcan, he provides the answer, “it must have been a lifetime ago” and walks away.
While many might assume this was the denouement of the Peter/Betty union, it is my contention that Steve Ditko, in leaving Betty’s whereabouts a mystery to all involved, was leaving the door open to revisit that plotline later. I base this on the fact that Betty had disappeared once before in issue #11, setting up a battle with Doctor Octopus that spanned two issues. (Dr. Octopus, for anyone keeping score, also kidnapped Betty Brant two other times, knowing Spider-Man helped come to her rescue before. Of these, the most effective tale, running 40 pages, was captured in The Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1. Called “The Sinister Six,” it had Spidey fighting six of his most infamous former foes.) But Stan Lee completely dropped the Betty disappearance plotline which Ditko kept alive for nearly a year. Even Ditko’s last issue of #38 shows Parker still thinking of Betty -- he punches out a store manikin because its smiling face reminds him of Leeds -- and the final scene Ditko drew to conclude his run on the series shows Parker coming home and just missing a female visitor. It was Mary Jane, but Peter thinks, “For just a second - - I thought - - it might have been - - Betty !”
In the third Spider-Man tale that Ditko’s replacement, John Romita, drew, Betty Brant returns to New York City. The teasing mystery of her west coast adventure was inexplicably resolved by Lee as quickly as possible, in a few panels of dialogue with Betty and Peter over coffee.
Peter: “Did you have a nice time on the coast?” Betty: “Yes, I did, thanks.”
Their interaction all centers upon Parker’s realization that after all these months, he now has absolutely no feelings for Betty at all. Parker exits the awkward scene with the arrival of Ned Leeds.
Just two issues later, in a single panel in issues #43, Lee/Romita put the final coda on Betty’s character relevance to the Spider-Man saga by picturing her showing off the engagement ring Ned has given her. As if to totally make certain the reader understood the implications of this, in the three issues between Betty’s return and her engagement to Ned, Peter gets romantic designs on schoolmate Gwen Stacy and begins hanging out with Mary Jane Watson, whom Lee/Romita revealed to the reader in issue #42. (Parker even drives Mary Jane on his motorcycle to see the Rhino and Spider-Man battle, 'twas Mary Jane’s idea.)
In this era of Parker’s life, Stan Lee, who was quite the ladies’ man, seemed to be reliving his bachelor playboy years of his time as a serviceman. “I was in love a hundred times,” he explained. “They shipped me to different cities all over the country. Every city I’d go to, I’d meet some other gal I thought was terrific.”
More in keeping with Lee’s personal memories than with the character outline of Parker as the social outcast, Peter’s romantic possibilities suddenly seemed wide open. Why? Because, pre-Romita, Lee was not the principal author of the title.
Rather, it was Steve Ditko.
In a letter to Comic Book Marketplace magazine, published in issue #36, Ditko revealed his role in creating the Spider-Man stories:
“The fact is we had no story or idea discussion about Spider-Man books. Stan never knew what was in my plotted stories until I took in the penciled story, the cover, my script and Sol Brodsky took the material from me and took it all into Stan’s office, so I had to leave without seeing or talking to Stan.”
In 1965, Stan Lee candidly admitted to Nat Freedland of the New York Herald Tribune, “I don’t plot Spider-Man anymore. 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 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 anyone 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.”
Sometimes Ditko’s notes in the margins weren’t explicit enough. Numerous mistakes began appearing in the Spider-Man storyline due to the Lee/Ditko communication gap.
In Issue #30, Ditko had two separate evil-doers at play in the story. Lee, not knowing that the set of costumed figures were unrelated to the current issue’s bad guy, and unawares that Ditko planned to continue their plotline separately in following stories, scripted them as answering to the lowly Cat Burglar who robbed peoples’ homes by cutting into their windowpanes. When the Cat Burglar is apprehended, no mention is made of the henchmen Lee assigned to him.
Astute readers called Stan out on that. Richard Weingard of Castro Valley, California called the story “botched-up” and wondered what had happened to his favorite Marvel character:
“You started off with a crook called the Cat Burglar, who thinks he’s too insignificant for Spidey to fight. Then you have a gang of masked crooks whose leader is the Cat. You never see the gang leader so maybe the Cat Burglar is the gang leader but you never say if anything happened to the gang. The two can’t be the same person, for the gang was not said to be apprehended or disbanded. If they were supposed to be the same, then the story failed miserably. If they were supposed to be two different people, the story failed even more.”
By the next issue, it was sorted out. The true leader of the costumed group was the new mystery villain, the Master Planner.
Likewise, another one panel mistake demonstrates how Lee and Ditko were not on speaking terms at all. Years ago, when I first saw this bottom right panel on page 13 in Amazing Spider-Man #36, I wondered why the figure of Spider-Man looked unusually awkward and nothing like the smoothly inked visual Ditko would render.
Here's what happened: Ditko dopped off his drawn pages for Lee to script. In that particular panel, Lee couldn’t tell if the figure on the ledge was Spider-Man or the villain. This was because Ditko’s pencil drawings were just outline ghost figures. Ditko would do all the shadows, shading and the web lines in Spider-Man’s costume later when it was time for him to ink his drawings. So Lee scripted that panel as if it were Spider-Man talking on the ledge.
When Ditko got his penciled pages back to be inked, with all the lettering already done on them, he saw that Lee had scripted it as Spider-Man speaking. But Ditko had originally drawn the figure as the villain, so he inked it in as him anyway. Of course, the villain now speaking as Spider-Man made no sense.
Lee got the finished pages and was furious. “He knew ! He knew ! He did this on purpose !”
The figure was whited out and given to Carl Hubble to correct, transforming the villain into Spider-Man. And that’s why he was rendered so differently. Lee could just have easily chosen the wording to be changed. But this was the state of the Lee/Ditko relationship at the time, that this sort of games-playing brinkmanship was the status quo.
STAN LEE’S PSYCHOLOGY
If the illustrations, storytelling and intricate plotlines that Ditko supplied were nonetheless top notch, what Stan Lee brought to them cannot be underestimated. Nothing can ruin a comic book more than treating fine drawings and paced plotting to weak dialogue and an inferior script.
There’s no doubt that Stan had a way with words. Stanley Lieber always wanted to write the great American novel. When he entered Timely Comics (Marvel Comics’ previous incarnation) at age 17, as cousin to publisher Martin Goodman’s wife, he was fetching coffees and lunches for stable artist Jack Kirby and writer/editor Joe Simon, erasing Jack’s pencil lines after they were inked, proofreading, filling ink wells and generally annoying them both with his ocarina playing and wearing his sometime beanie propeller cap.
He had no intention of staying.
He began using the name Stan Lee (derived from his first name Stanley) because comic book writers were considered lower than cockroaches in the field of writing and he didn’t want his name as a comic book writer associated with his real name Stanley Lieber.
After Kirby and Simon left Timely over a financial dispute with Goodman, Lee became Editor in Chief. The behind-the-scenes story of that particular episode is intriguing in itself: when Chief Accountant Maurice Coyne told Joe Simon that Goodman was shorting him and Kirby of their 25% royalty rate for Captain America and that the sales of that title were keeping the entire comic book line afloat, the two creators began submitting work to Goodman’s competitors. After they started heading out every day for ‘lunches,’ Stan got wise and insisted to go along. It’s then they let him in on the secret.
Soon after, publisher Goodman confronted them. Kirby was convinced that Stan Lee had turned them in to the boss. “The next time I see that little son of a b***h,” Jack told Simon, “I’m going to kill him.”
Whether Stan had the wisdom to foresee the exact repercussions, the fact is that with their departure he was elevated to run the comic book division of Goodman’s publishing enterprise, a career jump in stature and pay.
Over time, Stan Lee’s writing skills progressed but he felt stunted, doing repetitive stories for a kid’s market. After 20 years in the business, he was about to leave, when his wife urged him to write like he always wanted to, to do at least one story his way, one that would resonate beyond a ten-year-old reader’s mentality.
The result was the Fantastic Four.
Lee’s literary credentials were evident in the very creation of the Fantastic Four. He based his four characters on the four elemental archetypes: earth (Thing), air (Invisible Girl), water (Mr. Fantastic) and fire (Human Torch). With the discovery of how their bodies had changed and their newly-found freakish powers, Lee made the scene not one of jubilance but of horror. Such graphic realism, Lee’s forte, stood in stark contrast to his competitors’ run-of-the-mill utopian superhero fantasies.
At this time, as head of Goodman’s comic division, Stan Lee had a small office with one outer area in which he could cram a few people. Mario Puzo, one of the writers for the money-making men’s magazine division of Goodman Publishing, would pop his head in and sarcastically joke, “Work faster little elves, Christmas is coming !” Puzo, of course, went on to become a best-selling novelist with “The Godfather.” (By then, Stan Lee had earned his respect. In a copy of his latest novel Puzo inscribed, “For Stan Lee, whose imagination I cannot hope to equal.”)
The magazine section of the early years of Marvel’s resurgence may have looked down on comic book makers, but Lee was a workhorse. On November 22, 1963, after everyone else in the Marvel office was glued to the radio to hear the live reports on the president being shot, and after they drifted off home shocked from the news of his death, Lee stayed on, pecking at his typewriter into the night. A few short years later, during the famous New York City blackout, Roy Thomas came into the office in the early morning to find Lee already there, scripting Thor by candlelight.
Lee was invigorated. In little more than a year’s time, he co-created the entire stable of Marvel Comics superheroes, a synergistic universe in which if something happened in one comic, it would have ripple effects throughout the others. Thus, when the Hulk ran amok in Manhattan, it was reported in The Avengers, Journey Into Mystery (Thor) and The Fantastic Four titles in the first ever comic book crossover that spanned over six issues in total -- all of these books were Kirby titles. The Marvel Universe was like some sort of grand mega-fable that Lee was steering. If Stan Lee was getting lots of help story-wise from his two main artists, Kirby and Ditko, in keeping the interconnections between Marvel’s superheroes alive, the artists had a hand in other Marvel developments as well. The iconic corner box image that graced Marvel’s covers throughout the 1960s, and helped make them stand out from the multitude of competitor comics on the racks, was devised by Steve Ditko. In answer to a question from Paul B. Weinstein, in Fantastic Four #18, about who originated the corner cover symbol box, Stan Lee replied, "Steve Ditko dreamed up the idea, and we're sure glad he did!” Kirby, for his part, played the role of the good employee by siding with the company when Joe Simon tried to wrestle the copyright to Captain America from them in the 1960s. Publisher Goodman promised Kirby a stipend that would equal any future payout to Simon for the character. But it appears by the time of the Simon settlement, Goodman had sold the company and Kirby was not monetarily rewarded for helping Marvel keep a character he co-created.
A strong part of Lee’s superhero characterizations were the realistic human flaws that each character possessed. Iron Man’s Achilles’ heel was his weak heart. As playboy industrialist Tony Stark, he couldn’t bare his chest for fear of women discovering his affliction, for at all times he wore an electronic device over his heart to kept it beating (a precursor to the pacemaker of today). The leader of the X-Men, Professor Xavier, was wheelchair bound. His physical limitations made his mental psi prowess all the more potent by comparison. Doctor Donald Blake was a lame physician, using a cane to walk. When he tapped the ancient cane he found, it turned into a mystical hammer and transformed him into the Norse God, Thor. Daredevil was blind. But the injury that made him blind heightened his other senses to the point of super powers. (Daredevil’s true identity was Matt Murdock, a lawyer. Lee may have been coming down a bit heavily on the “justice is blind” trope perhaps ?)
When Lee had Ben Grimm of the Fantastic Four turn into a horrible claylike monster, the Thing, unlike his other three compatriots, couldn’t change back to human form at will. This created a pathos to the character and Lee/Kirby had fun teasing the reader with his many temporary transformations to human form.
But they didn’t stop there.
When Lee instructed Kirby to give Ben a love interest, Kirby took Stan’s simple edict and expanded upon it exponentially. He made her Alicia Masters, the daughter of the evil Puppet Master who was in conflict with the Fantastic Four. He also made her a blind sculptress. And he had her fall in love not with the human Ben Grimm as Lee wanted but with the inhuman monstrous Thing. The rare times she met him in his human form, placing her hands upon his face, she’d say “This isn’t my Ben.” Oh what irony, to be loved not for the man you are but for the monster !
Of course, the human flaw at the heart of Peter Parker’s persona was his psychology of guilt, the doubt that his powers were of any value and the alienation he felt from a public that often feared him.
As editor and scripter, Stan had an uncanny knack for balancing the drama of Parker’s emotional angst with humor, using lightness to offset such darkness. If Parker was prone to fall into moments of doubt, despair, regret and general negative thoughts, his alter ego Spider-Man would be the opposite: carefree, having the time of his life just swinging along, even wise-cracking jokes during his battles.
Stan, putting himself into the Parker role, understood that once he changed into Spider-Man, he would love using his spider powers, leaping building to building, shooting his webs, swinging through the sky above the human fray below. It would be especially attractive for a teen who still had a bit of a kid in him to revel in showing off his aerial prowess.
Lee’s drama/humor balancing act extended to other comics as well. If the tragedy of Ben Grimm gave him a sour, surly outlook, his scrapes with team member the Human Torch, a hothead if there ever was one, injected a bit of playful fun into the stories.
Perhaps it should be noted here that the Human Torch, in the early years of the Fantastic Four, had a love/hate relationship with Spider-Man. There is one particular story that Jack Kirby illustrated which showed Spider-Man, in his prankster role, crashing a summer party that Johnny Storm (the Torch) was throwing for his friends at a seaside bungalow. It ended with the other three members of the Fantastic Four taking a hand in quieting things and Spider-Man leaving a Valentine heart made out of his webbing for Sue Storm, the Invisible Girl.
Ditko, too, had the Torch guest in the Spider-Man book many times. One of his earliest appearances was as a speaker at Parker’s Midtown High School. In issue #3, Johnny’s speech gives Peter Parker, who was facing defeat after defeat with Spider-Man nemesis Doctor Octopus, the determination to face his foe and lick him in one final battle. But Ditko, ever mindful of how conflict is at the root of any story, used the heroes' relationship from then on to contrast how the adoring public received the Human Torch but feared Spider-Man.
Someone -- probably Lee or Kirby -- must have decided that since the two superheroes were teens, that they should have some kind sibling-like rivalry. It makes perfect sense. But when scripting these tales, Stan Lee goofed. He forgot that Spider-Man wore a mask and no one knew his true identity. How could anyone know, for certain, he was a teenager at all ? Yet, Lee had dialogue that suggested as much.
According to Ditko, Stan wanted these scenes changed into something less ‘dangerous’ but Steve convinced him to wait and see if the self-policing Comics Code Authority complained. They never did.
Despite such misgivings, Lee was responsible for some unorthodox things. Unlike his competitors, who seemed to never question authority of any kind, Lee portrayed journalists as schemers who could not be entirely trusted for telling the truth (J. Jonah Jameson in Spider-Man) and even our military was suspect (General Ross in The Hulk). Imagine such blasphemous ideas being read by a ten-year-old.
Besides the more human characteristics that Lee brought to the fore in his heroes (and villains), perhaps his most enduring innovation was the rapport he managed to conjure with his audience. Letter pages were littered with his jokey banter. His fanciful descriptions of the freewheeling madcap team inhabiting his “artist bullpen” were more in line with the early 1950s. By the 1960s, it was a shell of its former self, its members to be counted on a few fingers. Still, Lee knew fans would feel a kindred spirit with the notion that they were all one big family.
Lee was also responsible for not only giving credit to his artists, inkers and letterers on the splash page of each story but for giving them all nicknames such as “Sturdy Steve Ditko.” The prevailing method used by his competitors were to have one or two artists sign the page indiscreetly. Instead, Lee championed them all in big colorful boxes that always punned on the ‘lowly’ letterer. (Nowadays, the credits extend to the colorist as well, since color processing is so much more advanced than in those days.) Lee’s over the top bluster of praise and promotion always had an edge of self-deprecation which endeared him even more to his readership, who reveled in his tongue-in-cheek witticisms.
All of this came in handy when Lee started “The Merry Marvel Marching Society” which fans could join for one buck. Soon, he was selling likenesses of Marvel heroes on tee shirts, sweat shirts, pillows, stationery and he even had a record album with the Merry Marvel theme song. (Although a ton of Kirby and Ditko art was used for these secondary products neither were compensated for it. The same goes for the Marvel cartoons that began airing later in the decade on network TV, which used still shots taken straight from the published comic books themselves with Ditko and Kirby artwork.)
When Pop Art became the talk of the town and artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein began appropriating comic book imagery in their large-scale paintings, Stan Lee changed the simple banner of “Marvel Comics” on his covers to the short lived “Marvel Pop Art Productions.” All of this made fans feel a part of something offbeat and special. Marvel in a word was “hip.” Their competitors were “square.”
Some weird synchronicities with America’s radically evolving social climate seemed to be helping Lee’s hand in moving comics along with almost each new title he added to the roster, giving them even more relevance. In the months between the conception of the Fantastic Four and the book hitting the news racks, the space race heated up when the Soviets sent cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into space. With the Cold War as a backdrop, Reed Richards’ moon shot suddenly held national security and patriotic connotations.
Four months after the Kennedy assassination, Stan lee and Jack Kirby decided to resurrect the hero who embodied our greatest American ideals: Captain America. But when the original Captain America of the 1940s was found suspended in icy ocean waters by the Avengers in their submarine in issue #4, he awoke to be “a man out of time” in an America he couldn’t recognize, giving graphic weight to the so-called generation gap of the 1960s. His alienation resonated with many younger Americans who felt that their country’s values had derailed.
“It became this great soap opera,” contends writer/editor Danny Fingeroth, “of the early sixties and of this very optimistic age that became sort of traumatized by the assassination of John F. Kennedy.” Some years later, when the Black Panther was introduced in the Fantastic Four title, a new radical group of African Americans calling themselves the Black Panther Party soon began making headlines. Both the fictional character and the group bearing firearms in the streets were inspired by the notion of “black pride.” And the Marvel character had a lot to be proud of: the Black Panther was King T’Challa, ruler of an African nation whose technology was far more advanced than our own. (Note: The original name that Jack Kirby had given the Panther was the “Coal Tiger.” He also drew him with a cowl, so that the black skin of his face could be seen. Lee had it changed so that his facial features were fully masked on the issue’s cover. Lee, while eager to push for racial equality in his books but equally mindful of sales, didn’t want to take the chance of offending any southern racists or causing undue controversy.)
The X-Men too seemed to realize their potential for powerful metaphor in the spring of 1965 when they battled an army of giant mutant-hunting robots called the Sentinels. This was in the immediate wake of the attack upon civil rights workers in Selma by Alabama state troopers. The X-Men story concluded with these words by Lee: “Beware the fanatic ! Too often his cure is deadlier by far than the evil he denounces !”
Stan Lee was also the first one in the comics field to openly defy the Comics Code Authority, by devoting an entire storyline to drug addiction. Issue #96 of The Amazing Spider-Man was sold without the Code’s stamp of approval, for depicting Peter Parker’s friend Harry Osborn as a pill popping addict who then overdoses later in the story.
Artist Gil Kane did a fantastic job of illustrating this tale. His entire run on Spider-Man was a rare glimpse into the bygone era of Steve Ditko’s Spider-Man.
The conclusion of the story in issue #97 demonstrated once again the interconnectedness of the Parker/Spider-Man roles of Ditko’s time to amazing effect: Spider-Man defeats the Green Goblin by maneuvering him outside the hospital window of his son, Harry. Some humanity in the Goblin, with memories of his life as a father, wells up inside of him and causes his psyche to revert to industrialist Norman Osborn.
END OF AN ERA
The “King of Comics” Jack Kirby died on February 6, 1994. He is regarded as the most significant artist in the comics book field. With a career spanning the Golden Age years to the Silver Age and beyond, he’s written and drawn in every genre from War, Western, Horror, Humor, Gangster, Monster, Sci-Fi to Superheroes for more than half a century. He even created an entirely new genre in the 1950s: Romance comics, aimed at the advent market of young single working women in the aftermath of WWII.
His influence on contemporaries and succeeding generations of comic book artists is incalculable.
Artist Steve Ditko, the J.D. Salinger of the comics book world, is somewhat of a recluse living in a Manhattan apartment. He shuns the limelight and rarely gives interviews. The rumor mill suggests that Ditko can either be living hand-to-mouth or that he gets a sizable royalty check every quarter for the Hollywood adaptions of Spider-Man. No one knows for sure.
Ditko went on to create darker and darker vigilante characters, whose extreme black and white, good and evil mentality had them border on the insane. Unlike Stan Lee, who always seemed to inject his good guys with bad character traits and his evil-doers with a semblance of nobility and morality, in order to make them all the more human, there was no gray area of relativism for Steve Ditko. Evil doers must be punished in the harshest way possible, even if it’s a person who stole a paper clip from work.
Ditko is considered a giant in the comics book field, truly a one-of-kind, unique stylist. In the years after leaving Marvel, he never collaborated with Stan Lee again. But his influence has extended generations to contemporary comic book writers such as Alan Moore and Frank Miller.
Just as Jack Kirby made sure to plot and illustrate at least 100 issues of his signature title The Fantastic Four before leaving the book, Stan Lee made sure to script a hundred issues of The Amazing Spider-Man.
His final issue’s ending was truly shocking: Parker, using some DNA/blood formula to boost his spider powers, wound up growing four extra arms ! He really was a human arachnid for a time, with eight limbs. The Spider-Man saga would go on forever “to be continued.”
After wrapping up the hundredth issue of The Amazing Spider-Man, Lee gave the reins of his favorite title over to Roy Thomas. And Stan Lee, as Executive Editor, only turned to his typewriter to tap out the monthly “Stan’s Soapbox” which appeared in all the Marvel books.
And the name he coined for himself back in the 1940s, now synonymous with all things Marvel, with the Silver Age comic book revolution itself, would then be emblazoned like a banner above the splash page of every Marvel comic with the words: “Stan Lee Presents.”
YOU TELL ME
So who created Spider-Man ?
Setting aside the thorny issue of playing mind-reader to pinpoint who may have first thought up the idea of a superhero with spider powers, this is what is known:
Steve Ditko created the Spider-Man costume that we know today, after Kirby’s rendition and pages for the origin story were rejected. Jack Kirby supplied the cover drawing for Spider-Man’s debut.
Steve Ditko inked Jack Kirby’s cover drawing.
Stan Goldberg chose the colors for the Spider-Man costume and colored the covers and generally the interior pages of the Spider-Man comics as well.
Stan Lee contributed the “bookworm teen” concept in his synopsis for artist Steve Ditko. But it’s not clear if Stan Lee or Steve Ditko decided that the teen protagonist, Peter Parker, would remain a teen as a superhero -- unlike Kirby’s adult depiction of Spider-Man.
Steve Ditko drew and inked the superhero for 41 total comic books. Ditko may have also contributed the surprise ending for Spider-Man’s origin tale, which thence forth defined the basic psychology of Peter Parker/Spider-Man. Stan Lee and Steve Ditko worked closely together for about the first ten issues in co-writing the stories.
During his run on the series, Steve Ditko alone supplied the plots, character development, villains and story arcs for around the last 30 of his 41 books on Spider-Man, emphasizing the role of Peter Parker and essentially writing the stories in pictures for Stan Lee to dialogue.
Stan Lee contributed words, dialogue and narration, following the margin notes by Steve Ditko on the submitted pages.
So who created Spider-Man as we know him and have come to enjoy him today?
You tell me.
ONE FINAL THOUGHT
It’s a good bet that none of the preceding would have happened at all without publisher Martin Goodman. Stan Lee would have never entered the Timely offices at age 17 seeking a job as a relative of Goodman because there would be no Timely offices to enter. He may have never gone into the comic book field at all. There would be no Marvel Universe, no Fantastic Four, no X-Men, no Iron Man, no Spider-Man.
It’s possible that Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, in the waning months of 1939, would have placed their creation of Captain America with another company. And it’s possible, if Jack Kirby can be believed, that some form of Spider-Man may have been published in the 1960s, if Jack was the one who came up with the idea as he claimed. But it’s highly probable it would have gone the way of “The Fly.” Not even as a minor footnote in the history of comics.
The science of physics talks of cause and effect. Many religions take the view that our singular decisions as to what we do, how we behave and treat others, in conglomerate, create the world in which we live. The Hindu/Buddhist traditions speak of ‘karma.’
In this very article, using Peter Parker’s stunning epiphany in the origin story of Spider-Man as to his lone part in the cosmic whole, it is recognized that we are all in this together: “Everyone’s own small decisions and lone actions vibrate along the interconnecting web of life to create our world writ large.”
We create our reality.
So too it was with Martin Goodman.
In 1937, before he entered into publishing comic books, Martin Goodman married Jean Davis and they honeymooned overseas in Europe. They planned on taking a trans-Atlantic flight back to the United States but they couldn’t find two seats together. They rearranged their plans and took a different flight home.
Their original flight was on the fashionable German airship, the Hindenburg, which burst into flames at Naval Air Station Lakehurst in New Jersey, killing 35 of its 97 people onboard.
- by T o n y S i e n z a n t
SOURCES
I gathered the information for this essay from various sources I’ve read or seen over the years, including film documentaries, a number of books and magazines, websites and of course from years of reading and re-reading the original comic books themselves.
Here is a list of resources you may wish to check out for yourself, that went into the making of this article:
“Marvel Comics, The Untold Story” by Sean Howe
“Strange and Stranger, The World of Steve Ditko” by Blake Bell
“Will Eisner, A Spirited Life” by Bob Andelman
“Alter Ego Presents John Romita …And All That Jazz!” by Roy Thomas & Jim Amash
“Marvel Comics in the 1960s: An Issue by Issue Field Guide to a Pop Culture” by Pierre Comtois
“In Search Of Steve Ditko” BBC Documentary by Jonathan Ross “Superheroes” PBS Documentary “Collected Jack Kirby Collector” by John Morrow (Tomorrows Publishing) “Stan Lee and Jack Kirby: who did what ?” from the website: http://zak-site.com/Great-American-Novel/ff_Lee-Kirby.html
Strip Panel Naked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjtEjQqZuc4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UmY_4LskpY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjhIjb_wvRE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjtEjQqZuc4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdhJ7sJ1tFc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AYk20rrTe4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHho6osV9yk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdhJ7sJ1tFc&t=33s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXnE3BZ-CkM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8OYYt5wn74
http://toobusythinkingboutcomics.blogspot.com/2011/11/on-steve-ditko-stan-lees-amazing-spider.html © 2017 Tony Z SienzantAuthor's Note
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