Last week Steve Ditko left us to join the hoary hosts of Hoggoth. He will be remembered worldwide for his role in creating Spiderman, definitely one of his lesser artistic achievements.
Ditko was a highly imaginative comic artist whose half baked political philosophies eventually led him to a role as a hermit and an outsider artist. He would disapprove of any tribute that purported to interpret his work. He felt his pictures should speak for themselves: "[I]t's not my personality that I'm offering the readers but my artwork. It's not what I'm like that counts; it's what I did and how well it was done."
So out of respect for the talented Mr. Ditko, I'll be uncustomarily restrained and let his pictures speak for themselves. These are the kinds of wonderful pictures for which I think he should be remembered.
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| Note how Ditko's distinctive personality shows up in his drawings of trees, bushes, mountains, and smoke |
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| What a marvelous page, dense with the hard work of excellent compositions and creative angle shots. |
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| It's difficult to think of a comic artist with better cinematic instincts. |
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| When set free by Warren magazines, Ditko indulged in moody, Kafka-esque surrealism |
Ditko was an enemy of compromise. That was both his strength and his weakness.
But in between those two extremes, Ditko deserves great credit for contributing excellent work to the field of comic art for decades.