Last week Steve Ditko left us to join the hoary hosts of Hoggoth. He will be remembered worldwide for his role in creating Spiderman, which in my view was one of his lesser artistic achievements. His brilliant, distinctive work never got the full audience it deserved, but there's still time. Ditko is gone but his work remains.
He was a highly imaginative comic artist, and I could blather on about him but 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. look at his enraged opinion of "middle roaders:"
Later in his career, his half baked political philosophies became the sole focus of his art, crowding out a lot of his previous aesthetic concerns. Eventually he would become something of a hermit and an outsider artist. But Ditko deserves great credit for contributing excellent work to the field of comic art for decades.