Happy 88th Birthday, Steve Ditko!

A very Happy 88th Birthday to cartoonist Steve Ditko!

With a career now in it’s 62nd year, Ditko continues to produce new work. For the last 7 years he’s been publishing new material in a series of 32 page comics. His publishing partner, Robin Snyder, with whom Ditko has been working with for over 25 years, has even taken to Kickstarter for their last 9 projects! It’s been great to be able to support them (and get one’s name listed in the books!).

Co-creator of SPIDER-MAN and DR. STRANGE, creator of THE CREEPER, HAWK & DOVE, SHADE THE CHANGING MAN. Plus decades of stories and creations for a myriad of publishers, most notably Charlton Comics. His signature character has to be MR. A, the uncompromising eradicator of evil who’s appeared in Ditko’s creator owned material for decades.

Info on ordering Ditko’s current output can be found at the Ditko Comics site.

Steve Ditko has been an influence on me for more than half my life, and today, as I continue on with my own career as an independent creator, even more so. Both for the originality and uniqueness of his work, and his steadfast principled individualism. The fact that he's still producing new work well into his 80s is a testament to the voice of the artist that never quits expressing itself.

Steve Ditko turns 85

Steve Ditko turned 85 years old today. With a career spanning nearly 60 years, the legendary comic book artist continues producing new work even today.

The original artist and co-creator (along with writer Stan Lee) of SPIDER-MAN, as well as DR. STRANGE (for Marvel Comics), Ditko when on to create plenty more comics and more characters throughout his decades long career.

I first became a fan of his work when my older brother Albert handed me a collection of Marvel Comics he had collected in the late 60s/early 70s. Ditko's artwork stood out from the bunch, a peculiarity to the way he drew caught my eye. It was good old fashioned super-hero art, but it had a uniqueness to the way it was crafted. Of course, as a kid I didn't word it that way, but I was aware of his particular style fairly quickly.



Flash forward to the early 2000s... By now I had a few years under my belt as a self-published cartoonist. And my love for Steve Ditko's work hadn't waned at all. If anything, as an artist and publisher, I admired him on other levels as well. I'd tell friends of mine that I got so much inspiration from Ditko as an artist and as a creator who often would rather publish his own work through a trusted individual like Robin Snyder as opposed to the editorial-heavy publishers he had worked with in the past.

So my friends one day told me "Well, why don't you just write him and tell him how you feel?" It was that simple! Why the heck don't I just write him!?

So, I composed a brief letter, telling Steve Ditko how much I admired his comics as a kid, and as I got older I eventually published my own work. And I cited his inspiration in doing things exactly how he chooses to do them and the heck with second-guessing what the 'public' might want. I even sent him a copy of my comic book EL MUERTO. I certainly didn't expect him to read the book or review it, but I definitely wanted to give the man a gift to thank him for all the decades of pure enjoyment his work has given me.

A few weeks later, I open my P.O. Box on my weekly visit and see an envelope. He wrote back! I was quite aware at that time (2003) that Ditko was a very private person, not doing any interviews or personal appearances since the late 1960s. But he was known to write people back. Not an 'anti-social recluse' as many people have commented, just a person who prefers his privacy and wants only his work to speak for himself.

Upon opening the letter, I slowly read, and reread Steve Ditko's letter to me.
That he thanked me for the 'copy of El Muerto' was just the icing on the cake!

On this blog, I've often written about Ditko, and will continue to do so, no question. But for now, I'd like to end this post by sharing with you a one page comic I created a few months ago on Steve Ditko. A brief auto-biographic comic. You can go to my Deviant Art page for a larger image. Just open the link here, and once you see the image click on it once and it'll enlarge for a readable version.

 One last piece of art I'd like to share (which I actually finally finished this morning after leaving it aside for months!). An homage to that great Spider-Man Vs Mysterio image at the top of this post (from THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN Annual #1, 1964). This features two of my comic book characters, EL MUERTO and THE COMA:

 I've always loved the original image, as not only is Mysterio (and Spider-Man) one of the most uniquely designed characters Ditko has ever created, but the way he bends the character's bodies to fit the composition above all else is so great. The way both characters are invading one anothers space is very climatic and bold. It's a true superhero comic drawing: Everything is made to make the image look dynamic, regardless of how much he has to distort the figures and skewer the composition to fit what the artist has in mind.

So I basically substituted my characters for the originals, and added the Coma's interdimensional environment as background. But I really wanted to mimic the original composition as a creative exercise. I do these type of homages because I want to free myself from the way I usually work, to temporarily try a study of another artist's dynamics. Hopefully I then learn something in the way of creative composition & figure drawing, which helps me stretch my own skills. Plus it turned out to be a pretty neat image!

Thanks Mr. Steve Ditko, for the almost 40 years I've been enjoying your considerable body of work. Happy Birthday!

Steve Ditko, comic artist legend, turns 84 today

A very Happy Birthday to Steve Ditko, the great comic book creator who's creations/co-creations include Spider-Man, Dr. Strange, The Creeper, Hawk & Dove and Mr. A., among many others.

Here's some artwork I did that was featured recently on the back cover of DITKOMANIA #85, the fanzine dedicated to the work of Steve Ditko. That issue featured stories on Ditko's work for black & white magazines, and one of the stories he did for EERIE Magazine that I wanted to pay homage to was one called 'The Fly':

Ditko's career began in 1953, and almost 60 years later, the man is still producing new work! Published under the Robin Snyder/Steve Ditko banner, his latest book was just released:

 

This is his 14th new comic book released in the last 3 years, so Steve Ditko still has some stories to tell. This one features another chapter in the saga of Miss Eerie, and also introduces The Distorter, a character who never once appears in the actual story (unless you count a trail of energy an appearance!) but you still see the results of his/her/it's crime fighting abilities.

In addition to his singularly imaginative artwork and storytelling, what's specifically appealed to me, as a self-published comics creator, about Ditko's work is his reliance for the last 20 years or so on creating his work for himself, without the editorial oversight or worse, marketing input, of any third parties. He's creating pure art at this point, and he leaves it up to others to decide the merits of that choice. His desire is to create personal work and release it to the marketplace, no other considerations come into play. I'm not saying I have the exact same mindset, but his example is one that inspires me tremendously often keeps me going in this crazy comics business.

Ordering info for Ditko's new books is available at the DitkoComics Blog. To order DITKOMANIA, visit the Ditko-Fever site. Bleeding Cool.Com, a comics news site, has a nice gallery of original Ditko comic book pages you might be interested in checking out.