Ukrainian-American Steve Ditko is acknowledged as one of the all-time great illustrators of comic books. He was born on 2 November 1927 in Johnstown Pennsylvania.
Ditko got his start at the Cartoonists and Illustrators School in New York City. He began his professional career in 1953, when he did mostly horror and fantasy for Charlton Comics. His early covers, depicting, for example, blood-sucking beauties, brought him instant recognition.
By the end of 1950s, the Golden age of comic books, he'd moved to Atlas Comics, which soon changed its name to the better known Marvel Comics. It was with Marvel, in 1962, that he would gain lasting fame as the co-creator of Spider Man. Readers immediately identified with Peter Parker, the troubled young man behind the super-hero mask, who was brow beaten by his boss and rejected by women. It was characteristic of Ditko to imbue his fictional characters with mood and anxiety.
Another innovative feature of Spider Man introduced by the Ukrainian-American artist is that his mask reveals absolutely no facial features. Ditko himself was a man without a face, almost never appearing in public and refusing to give interviews to the media.
His time at Marvel was also marked by conflict. Ditko had a long-running feud with writer and editor Stan Lee, who claimed to be the sole creator of Spider Man. Eventually, Lee acknowledged Ditko's significant contributions to the development of the character, but their difficult relations led Ditko to leave the company. The last straw is often alleged to have been a disagreement as to the secret identity of the Green Goblin, one of Spider Man's archenemies.
In the second half of the sixties, Ditko returned to Charlton, which was relatively slower but offered more artistic freedom. It was there where he created new characters like Blue Beetle, Captain Atom (the first super hero with a nuclear twist) and, later, The Question - a crusading television journalist who dons a faceless mask to dig into stories of corruption off limits to a normal reporter. The Question is thought to reflect the artist's philosophical views, which were based on the writings of Aristotle and Ayn Rand. "My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of Man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute," wrote Rand, who was born and raised in Czarist Russia before immigrating to New York. Perhaps the character that best expresses Ditko's belief in Objectivism is the character Mr. A, whose hard line against criminals alienated readers and thus sales. The artist's lecturing style and imposing sociopolitical views earned him the nickname "Ditko the Dictator." Another commercial flop was The Creeper, which Ditko created during a short stint with DC Comics. The artist was apparently using the super-hero genre to explore ethical issues.
Almost a decade later, Ditko returned to DC Comics with Shade, the Changing Man, which didn't last long but was later successfully revived without him. The 1980s marked a slow retreat into obscurity until the artist finally retired from mainstream comics in 1998, at the age of seventy-one.
As prolific as he is intensely private, Ditko still works as an independent in New York. Starting out as a feature artist, he rose to success along with the genre of comic books itself. Like what many consider to be his best character, Dr. Strange - a mystical figure who occupies two different existences at the same time - Ditko seems to exist in two realties at once: his drawing room and the pages of the comics he creates.
|
