He helped create the web-slinging hero in his own image — but who was the man behind the mask?
Uncle Steve went back home to Johnstown, Pennsylvania, from New York City, there was a strict rule: No one talks to him about work. He’s not here on business, his brother, Patrick, would tell the kids.
Within years of Mark’s realization, Steve Ditko would forever change the cultural landscape by co-creating a superhero unlike any before him. One with insecurities, whose life mission was sparked by a massive mistake. He lacked social skills. His head buzzed with worry. Every issue ended with him steeped in depression.
“I got calls from all around the world. People thinking I was my uncle,” his nephew says, explaining what prompted the name change. After being honorably discharged in 1948, Ditko spent a brief period living at home in Johnstown, then made his way to Manhattan. His family knows little about his time studying at the Cartoonists and Illustrators School, which he attended from 1951 to 1953 under the tutelage ofartist Jerry Robinson, or the years he spent breaking into the industry, working for comic companies that paid little but offered creative freedom.
Spider-Man came from a hint of an idea Lee had in the early Sixties: An orphaned teenager becomes a hero named Spider-Man. That was the extent of it. “A lot of the hippies in college were like, ‘Man, he must be doing a lot of the acid,’” says Mort Todd, a former Marvel andeditor who was friends with Ditko for more than three decades. “Couldn’t be farther from the truth.”
Unlike other comic companies, where pencilers received full scripts to draw from, Lee used what is called the Marvel Method: Lee came up with a germ of an idea for an issue, maybe a paragraph long, handed it off to the penciller, who drew the issue, pacing the story, filling in the details and plot points. Then Lee added dialogue and narration.
In issue 25, the issue when Lee acquiesced to list Ditko as plotter, Lee credited him as “Scowling Steve.” With journalists happy to give Lee credit for the entire Marvel universe, Lee wouldn’t speak up about Ditko’s contributions, and even Ditko’s family couldn’t avoid reading the press. The years following his Marvel exit saw Ditko working across the comic landscape, co-creating Hawk and Dove for DC, and reimagining the character Blue Beetle into a teenaged hero for Charton comics. After Spider-Man, he had rules. Before he entered a project with a writer, he’d call them and ask, “How do you define a hero?” to ensure their definition didn’t fall into the gray. He began getting a reputation with editors as being difficult.
In the third issue, Ditko introduced his most controversial character — one he would come back to persistently for the remainder of his life — and, unlike with Spider-Man, he retained full rights. By then, comic heroes had begun blurring their morality, inching their way to becoming corrupt Watchmen, and Ditko felt readers couldn’t decipher right from wrong. His creation, Mr. A, told a morality play steeped in exaggerated violence. Like Ditko, Mr.
It was the first of five visits over the next few years. Each time, Ditko would barely crack the door, and step out into the hallway where they’d chat. Visits would last five to 20 minutes. One time, Haspiel even brought his mom. “I can’t really remember the conversations because you’re in a fugue state. You black out when you are around someone who is that accessible yet inaccessible at the same time,” Haspiel says. “I would show him some artwork. He never showed me anything.
But there were friends who Ditko allowed greater access to his many worlds. They may not have known about his time in the Army or his family, but he had friends who he’d meet weekly for burgers to discuss movies and New York history, friends he allowed into his office to set up his VCR. “He already had a copy of the movieready to watch,” Todd said. He even let Todd slip in a Spider-Man question or two over the decades.
Ditko and Frank wrote each other nearly 1,500 letters, ranging from four to 10 pages, discussing Ditko’s appreciation of Don Rickles and his respect for Dan Rather and William Shatner, two examples, Ditko felt, of people who didn’t allow one role to define them. Frank mentioned to Ditko that he loved the first season ofAlthough Ditko wasn’t a fan, he sent him newspaper clips when one of the actors died. “Not only did he remember, but he thought enough of me to do that,” Frank says.
As an adult, Mark Ditko became a fan of comics himself, and in the 1990s, he frequented conventions and met creators his uncle had worked with, many who gushed with praise. He would write his uncle 20- to 40-page letters, discussing politics. But at cons, he began hearing the myths of the recluse, the bitter old man. “I did not do something because I knew he wouldn’t want me to,” he says.
There was a crew of “hot superstar artists” whose “signatures would get bigger and bigger on their art,” Todd says. On their backs, Marvel sales skyrocketed, with artist-tagged relaunches oftitles selling millions. Then in 1992, they all walked — they’d seen what the industry did to the early creators and swore it wouldn’t happen to them
Salicrup left Marvel soon after, but believes if he had stayed, Ditko and Lee would have worked together again, on something with a more positive future. “I could’ve easily talked Stan into working on such a character with Steve,” Salicrup says. Lee claimed he came up with the idea for one of Ditko’s most iconic scenes. Ditko wrote letters to the magazines complaining.
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