Celebrated comic book artist

Born: November 2, 1927;

Died: June 28, 2018

STEVE Ditko, who has died aged 90, was a reclusive American comic book artist who worked across the major US publishers of his era – including Marvel, DC and Charlton – and was known for his esoteric, psychedelic designs and distinctive draughtsmanship.

Although his career was long and varied, he will be remembered most widely by popular culture at large as the co-creator (with writer Stan Lee) of Marvel’s Spider-Man, one of the most widely identifiable of all superhero designs, and Doctor Strange, a cult favourite who achieved widespread recognition through the recent film adaptation.

In his later life he will also, among comic fans who follow individual creators, be remembered for a reclusive personality akin to a kind of four-colour JD Salinger, shunning any attempt at contact, interview, or award-giving, as documented in Jonathan Ross’ 2007 BBC4 documentary In Search of Steve Ditko.

Although Ditko was inducted into the industry’s Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1990 and the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 1994, he pointedly handed back awards collected for him by others, believing art not to be a competition. He was also famously a strong believer in Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, expanding upon his beliefs in his independent strip Mr. A (1967) and further self-published titles.

Introduced in 1962, in the 15th and final issue of sci-fi comic Amazing Fantasy, Spider-Man’s first appearance was both a high watermark of fantastical whimsy, and a story rich in pathos and well-earned audience identification. In a story which has since been replayed more than once on the big screen, it told of geekish and bullied teenager Peter Parker, who was given great physical power through a radioactive spider bite, yet failed to stop his own uncle’s murder through a foolish moment of youthful arrogance.

The lesson of the issue, that “with great power comes great responsibility”, has defined Spider-Man and American superhero comics ever since.

Although Lee was Marvel’s main driving force at the time of Spider-Man’s creation, he used what he called the ‘Marvel Method’ to originate strips, essentially coming up with a concept and a brief description, and allowing the artist to greatly flesh out the story and design. As such, it’s become impossible for even enthusiasts to correctly attribute who created how much of each character, but it’s generally accepted that each artist – including Ditko - did more original creative work than the split co-creative credit suggests.

A well-employed artist on Marvel’s (and their 1950s predecessor company, Timely) science-fiction comics, Ditko made the switch to superheroes after Spider-Man’s debut adventure proved to be a huge hit, earning the character his own title. He drew the first 38 issues of The Amazing Spider-Man, along the way co-creating enduring villains like the Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus; drawing a stunning and often-cited sequence from the 1966 story If This Be My Destiny… in which Spider-Man escapes a crush of machinery through strength and force of will; and winning his own battle to gain a co-plotting credit from Lee, in light of their use of the Marvel Method.

Yet the pair were not on speaking terms when Ditko eventually left Marvel in 1966, having also drawn runs of Iron Man and the Hulk’s strips, and co-created brilliant surgeon turned mystical adventurer Doctor Strange – also with Lee – in a 1963 issue of the title Strange Tales. If Spider-Man became known for the unique look of the character, then Doctor Strange’s enduring popularity came from the outlandish and impossible nature of the world in which he existed. One of the many weird beings Strange faced off against was Eternity, a humanoid figure who contained the entirety of the universe within his form.

After Marvel, Ditko returned to their smaller competitors Charlton, for whom he had created the nuclear-powered Captain Atom in 1960. Although significantly less well-known by the public, many of his creations for the imprint bear a unique place in comics history.

When DC bought Charlton in the 1980s, they merged the acquired stock of characters with their own properties, including the likes of Batman and Superman; yet their first thought had been to give them to a young writer from Northampton named Alan Moore to play with, eventually asking him to create his own characters.

The result was the classic Watchmen, whose characters Doctor Manhattan, Rorschach and Nite Owl are thinly-veiled analogues of Ditko’s Captain Atom, The Question and Blue Beetle, respectively.

During his own periods with DC, Ditko also created or co-created the odd but well-remembered The Creeper, Hawk and Dove (both 1968) and Shade the Changing Man (1977).

Yet he fell from grace with the industry in the 1980s and spent the years until his retirement from the mainstream in 1998 filling in on B-list books and paying the bills with licensed projects like Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and a Transformers colouring book (although Squirrel Girl, his 1992 co-creation with writer Will Murray for Marvel, has enjoyed recent success in a new version for younger readers).

Born in Johnstown, Pennsylvania in 1927, Stephen Ditko was the second of four children born to Stephen Snr and Anna, Americans of Slovak descent. A huge fan of Batman comics and Will Eisner’s strip The Spirit, as a teenager he was detailed to make model German planes to help aircraft spotters during the Second World War, and carried out his own military service in Germany after the war. Taking advantage of a scheme available to G.I.s, he enrolled in New York’s Cartoonists and Illustrators School in 1950.

Ditko settled in the city and remained there until his death, in between chronicling it for generations of readers through his initial portrait of Peter Parker’s world. He made “my childhood weirder,” said the author Neil Gaiman in tribute, while the director Edgar Wright said he had been “influential on countless planes of existence.” Jonathan Ross called him “the single greatest comic book artist and creator who ever lived.”

DAVID POLLOCK