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 Artist
Steve Ditko was found dead in his apartment on Friday June 29 by the New York
Police Department and it is believed he died about two days earlier. No cause of
death was announced and the initial reports of his death didn't begin to show up
on news sites until almost a week later.
Stephen J. Ditko was born in Johnstown, Pennsylvania on Nov. 2, 1927. His father
worked at a steel mill and his mother was a homemaker. He developed an interest
in comics from his fathers love of Hal Foster's Prince Valiant newspaper
strip, and from Batman and the Spirit, which both debuted as he entered his
teens. After graduating high school, Ditko served in the army in post-war
Germany, drawing for a military paper. After being discharged, he moved to New
York City in 1950 and studied under Batman artist Jerry Robinson at the
Cartoonists and Illustrators School. By 1953, Ditko was getting work as a
professional comics artist, including at the studio of Captain America creators
Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. He began drawing for Marvel Comics forerunner Atlas
Comics in 1955. He had a successful collaboration with Stan Lee at first, as the
pair worked on a number of science fiction stories together. He is of course
best known for his sixties Marvel work and co-creation of Spiderman, Dr.Strange.
Ditko left Marvel Comics over a fight with Lee, the causes of which have
always remained unclear. The pair had not been on speaking terms for several
years. Ditko never explained his side, and Lee claimed not to really know what
motivated Ditko's exit. The best explanation suggests Ditko was frustrated at
Lee's oversight and his failure to properly share credit for Ditko's
contributions to Spider-Man and Doctor Strange. The charismatic Lee was always
the face of Marvel Comics, but Ditko (and Jack Kirby) thought Lee was more
interested in self-promotion than selling the company, and, in the process,
implied that he deserved the lion's share of the credit for creating the
characters in the Marvel Universe.
After leaving Marvel Ditko spent the next ten years on and off at DC
creating Hawk & Dove, Creeper, Shade the Changing Man and others and also at
Charlton creating Blue Beetle and the Question. The latter character was the
forerunner of his most famous/notorious of Independent Projects: Mister A in
1967. The character embodied Ayn Rand's objectivist philosophy, which Ditko was
an ardent believer in from the mid-1960s on. Many of his subsequent creations at
DC and Charlton shared his objectivist views but to a lesser degree when
compared with Mr.A which was a pure and somewhat strident distillation of these
views. By the 1980's he had returned to Marvel to occasionally freelance on such
titles as Micronauts, Rom and Machine Man and creating the character who would
eventually become the current Millennial favorite: Squirrel Girl. Ditko spent
most of his life as a recluse, shunning publicity to the point where he was
referred to as the "J.D Salinger of comics". This was never more apparent than
in the last two decades which saw him totally absent while many of his creations
enjoyed great success on both the large and small screen.
Ditko has no known survivors. He is believed never to have married.
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