Synopses & Reviews
The first critical retrospective of the work of the reclusive co-creator of Spider-Man. In the wake of the astonishing success of the recent Spider-Man movie, Steve Ditko has become known as the co-creator, with Stan Lee, of the early 1960s character that helped propel Marvel Comics' popularity on college campuses and gave it much of its cultural cachet throughout that decade. But, in the context of Steve Ditko's 50-year career in comics, his creative involvement with Spider-Man is merely the tip of the iceberg. Ditko is known among the cognoscenti as one of the supreme visual stylists in the history of comics, as well as the most fiercely independent cartoonist of his generation. His unique style and innovative spatial designs moved from the imaginatively hallucinatory landscapes of Dr. Strange to the almost plebeian earthiness of The Amazing Spider-Man. Ditko began his career in the 1950s drawing comics for the notorious low-budget Charlton Comics (the Roger Corman Productions of the comics industry) where he developed his craft on various genre titles. He worked for Stan Lee at Marvel Comics in 1958, churning out monster/horror stories, until he was conscripted to work on Marvel's new super-hero line, for which he provided the visual conceptions of The Hulk, Spider-Man, and Dr. Strange, and plotted and drew these characters' adventures between 1962 and 1967. By 1967, Spider-Man had become a pop culture icon, and it was then that Ditko quit drawing the character over a professional dispute with Stan Lee, and never looked back. He immediately created his Ayn Rand-inspired character, Mr. A, whose first story appeared in Witzend, a black-and-white pre-underground comic edited and published by Wally Wood, a talented artist who had hit similar loggerheads with comics publishers. Ditko went on to work at various publishing companies such as DC Comics, Warren Publishing, and even Marvel Comics (albeit steadfastly refusing to ever draw Spider-Man again), writing and drawing heavily didactic Mr. A stories relentlessly extolling the philosophical precepts of Ayn Rand, and, more recently, bitter visual jeremiads against the moral status quo of the comics industry. Steve Ditko; The Mysterious Traveler is a coffee table art book tracing Ditko's life and career, his unparalleled stylistic innovations, his strict adherence to Randian principles, with lush displays of obscure and popular art from the thousands of pages of comics he's drawn over the last 50 years. Full color and b/w illustrations throughout.
About the Author
Blake Bell lives in Toronto with his wife and son.