Adding onto the birthday wishes from last Friday, here’s a smart look at Steve Ditko’s relationship with abstraction and abstract images from the Comics Journal:
Here and elsewhere, Ditko is uninterested in representing, in either a literal or conventional way, what the writer asks for. He rewrites/reinvents the narrative as he draws it, making the finished story far subtler and stranger than what the script could possibly have suggested. Ditko is one of the few artists who consistently makes something special from mediocre (or even horrible) writing — I often think that he takes scripts he was given by Marvel and DC far less seriously than the writers and editors did, seeing a conventional plots as an occasion to explore his visual sense of humor . . . . Too often readers focus on Ditko’s thematic concerns, overlooking the way he transforms conventions, building new worlds out of a familiar cartoon vocabulary.
Ditko is another of those artists whose work seemed ugly to me as a kid, but who I’ve come around to as I’ve gotten older. Maybe I just liked more photo-realistic stuff back then…
November 7th, 2012 at 12:23 am
Ditko art work is pure magic, I grew up with his Spider-man and Dr Strange, both characters have had their share of great artists over the years but none has been able to recreate the magic of the early stories written by Stan Lee and drawn by
teve Ditko.
Ditko creativity can be seen in the magical and alien realms of
Doctor Strange as well as in the darker yet fascinating
young and suffering Spider-Man.