Steve Ditko The Mysterious Traveler

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 andpublished by Wally Wood, a talented artist who had hit similar loggerheads with comics publishBell, Blake is the author of 'Steve Ditko The Mysterious Traveler', published 2003 under ISBN 9781560975359 and ISBN 1560975350.