Steve Strange

The great comic artist Steve Ditko died last week. Along with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby he was one of the principal architects of the Marvel universe, co-creating Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, and their cast of supporting characters.

Unlike Kirby’s square-jawed heroes, the characters Ditko drew looked like they needed a good meal and actually lived in our grubby little world. His Peter Parker was gawky and miserable, forever feeling beset by life — just like a real teenager — and the villains he fought were a gallery of grotesques: Doctor Octopus was chubby and wore glasses, The Sandman had a face like the back of a bus, and The Vulture looked like an evil grandad. They were mostly small-time losers who fell arse backwards into their superpowers. This was revolutionary stuff and his and Stan Lee’s most influential work, it certainly had a big impact on me as a kid.

While his Spider-Man was grounded in the real world, Doctor Strange wasn’t tethered to reality at all and Ditko came up with imagery that looked like he was tripping on some very good LSD — he wasn’t, Ditko was very conservative and hated the counterculture. Other, less-imaginative artists might have drawn the alternate dimensions the magician traveled in as shadowy, vague environments but Ditko created colorful, surrealistic worlds with crazy perspective where there was no up or down. Mind-blowing stuff.

Even more dazzling to me was his rendering of the character Eternity who, as the living embodiment of the universe, was almost literally an undrawable concept but he managed to give him form that was brilliantly original — the dude is a hole in reality in the shape of a man. These full-page panels of his battle with the dread Dormammu are just far fucking out, man.

Ditko produced a lot of great work both before and after Marvel but I haven’t got time or space to cover everything he did. This is a good overview of his entire career, including his controversial post-Marvel creations Mr A and The Question who were dour vigilantes given to making didactic speeches about free will based on the philosophy of Ayn Rand of which Ditko was a firm believer.

Even though he hadn’t produced any mainstream work in decades his death still felt like a big loss. With Kirby gone and Stan Lee seeming very frail we’re losing the Gods of the Marvel universe, one of the greatest feats of imagination of the 20th century and a huge part of my growing up, and it makes me very sad.

Download: Strange Magic – Electric Light Orchestra (mp3)