Next Sunday, BBC4 in the U.K. is running In Search of Steve Ditko, a film by Jonathan Ross. I'm told it'll turn up on YouTube and other online sites soon after that and I would imagine that DVDs and such will make the rounds. This page gives you the broadcast times in case you can get BBC4 where you are. I spoke with Jonathan about it at the Comic-Con and it sounds like a "must see" for those of us interested in comic book history.
Nevertheless, I'll quibble with some of the rhetoric on that web page. It says, and I quote…
Ditko is a recluse and has never revealed why he left Marvel Comics. He has never been interviewed and won't allow his photograph to be taken.
"Recluse" seems a bit harsh to me, suggesting as it does a person who never associates with other human beings. What we have in Ditko is a very gifted gentleman who refuses interviews and convention appearances and wide interaction with the comic book community and personal publicity. But dozens of folks from that community (including me, years ago) have visited him in his studio or spoken with him in comic book company offices and such.
Yeah, he's never been interviewed in the accepted sense. That's if you don't count a couple of brief Q-and-A things he did for fanzines many years ago. Also, a few years ago, two separate individuals were telling people they'd recorded long phone conversations with Ditko, and they were guardedly letting out tapes. I wouldn't count those as interviews, either. (And don't bother asking if I know where you can get copies. I don't. I refused to accept one because I thought, and still think, it's a slimy and probably illegal thing to do.)
But the man has certainly discussed with others why he left Marvel Comics, even if he has sometimes claimed in print that he hasn't. He was unhappy because he believed Marvel's then-owner was reneging on certain promises about sharing in the revenues of the characters Ditko co-created, Spider-Man and Dr. Strange. He was upset with the way his comics were then produced, feeling that he was doing most of the writing work on the comics he did with Stan Lee, but that Lee — as dialogue writer — was getting too much of the credit and money. (Marvel's two other best artists of the period, Jack Kirby and Wally Wood — both good friends of Ditko's — felt the same way.) There were also personality clashes between Lee and Ditko — they didn't speak for the last eighteen months or so of their "collaboration" — and Ditko was displeased by many of the creative choices Stan was making, treating Spider-Man as a morally-confused, troubled protagonist. Ditko, as was obvious from his subsequent work, didn't like heroes who didn't rigidly adhere to his own interpretation of good and evil, black and white. But Stan, of course, was the editor and had the last word.
Ditko told me all that in his studio in 1970, not long after he quit. He's said it to others and I also think it's pretty easy to perceive in his other comics and in the occasional essays he's written for the fan press. He may write things like "My reasons are my own and I've never divulged them to anyone" but we don't have to believe that. Besides, what other reasons could there have been? He didn't quit Marvel in 1966 because he didn't like the ties Stan was wearing in the office.
Jonathan Ross is quite a brilliant man so I'll presume his documentary doesn't presume there's some dark, unfathomable mystery why someone walks out of a company and refuses to ever work for them again…a vow Ditko kept until 1979 when Charlton, the main company that employed him after Marvel, cut back on buying. (Even then when Ditko returned, he steadfastly declined to draw his old co-creations, Spider-Man or Dr. Strange. Many tried to convince him and a few writers even snuck them into scripts for a panel or two, only to have Ditko politely refuse.) In any case, I think it's time to bury this myth that Ditko's reasons for quitting are unknowable, even if he says they are. They were pretty much the same reasons that anyone quits a job like that.
By the way: I went to look up one Ditko fact on Wikipedia and spotted an error there. I don't know how to correct an entry so I'd appreciate it if someone else could fix this line in their page on Ditko…
In 1968, Charlton editor Dick Giordano moved to DC Comics. Steve Ditko, and several other artists and writers in Giordano's stable, moved with him.
That's the way it keeps getting reported and it's wrong. Ditko was hired by DC before Giordano. The editor of Ditko's first comic for DC (Showcase #73, the first Beware the Creeper) was Murray Boltinoff. In fact, it was in part because Ditko gave him a recommendation that DC management decided to hire Giordano, who then joined up and became editor of several comics, Ditko's among them.