Working with Ditko by Jack C. Harris
Introduction by Mike Gold Design, Production, and Editorial Assist by Jon B. Cooke Proofread and Published by John Morrow Steve Ditko portrait by Drew Friedman Front and back cover art by Steve Ditko Special thanks: Cory Sedlmeier, Rob Imes, Kendall Whitehouse, Glenn Whitmore, and Andrew Pepoy Dedicated to Stephen J. Ditko
My idol, acquaintance, colleague, collaborator, friend & Master of the Comic Book Arts Batman, Black Canary, Block, Bouncing Boy, Cancelled Comics Cavalcade, The Creeper, Dial H for Hero, Green Arrow, The Hawk and the Dove, Hawkman, House of Mystery, The Legion of Super-Heroes, The Odd Man, Shade the Changing Man, Showcase, Stalker, Starman, Superboy, Superman, Time Warp, Wildfire, Wonder Woman, World’s Finest Comics, and all associated characters TM & © DC Comics. Amazing Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, The Human Torch, Kraven the Hunter, Spider-Man: Web of Doom, Tales of Suspense, and all associated characters TM & © Marvel Characters, Inc. The Adventures of the Fly, Fly Girl, Jaguar, and all associated characters TM & © Archie Comic Publications, Inc. The Fly created by Joe Simon, © The Estate of Joseph Simon. Steve Ditko portrait © Drew Friedman. Originally appeared in Drew’s Heroes of the Comics: Portraits of the Pioneering Legends of Comic Books [2014], published by Fantagraphics Books. Alter Ego TM & © Roy and Dann Thomas. The Comics Journal TM & © Fantagraphic Books, Inc. Warp and associated characters TM & © the estate of Stuart Gordon and Lenny Kleinfeld. Byron Simon (In the Lamp), Daughters of Time, Dr. Ato: The Man with the Atomic Eye, Fantasy Master, Felix Fax: The Infinity Flyer, Lelona, The Myth Master, Star Guider, 3-D Substance, and Tommy Todd’s Dream Squad, and all associated characters TM & © Jack C. Harris. Revolver TM & © Robin Snyder. The 3-D Zone TM & © the estate of Ray Zone. Fantastic Giants, Gorgo, Konga TM & © the respective copyright holders.
First Printing: June 2023 • Printed in China • ISBN-13: 978-1-60549-122-6
Published by
TwoMorrows Publishing
10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, North Carolina 27614 USA www.twomorrows.com
Table of Contents Introduction: “Art That Speaks for Itself” by Mike Gold........................................................... 7 Chapter 1: First Encounter..................................................................................................... 9 Chapter 2: Meeting Steve Ditko............................................................................................. 14 Chapter 3: Steve, Shade, the Changing Man, and The Odd Man............................................. 19 Chapter 4: Steve: the World’s Finest Creeper, and The Batman............................................. 27 Chapter 5: Steve, the Mystery Stories, and Time Warp........................................................... 38 Chapter 6: Ditko and the Wonder Woman Spectacular........................................................... 47 Chapter 7: Steve Ditko’s DC Profile....................................................................................... 52 Chapter 8: Steve and The Legion of Super-Heroes.................................................................. 54 Chapter 9: Steve, First Comics, the Faceless Ones, and the Fantasy Master.......................... 59 Chapter 10: Steve, the End of Gold Key Comics, and the Star Guider.................................... 75 Chapter 11: Steve and The Fly.............................................................................................. 88 Chapter 12: 3-D Ditko: Substance and the Daughters of Time.............................................. 95 Chapter 13: Steve, the Hulk, the Human Torch, and the Long Wait..................................... 107 Chapter 14: Unpublished Ditko.......................................................................................... 112 Chapter 15: My Last Letter to Steve.................................................................................... 124
Chapter 2.
Meeting Steve Ditko I
first met Steve Ditko in the halls of DC Comics in New York City. I began working at DC in 1974. I came there by way of the University of the Arts (formerly known as the Philadelphia College of Art) and the United State’s Army Signal Corps. My three years in the Army in North Carolina, Georgia, and Germany paid for my college, where I studied illustration. My original goal was to become a comic book artist. Comic book fans in the late 1950s and early ’60s, such as me, were extremely fortunate. Not only were we there for the blossoming of the Silver Age of Comics, but we also witnessed the birth of the Golden Age of Comic Book Fandom! The comic books of that time all had letter columns, packed with correspondence
from enthusiastic fans of all generations. Since many of the comics of the Silver Age were revivals of the super-stars of the ’40s, the letter columns featured letters from both the older fans, fondly remembering their childhood heroes, and the newer fans, enthralled by the flood of new (to them at least) super-heroes and super-teams. The letter columns, especially those appearing in DC books edited by Julius Schwartz, and the Marvel Comics pages overseen by Stan Lee, were the best. These pages published the full street addresses of the letter writers, allowing them to contact each other to further discuss, critique, and otherwise analyze the latest super-hero epics. Because of this communication, a fandom network arose with the publication of fanzines and organizing the
The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, my alma mater, where three friends and I taught the very first accredited student-taught course, “The History of the American Comic Book.”
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Me in my DC Comics office at Rockefeller Plaza, in 1978. I’m holding the 3-D shadowbox of the cover of Showcase #101 [June 1978], the first issue of my Hawkman trilogy. The shadowbox was created by Todd Reis.
first comic book conventions. I was the perfect audience. I was a proud member of Comic Book First Fandom. I wrote letters, subscribed to the fanzines, corresponded with other comic book fans (and even some comic book professionals) and attended the
comic book conventions. This continued after I enrolled in the Philadelphia College of Art, where I met a number of other comic book fans. We all became fast friends and spent many hours between our drawing and painting classes talking about comic books!
Meeting Steve Ditko
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Chapter 3.
Steve, Shade, the Changing Man, & The Odd Man D uring the first half of the 1970s, most of Steve’s work had been for Charlton, which had always been his favorite publisher. They didn’t pay that much, but they allowed him the most creative freedom. He’d also done some work for the newly formed Atlas/ Seaboard company. In late 1974, DC’s managing editor, Joe Orlando, had taken note of a sword-&-sorcery trend springing up in comics. Marvel’s Conan and Kull had been doing well for a long time and Joe wanted DC to have a counterpart. DC had a Beowulf title, but Joe was looking for something more original. Paul Levitz, Joe’s assistant editor and general righthand man at the time, jumped at the chance and created the Stalker series. Joe immediately tapped Steve Ditko as the artist. When I had first met Steve, that’s what he was doing. He had come in to drop off his latest penciled pages for Stalker. My office soon became a haven for Steve. He was not a recluse, but he was a very private, and perhaps shy, person. He really didn’t want to hang out in the DC bullpen with all the other freelancers while waiting to hand in art pages to Joe, so he used my office chair as his sanctuary. This is how we became friends. Whenever he came to DC, he would duck into my office and wait there until Joe was free to meet with him. He would show me his artwork for Stalker even before he showed it to Joe, who was the Stalker editor.
The Shade, The Changing Man house ad, designed and written by me, with Ditko’s illustration.
Recognizing what an asset Steve was, the upper echelon of DC wanted to keep him happy. While he was in the midst of doing Stalker, they also had him do a Creeper issue for First Issue Special, DC’s latest “try-out” magazine, in the tradition of Showcase from years earlier.
Steve, Shade, and The Odd Man
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Chapter 5.
Steve, the Mystery Stories & Time Warp W
orking at DC Comics in the ’70s and ’80s was a blast, especially if one was on the editorial staff. While we were not (usually) permitted to write stories for the books we edited, we were free to pitch ideas to the other editors whenever we wanted. This presented us with an abundance of freelancing opportunities. If an editor needed a story or a fill-in issue, it was easier to just ask someone down the hall rather than call a writer and have to schedule a plotting session. In the days before FedEx or the internet, artists were always dropping by to deliver work. We editors wanted to make sure these visiting artists would leave with another script in their hands to illustrate. Many times I would hear, “Artist Soand-So is coming in tomorrow! Anyone have a script?” When this happened, one of two things would occur: we’d either grab a script we had in inventory, or we’d immediately volunteer to write one. If the artist in question was someone with whom we were anxious to work, the latter choice would prevail. This is exactly how I first got to write a story specifically for Steve Ditko. House of Mystery had been a stalwart title for DC since its debut back with #1 [Dec./ Jan. 1951]. The book was first published right in the middle of a controversial time for comic books. Comics were under attack as a result of psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s question-
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able book, Seduction of the Innocent, which laid the blame for juvenile delinquency solely on the reading of said comic books. Horror comics, especially the EC Comics titles such as Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror, had been the target of Wertham and his followers. For the most part, DC editor Jack Schiff played it safe in the pages of early issues House of Mystery, running “supernatural” stories which usually turned out to have logical, scientific explanations, and happened because criminals were perpetrating some kind of hoax. With the 46th issue [Jan. 1956], the title began sporting the seal of approval from the Comics Code Authority on its covers. Schiff held reign over the title until issue #126 [Sept. 1962], when George Kashdan took over. During all that time, science-fiction stories had begun to sneak into the pages, as that had become the more popular trend at the time. In a couple of years, Kashdan turned over the cover feature of the Martian Manhunter [House of Mystery #143, June 1964]. During an editorial shift, the Martian Manhunter (written by Jack Miller and drawn by Joe Certa) had been disposed from his longtime home in Detective Comics in favor of Next page is my favorite cover of the half-dozen issues of House of Mystery issues I edited, Ditko’s illustration for #277 [Feb. 1980].
Steve, the Mystery Stories, & Time Warp
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Chapter 8.
Steve & The Legion of Super-Heroes
The Legion of Super-Heroes #281 [Nov. 1981] may have been Ditko’s last Legion adventure, but its splash sported his magnificent rendition of the Boy of Steel!
I
n 1978, I was assigned the editorship of Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes. This was not my initial encounter with the Legion; far from it! My first assignment at DC was as assistant editor to editor Murray Boltinoff, and one of the many books Murray edited was Superboy and the Legion of SuperHeroes. I even dialogued one of Paul Levitz’s Legion stories in #240 [June 1978], drawn by
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Howard Chaykin and Bob Wiacek. My familiarity with the Legion went all the way back to its very beginning. I had begun collecting comics not long before Adventure Comics #247 was published. This was the Legion’s first appearance, in a story called, unsurprisingly, “The Legion of Super-Heroes,” written by Otto Binder and illustrated by Al Plastino. In the story, Cosmic Boy, Saturn Girl, and Lightning Boy (yes, Boy, not Lad) come from the future to ask Superboy to join their “SuperHero Club.” The future trio wore costumes almost totally different from those worn in their next appearance. Their full super-hero names were printed on the fronts of their costumes. The story was quite typical, wherein Superboy is eventually rejected from the club, but learns that his rejection was just the final test to see how he handled failure. This was a common plot device in Mort Weisinger-edited Superman titles. I always believed that the Legion of SuperHeroes was an “accidental” series. They were never intended to be anything more than supporting characters. However, with every subsequent appearance, their popularity grew. After appearances and even their own series in Adventure Comics, the Legion took over Superboy’s title. Superboy was changed to become Superboy and the Legion of SuperHeroes with #197 [Sept. 1973].
My first issue as editor was Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes #247 [March 1979]. I had inherited two scripts by Len Wein and Paul Levitz for that issue, but as of the next issue, Gerry Conway became my regular writer, and Joe Staton became my regular artist (with a few fill-ins by others). Gerry had a heavy, contracted workload of scripting chores. To ease things up a bit for him and for Joe, and to get ahead of deadlines myself, I commissioned a few fill-in back-up short stories. I planned to have these written and drawn by others so my regular creative team could catch up. Giving Staton a break from doing another full issue, Conway wrote a seven-page back-up for #257 titled, “Once a Legionnaire…” featuring Bouncing Boy and Duo Damsel. Bouncing Boy was always my favorite Legionnaire. There were many reasons for this: One, he didn’t look like a super-hero. Two, he had a very visual power, unlike many of the other Legionnaires who just pointed to use their super-abilities. Three, he had a hot girlfriend (later his wife) in the person(s) of Duo Damsel. I decided to assign the art for this story to Steve Ditko! Steve Ditko’s personal philosophy is quite well known. Steve believed in a black-&-white world. Everything was either good or bad, wonderful or terrible, benevolent or evil. You had to accept either one totally. You could never compromise. If you claimed to be a good person and compromised, this meant, according to Steve, you would have to accept some aspect of evil! This was best reflected in his ruthless crime fighting character Mr. A, whose fearful calling card was simply a business card, half-white, half-black. Ironically, this back-&-white attitude was reflected in Steve’s work on the Legion of Super-Heroes; fans loved it or they hated it,
Ditko’s first Legion assignment: Gerry Conway’s story “Once a Legionnaire...” in Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes #257, inked by Dan Adkins.
no in-between. I had selected Steve for a number of reasons. First of all, I thought Ditko’s figure work was similar to that of George Papp’s, who had drawn many of the Legion’s early appearances after their debut. Secondly, Steve was fast and could turn around a sevenpage story in a very short amount of time. When I asked Steve if he could do the story, he was pretty busy. He was doing a few Time Warp stories for me, and was drawing Machine Man and Micronauts for Marvel, but he agreed. After he accepted the assignment he asked, “Do you have reference for the characters? Because I really don’t know them.” This was immediately a concern because one of the most common complaints from
Steve & the Legion of Super-Heroes
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Ditko’s pencils for the two finished pages seen on the previous spread. Below is Craig Yoe’s The Creativity of Ditko.
Steve told me to hold onto the penciled pages in the hopes that, some day, someone else might express some interest in publishing Fantasy Master. As far as I ever got was a sampling of the pages being printed in Craig
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Yoe’s book, The Creativity of Ditko, published by Yoe Books in 2012. I still have the all the penciled pages. Perhaps the possibility of Fantasy Master being published someday still exists.
Chapter 10.
Steve, the End of Gold Key Comics, & the Star Guider I
don’t recall exactly when I started reading comic books. I do, however, fondly remember two of my favorites before I discovered super-hero comics: Little Lulu and Donald Duck. Both of these titles were published by Dell Comics. Most of the early comic books my older brother and I read were published by Dell. Besides these two, the rest of what we bought were books based on television shows we watched, most notably the Westerns such as The Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. When I started buying Action Comics, Adventure Comics, Batman, and Detective Comics, to follow the adventures of Superman and Batman, my childhood budget just could not keep up with continuing to buy the Dell titles. I justified this switch by convincing myself that such humor comics were “just for kids,” while the DC super-heroes were much more sophisticated. So while the Dell Comics was still sharing the spinner racks with DC, I pretty much ignored them. Then, one day, in 1962, Dell Comics disappeared and were replaced by Gold Key Comics. At first, I just thought Dell had changed their name and their look. This was not the case. What I learned later was that Western Publishing Company, in an attempt to make their comic books resemble established children’s books, switched to their own in-house
Ditko’s original penciled presentation page for Star Guider, originally prepared for Gold Key’s Astral Frontier science-fiction multiple-story title edited by Robin Snyder.
publishing. Previously, they had been merely packaging content for distribution by Dell Comics, their business partner. Now, Western Publishing was printing its own comic books under the Gold Key banner. In the 1970s, Gold Key struggled during
Steve, the End of Gold Key Comics, & the Star Guider
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Above is a Ditko page from the Jaguar story in The Fly #8 [August 1984].
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Chapter 12.
3-D Ditko: Substance & The Daughters of Time I
n 1989, I attended the San Diego ComicCon. At that time, I was working for a trade magazine publisher and writing comic books and children’s books as a freelancer. One of the publications I was editing for the trade company was a magazine devoted to the licensing industry. It featured sections on both gaming and comic books. For these reasons, my publisher sent me off to Southern California as a representative for the company. While there, I thought I would pitch an idea Steve Ditko and I had been developing. I had spent a lot of time in Steve’s studio. He had set up his working space in a building about a half-block off Times Square. It was up on the fifth or sixth floor, near the back of the building. When I first visited, the structure was showing its age, but not too long after I had started to drop by, the whole place was renovated and ended up looking quite nice. What I remember of Steve’s studio is that it was simple, but functional for what he needed. There was a single window overlooking the city where one could easily spot a few of the water towers Steve used to draw in just about every one of his Spider-Man stories. There were shelves lining the walls of the studio stuffed with movie stills from every genre, which Steve used for reference. There was a little black-&-white, rabbit-eared portable television set and a draftsman table. Whenever I saw Steve drawing, he’d have a drawing board
The published cover of 3-D Substance [1990], colored (poorly) by me.
on his lap, with the top edge resting on the draftsman table. It was on this lap-supported drawing board that all of Steve’s penciled art was created. I never actually saw him use the draftsman table for drawing. Perhaps he only used it when he was inking.
3-D Ditko: Substance & the Daughters of Time
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Chapter 13.
Steve, The Hulk, the Human Torch, and the Long Wait A
s a freelancer, I created and wrote The Ray mini-series for DC Comics [#1–6, Feb.–July 1992] in 1991. This run came to the attention of Marvel editor Danny Fingeroth, and he invited me to lunch and wanted me to pitch a new character idea for that year’s Amazing Spider-Man Annual. That summer, Marvel’s plan was to introduce a new character in all of their summer annuals. I came up with Annex, who appeared in Amazing Spider-Man Annual #27 [1993], drawn by Tom Lyle and Scott Hanna. Annex was the only new hero of that summer who had a chance to continue. He appeared in a solo tale in Spider-Man Unlimited #3 [Nov. 1993] and earned his own mini-series [#1–4, Aug.–Nov. 1994]). Simultaneously, I successfully pitched a three-issue Spider-Man mini-series, Spider-Man: Web of Doom [#1–3, Aug.–Oct. 1994], drawn by Scott Kollins in the first issue, and then Anthony Williams in the remaining two, all inked by Sam DelaRosa. There were two memorable incidents involving this mini-series. The first was that right after I had written the first issue, editor Mark Powers called to inform me that I had to change the villain! I had originally pitted Spider-Man against the Vulture, but he was being used in a different title during the same month. So I had to go with the Beetle instead. With Marvel’s tight crossover continuity, such last-minute changes were common.
Amazing Spider-Man Annual #27 [1993], my first Spider-Man story for Marvel, where I created Annex. Art by Tom Lyle and Scott Hanna.
The second incident happened one Thursday morning during my weekly trek into New York City to teach my classes at the School of Visual Arts. I was going to go by Marvel’s offices that morning to drop off my dialogue
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