This week we are remembering Steve Ditko, co-creator of Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, The Question, Rorshach, and much, much more. Just like the heroes he created and helped develop, Ditko was a mysterious, complex, and principled individual. Today we try to open a little of that up for you.
Ross’ Show Notes
- Here’s a list of characters that Steve Ditko created on Wikipedia. Not all of them had their own titles, of course, but it’s pretty impressive.
- William Sydney Porter’s pen name was O. Henry.
- My history of Marvel Comics is not strictly accurate, but it is the simplest way of thinking about it. Fortunately, there are a lot of good biographies of early comics history. My favourite, for its objectivity, is Sean Howe’s Marvel: The Untold Story.
- Here’s a sample of Alan Moore’s scriptwriting style, which I don’t think anyone would advise emulating. This is the description for ONE PANEL on the first page of Watchmen. You can find it in the Watchmen Absolute edition.
- Jack Kirby’s character contribution.
- To learn a lot more about page composition and the art behind draftsmanship (which is the word we give to how much a picture actually looks like the thing that it is of), I recommend Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative.
- The scene where Reed is knocked out and has a whole off-panel conversation is found in Fantastic Four issue 71, which I talk more about on my blog FF1by1.com! Go ahead and scroll back through some of the other issue to see what I’m trying to describe about Jack Kirby’s work. He illustrated the first 100 issues of FF.
- Here are the Charlton characters along with their Watchmen counterparts:
- Here’s the Zack Snyder/Objectivism post I did for Batman V Superman. It has recently been announced that following Justice League, Snyder will attempt to adapt Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.
- I’ll repost a page from the Avenging Planet. It’s not the angriest page, but it is the one that makes most sense as a single page:
