Far Horizons: Tales of Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror. Issue #22 January 2016 | Page 50

Understanding Steve
Ditko

in Watchmen. For DC comics, he created The Hawk
and the Dove, The Creeper, and Shade the Changing
Man. I could go on, but you get the picture.

Ian Millsted

Ditko doesn’t do interviews. There are only
a couple of photographs of him from his years
as a professional artist. He was one of only two
professionals to attend the very first comic convention
in 1964. He never attended another. Other artists and
writers who have worked with him say he is a friendly,
quietly spoken man. He is also as uncompromising an
artist as can be found in comics.

Photo taken by and copyright of Amber Stanton

Just off Times Square each workday, an elderly
man makes his way up to an office in which he draws.
He wears several plaid shirts, one over the other, to
keep away the cold he feels more these days. The
nearby movie theatres sometimes show big new films
based on characters he created. He probably doesn’t
go to watch them. His name is on the door of his
office. It says ‘S. Ditko’. If you want to hire him to
do artwork, he may listen to you. If you want to ask
him questions about his work, forget it. The work, he
believes, speaks for itself. We’ll come back to that.
Steve Ditko is one of those people who is a
big name to those who know his work but largely
unknown to the wider public, even though most have
come across his creations. Ditko was born in 1927
and was one of the first professional comics artists
to have been a fan of the medium first. He created,
or co-created (we’ll come back to that too), SpiderMan and Doctor Strange for Marvel. Of the villains
that featured in the five big budget movies of the last
couple of decades, Ditko designed The Green Goblin,
Dr. Octopus, Sandman, The Lizard, and Electro. For
Charlton Comics, he created The Question which was
later used as the template for the character Rorschach

The Question by Steve Ditko, copyright DC comics

It is often written that Ditko has been
influenced by the Objectivist philosophy developed
by Ayn Rand. True, but I think, as so often happens,
Ditko found a philosophy that reinforced and validated
his existing world view. Either way, the influence has
grown only stronger over time. Where Ditko drew
many stories with supernatural settings including
the aforementioned Doctor Strange, by the mid1990s he refused to continue work on a new series,
Dark Dominion, because of its supernatural theme.
As an atheist, he refuses to work on anything which

50