Pay Attention: Late-Period Ditko
by Jeet Heer
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
A Ditko Act
Over the last few years, there’s been a tremendous upsurge of interest in Steve Ditko’s legacy, thanks in no small part to the various books written and/or edited by Blake Bell and Craig Yoe. This is all to the good: Ditko is, to my mind at least, one of the four or five most imaginative and path breaking visual artists ever to work in the commercial comic book field (the others, for what it’s worth, are Kirby, Kurtzman, and Toth). What tends to get forgotten, though, is the fact that Ditko, unlike the other masters, is still alive and in fact very busy.
Steve Ditko is 83 years old. In the last year he’s produced at least 150 pages of new comics (published by Robin Synder in the series A Ditko Act). By any reasonable measure, this venerable cartoonist much more prolific than many artists 60 years his junior. It’s unfortunate that late-period Ditko tends to be ignored by all but the most hard-core fans. Of course, Ditko himself is partially to blame, since these latest stories follow in the trajectory of his Mr. A work in being both forbiddingly didactic and shorn of any reader-friendly cordiality. As befits a man of his ideological purity, Ditko demands to be taken on his own terms. And increasingly, Ditko’s visual vocabulary has an abstract and hermetic quality that makes it look like an alien script, one without a Rosetta Stone to help us decipher it. Ditko’s dialogue is also unique: more and more it has a telegraphic quality whereby information is conveyed in short phrasal bursts that don’t resemble anything close to human speech.
The most interesting thing about late-period Ditko how relentlessly stylized it is, achieving a level of cartooning abstraction almost worthy of Sterrett or Rege. To be sure, Ditko has long had a covert passion for abstraction — think of the weird backgrounds in his Doctor Strange stories. But late-period Ditko takes this tendency to a radical extreme. Artists late in life, Irving Howe once suggested, have a tendency to give up all that they no longer need, to offer up art that is unshorn and pure and blunt. I’m not sure if that is generally true but Ditko would make a good case study.
I’m not the writer to do justice to late-period Ditko — it requires someone more steeped in his career and the history of mainstream comics than I am. But I will say that I hope some smart critic – Matt Seneca comes to mind, or my formidable blog-mate Jog – will look at this stuff and try to explain it. It’s too interesting to remain the terra incognito of comics. I have a hunch at in the future there will be a general rediscovery of late-period Ditko, just as there has been an upward reappraisal of late-period Kirby.
Steve Ditko's The Madman (From A Ditko Act)
Labels: Pay Attention, Steve Ditko
I reviewed some of these Ditko comics a while ago:
http://comicscommentary.blogspot.com/2009/10/review-two-steve-ditko-comics.html
To be honest, I don’t find these works to be as compelling as (to give an example) Kirby’s late-period comics. I’m glad they exist, but to me these Ditko comics are interesting in the way they give us a glimpse into the mind of a creator who did truly remarkable work during the 1960’s. The story of Ditko and the way his relation with the industry has evolved is to me more interesting than his work from the past two decades or so.
I talk about Ditko on my blog. Particularly his weird hands. I’ve been studying Ditko’s work for the past couple of months, but probably won’t have more in-depth talky-talk until I get through more of his collections, both old and recent. I love that guy’s stuff and I’m also interested in digging into more of his later-days political comics.
I’ve recently grown fond of challenging texts, I feel like many people are too quick to dismiss work that they stand in ideological opposition to. I certainly have my limits but I’ve been more and more open minded to reading works that contain “problematic” viewpoints.
For reference, I’ve also been re-reading that old COMICS JOURNAL “Steve Ditko” issue which opened my eyes to Ditko for the first time.
I’ve stopped reading this current Ditko material for the same reason I stopped reading Robin Snyder’s The Comics, because he doesn’t just allow Ditko to do whatever he wants, he also allows Ditko to humiliate himself. The lack of human compassion, pro Big Business (at any cost) Randian rants is one thing, but Ditko is incapable of being objective about anything he does. In THE COMICS he started a series in which he wrote about each individual Spider-Man story he drew, giving background, history and commentary, but halfway through each essay he’d suddenly takea sharp turn into a Randian lecture which had nothing to do with Spider-Man. It was obvious that this lecturing was the real reason for the essays. He was so hell-bent on this that when he covered Spider-Man #3 he gave no background on the creation of Doctor Octopus, one of the signatue villains in the entire history of the series! When readers objected to this approch of Ditko’s, he stopped them altogether, complaining that he wasn’t “appreciated”. He’s also so intolerant of criticism that he indulges in paranoid rants about people he calls the “anti-Ditkos.” Two years before Blake Bell’s Ditko book was published, Ditko attacked it sight unseen in two different essays, and Robin Snyder let him do it. This is why a lot of people ignore Ditko’s current work, because they find the whole situation rather sad.
The material Ditko has produced since he left mainstream comics is far more interesting to me than old issues of Spider-Man, and this is despite the fact I don’t agree at all with many of Ditko’s opinions. Ditko has things to say, and he says them in an interesting way.
The problem for Ditko is he’s “trapped” by his close identification with Silver Age Marvel.
Many of the people who follow him are following because they like the old stuff, and yearn for more of it, which is sad.
And he inks his own stuff!
😉
The general neglect of Late Ditko is odd, especially given the stature his 60’s commercial stuff still holds. People always like to pull out the Randian card as an easy route to outright dismiss his current work or as a fetishizing method to chortle at these August works, with neither approach bearing much fruit. The proof of his continued talent is right there on the page. Drawn (the key word) in a near scribbly or mercury thin line his stories have a freshness about them, almost as if you were sitting on a subway and somebody handed you something they just drew. Look at the cover to ACT 5. It looks like a zine cover. It is a striking cover. Black and white. That menacing, gap-toothed head (straight out of Jan Brueghel) begging you to “compromise buy us”… This is exciting work. I find a parallel between Ditko and Godard: both revered for their early (60’s) more commercial success, lotsa head scratching for their current output. Both put out angry, funny, frightening, esoteric, minimal, maximal, grumpy, joyous work. Obviously Godard is better at managing his public’s expectations (he’s been playing the grand old master since he was a young man), but I find Ditko’s distance from the public eye almost a blessing… all were left with is the work at hand, which in my poor opinion stands shoulder to shoulder with any of the great comics art available these days (by the likes of Lynda Barry, Gary Panter, Jim Woodring, Ron Rege, Gabrielle Bell, ad infinitum)
My feeling is if Ditko didn’t have the Marvel sandbag on his back, and just showed up as a fresh cartooning face doing exactly the work he’s doing today, he’d be far more popular than he currently is.
Ditko is boxed in by two different sets of preconceptions, neither of which serves him.
This isn’t to say I think his work would reach a large audience, just a larger audience.
He might sell the same numbers as Johnny Ryan rather than a couple hundred copies per issue. Low 1000’s as opposed to low 100’s.
The Marvel thing is a huge millstone for him. The people who know him, for the most part aren’t happy with what he’s doing, and maybe some of the kind of people who buy books from Picture Box see him as a Marvel dinosaur.
That cover to “Act 6” is wonderful, and stylish.
LOVE those half-sentences…
They’re not so indecipherable. There’s a looser grain than we’re used to seeing in line art that might be off-putting on a flip-through. But Ditko compensates for the lack of fine detail with some really effective techniques. Heer didn’t run one of the best pages. I hope if any other bloggers choose to talk about this they help us to some more scans. The art doesn’t rely on black nearly much as most black & white comics, but instead involves some unusual, expressive effects with various textures. Lines are often interrupted as if shot through with light. In long shots and crowd scenes he uses a device of drawing some figures in simple outline with maybe one or two flecks of detail. With different textures and layers of depth it creates a bold, impressionistic effect. But what’s going on is always perfectly clear.
And it’s a confident display of pen technique… more so than ever now that he’s pulling back from the illusionistic displays of slicker artists and foregrounding the use of the tool. With the bone-white covers, it’s a pleasing, unified package.
Now, dialogue… the meaning… intention… hard to grasp… can be… i’m inquiring… yah! Sometimes. Ditko is trying all kinds of different things in these: action characters, straight-up drama, philosophical parables, satirical/editorial commentary on the fan community (like a rapper on player haters.) Personally his didactic, philosophical phase always gave me a headache (though I want to look at that work again.) These come across as being more curious and open-ended.
He’s still coming up with new super-hero characters. There are some I like for once. Miss Eerie is a nicely designed mystery/adventure character in the rare Fantomah tradition of ugly superheroines. The Outline is a kind of invisible helper/influencer who comments/reacts to the reader on people’s perplexing behavior.
Comparing this to late Kirby is tricky because SIlver Star and Captain Victory were strong works that only started to fray when the collaborators got shaky- the inking got amateurish and the colorists started trying some unfortunate experiments midway through. Some of his work after that for DC gets hard to look at- there’s evidence of declining ability there. Here, I think there’s an artist who’s in full control of his statement. If there’s loss in ability he’s compensating by finding new expressive devices.
They’re also effective statements in the pamphlet format. The short pieces wouldn’t work the same way if collected. So people who want to support the comic book pamphlet as a vehicle for personal expression might take an interest.
I’m really glad I have a stack of these. Some people commenting here seem to have made up their mind too early. Ditko has been producing them at an astonishing rate. It’s been four a year in 2009 and 2010. If you buy them from the website you can feel good about supporting the artist in an interesting creative phase.
Just to jump in here for a second: this is quite a wonderful discussion about Ditko and exactly what I hoped to spark. Thanks to everyone who is participating.
viva la non-sequitur dialogue! and becoming an angry old comics-drawing hermit….there’s worse fates. ditko’s position in the real world both comforts and terrifies me, somehow. he needs to sit down yoshiharu tsuge for a heart-to-heart on work ethic and the difficulties of ‘translation.’
Well put Jesse, with the exception that the dialogue is the antithesis of “non-sequitur.”
That said, I’ll mention again that while I like what Ditko is doing, I find his well explained ideas to be absurdly unrealistic, although I agree with them in an abstract fantasy world.
In the sense that Ditko personally has gone to the end of the rope to remain “true” to his ideals, I have deep respect for him, but his world isn’t one that many people are willing to inhabit.
yah, his words make a lot of horse sense, but many factors he’s lately allowing into play give thick, silly reading with malleable interpretation. but maybe i’m letting his loose line take me to places he didn’t intend. i’m sorry ditko! we’re all sorry………but also proud. sigh…..
To be sure, I think Ditko is living in a world that is his alone.
I’d say he’s full of crap, but it’s his world, and he’s stuck to it. so I give him that.
If he were running for political office I’d have a different opinion.
Because he’s an artist, I enjoy the clear expression.
If we were all like Ditko the Earth would be better off, mainly because there wouldn’t have been anyone born in the past 60 years.
For you Facebook people there’s a thread on Ditko-encounters over at Alan Kupperberg’s page (I think you have to be “friends” to read it, but some of you probably are: http://on.fb.me/e02Ewq). I’m telling you, Facebook is the place for gossip and anecdotes.
I didn’t know these were back in publication! I was following the Ditko “Packages” around the turn of the century, and they were absolutely fascinating. Not necessarily good comics, but pure, following a strict adherence to a philosophy. Heroes are heroes. The bad guys are low-lifes and despicable. A is A.
Also fascinating was Ditko’s drawing style. You could see the degeneration; the looser figure work, the proportions getting a bit wonky here and there. Kirby had the same problem in his later years, and responded by experimenting with wild layouts. Not so with Ditko, who keeps stubbornly to his grid. His sense of design and story telling was as strong as ever.
I’m curious to see if this new Ditko material shows the same approach. Based on the one page above, it does.
Ditko’s current work is fascinating. He has minimized his style in ways that are often jarrring, but always keeps me looking through the window. All of it is very personal, even though he never quite leaves the trappings of mainstream superhero comics. Despite this, his new comics bear more similarities to the alternative comics press than to anything from Marvel or DC, although he probably has little interest in either group.
I find it compelling and oddly gratifying that I can recieve the latest Ditko comic – not in the comic shop (or, to show my age, the newsstand or corner candy store) – but in my mailbox. The very artist who is so removed from the world of “celebrity creator” is linked with a small cadre of fans that continue to collect his ongoing efforts.
While I love his early work, and continue to absorb, study and write about many aspects of those strips he is most associated with, I also find something attractive about a gifted artist, at the age of 83, going about his business with a quiet, unrelenting determination.
These pubs (awesome as they are) aren’t “ignored” by the comics community. They’re underground publications, barely visible to the average consumer and rather hard to order. They’re just a step above mini-comics in terms of print runs, but unlike most mini-comics creators, Ditko doesn’t do MOCCA so no one sees or writes about them.
I’m with Van Hise on this: Ditko has earned the neglect he now enjoys. Auteurist criticism will find ways to appreciate his late output, of course, and, as ever, Ditko’s phenomenal abilities show through. But relatively few readers will continue reading a comic whose ideology and tone they profess to dislike just for the sake of aesthetic delectation. Content, too, matters, and Ditko’s thematic content is barren. The comparison to late Kirby, whose final works show a loss of technical control, is misleading because Kirby, for better or worse, always sought to the deliver the goods narratively and seldom resorted to the kind of ideological hectoring that forms the foundation of late Ditko.
We’re squarely in Outsider Artist appreciation mode here, and I don’t buy that. Ditko’s outsider status is the result of his own perverse choices, and his later work is notably lacking in generosity, humaneness, empathy, and warmth. Bah.
I would really recommend that you look at the Ditko Act series, which makes up the last six issues of these pamphlet comics. He shifted from what had been a mostly editorial mode reliant on full-page images and sprawling layouts into fiction and full dramatic storytelling with very tight multi-paneled pages. Many of the stories are crime or adventure drama that aren’t didactic. They can be cryptic, which is not a bad thing, but do deliver the narrative goods and have a more open-ended interest in the human players. There are also some moral/philosophical allegories that are closer to what you’d expect but are subordinated into a narrative framework that I think helps. Some of them resemble medieval allegories. I guess I would have to say with the usual chorus that I don’t agree with the specific points of his philosophy, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things I can connect with about them. I’m no expert, but these seem to me to be a definite change of pace from the “late” Ditko, which we’ve really been seeing for a while, that you describe.
I kept meaning to say that there is a pretty generous selection of this work available at Jim Hanley’s Universe in NYC. That’s where I got mine. I suggested buying them direct because somebody pointed out in a thread I started on TCJ that Ditko gets more money if you order them from Snyder. I see now that it’s not as simple as ordering them from a website, but that you have to contact Snyder directly.
Yeah, Alan is right: the most recent Dikto stuff (what we might call Really Late Period Ditko) is different than the Randian rants that people are more familiar with — both visually and as narratives. Also I’d add that I think to some degree Ditko and Kirby were engaged in a conversation/debate — there is at least on as-yet-unpublished Kirby piece which is an oblique critique of Rand — and so anyone interested in late period Kirby should also be interested in late period Ditko.