…and we’re back to Squirrel Girl. 
He did atlas the destructer I liked his art in that book.[
He also did an issue of MORLOCK 2001, inked by Berni Wrightson. Sounds like it has potential, right? But Wrightson got pissy about the page rate and turned in an effort so perfunctory, you’d mistake it for Frank Giacoia.
I’m glad Ditko was financially comfortable in the last decades of his life, and that he was basically able to do what he wanted, which was to write, draw, and publish his own work without interference from anyone else. For a cartoonist of his generation, that was almost an impossible dream.
I understand he got cranky and irritable at the endless stream of questions about Stan Lee and Spider-Man, and I can kinda get his reluctance at conducting interviews or appearing at awards ceremonies and conventions. But there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of fans of his work out there, and I don’t know if he quite understood how loved he was, and of the largely frustrated desire these fans had to simply let him know how much they loved his work. Maybe he did and it just wasn’t important to him. After all, he did the work, and beyond that he doesn’t really owe us anything.
It just strikes me as unfair that so many artists and writers of much lesser impact spend most of their time working the convention circuit, wringing every bit of fame and every possible autograph fee out of their fifteen minutes of fame, while an actual honest-to-Dormammu giant of the field is overlooked.
I mentioned Ditko’s passing to a friend of mine. His reply was that it’s God’s way of getting us ready for Stan Lee.
I honestly thought Ditko had passed years ago. My favorite character of his was The Question, who (in combination with Mr. A) was the inspiration for Rorschach, and the only comics I still own are Denny O’Neil’s run of the character and the paperback of The Immortal Iron Fist.
I grew up reading Ditko’s comics, and have o admit that I was surprised he was still around.
I loved his original Spider Man comics, although for some reason Ditko drew the backgrounds in a “flat” style – sometimes the machines or whatever in the background would be just silhouettes. There was surprisingly little depth in anything not essential. I KNOW that Ditko could draw 3D-looking objects, from his other work, so this was clearly a stylistic choice. He frequently did it in Dr. Starange and the Hulk:
https://www.allposters.com/-st/Steve-Ditko-Posters_c141851_.htm
But Ditko also worked for other companies. As noted, he did The Creeper and The Question for DC.
But he also drew some issues of Gorgo and other monster-based comics for Charlton Comics.
And he did work for the Warren magazines (Creepy, Eerie and the like), producing some spectacular supernatural horror – Ditko didn’t go for gore.
http://comicsbulletin.com/classic-comics-cavalcade-steve-ditko-warren-magazines/
Oh, man! He was definitely one of the comic book titans. Sad to see him go, but at least he had a long, productive life.
Huh. I never noticed it before, but: Peter Parker, absolutely; and Ditko’s other big Mentioned-In-All-Of-His-Obituaries character was Doctor Strange, who didn’t quite have a ‘heroic’ build; and the Question doesn’t wear a skintight outfit, because, like Mr. A, he’s a not-especially-muscular journalist in a business suit.
Ditko reportedly HATED it when Johnny Romita took over drawing Spiderman and made Parker a.) handsome and b.) muscular. It went against the basic character idea.
If Johnny Romita is JR[sup]2[/sup], he’s kind of the opposite of el Greco: his “normal” guys look like rugby runners, his “muscular” like rugby defenses and his “strong” like two football linebackers stuck together.
I had the good fortune when I was young to meet someone who had a huge horde of 50s comics, mostly westerns. (Don’t get me started on what she could have had in there if she had had good taste)
I got a lot of them and 50s western comics included horse comics, where the main character was a horse and there might not be any people in the story. In the Chalrton westerns there was a lot of Ditko. One of them was a 25 cent special with horses only, for 40 pages or so. You wouldn’t beieve how great it was. Usually when you are looking at Ditko you are reminded of his idiosyncratic human anatomy all the time.
There’s a story about a neighbor accidentally or “accidentally” opening some mail from Marvel to Ditko and finding a very large check. I believe this was supposed to be around the first Spiderman movie.