Making Marvel Mine: The Stan Lee/Steve Ditko Break Up

So, truth to tell, I’ve been trying to work my head around Essential Dr. Strange vol. 1 for about 4 months now, since I finished it back in January.  I read it in 3 months, a little long for this type of project, and now I’ve spent even longer trying to figure out how to articulate my impression of the book.  I’ll get into this more in my actual review for the book later next week (hopefully?), but the book is really 2 very separate books- “Steve Ditko’s Dr. Strange”, followed by “What the Hell do we do With This Weird Ass Character?’s Dr. Strange”. 

The split is jarring, more so that the break up with Ditko and Lee on Spider-Man, which is ironic, given Dr. Strange has a firm ending, as opposed to Spider-Man, which doesn’t even attempt to comment on the switch from the fascinating, scratchy work of Ditko to the softer, gorgeous Romita.  I haven’t talked much about it before (it won’t come up in Spidey until I review Essential vol. 2), but others have discussed it at length.

Officially, there is no explanation.  Fans have blamed it on a disagreement between Lee and Ditko over the identity of the Green Goblin.  There’s a certain logic to this, if all you read are Spider-Man comics (In Amazing Spider-Man #39, Romita’s first issue, the identity is revealed, after all), but it has little bearing on the larger narrative.  Reading the tail end of Ditko’s Dr. Strange work, you can feel it all reaching its climax.  Months before his final issue, Stan Lee wasn’t even writing the book, handing it off to Roy Thomas and Denny O’Neil.   Hell, the final Ditko story was literally titled “The End—At Last!”, the finality of the 17-part(!) Eternity Saga, Ditko’s swan song, his ultimate Dr. Strange story.

And then Steve Ditko left Marvel Comics.  He and Stan Lee hadn’t been on speaking terms for months.  Ditko went into reclusion, and has refused interviews for nearly 40 years.  Based on what people around them can tell, the Ditko/Lee split was as much about politics as it was artistic integrity.  Despite the weirdly LSD-Trip-like world Ditko had portrayed in Dr. Strange, as the 60’s progressed, Ditko found himself becoming more conservative, growing more and more to believe in Ayn Rand’s objectivism and the belief in the self before others.  Lee’s secular humanism, his impassioned support for the growing civil rights movement and liberalism became a problem between the two friends.

Basically, as the culture wars of the ‘60s began, the two became irreconcilable. 

People often compare the Lee-Ditko split to the Lee-Kirby split, but I don’t think the two are really comparable.  While both artists left Marvel due to artistic differences (and both eventually returned in a reduced role), Kirby’s main complaints were more due to legal rights issues.  Kirby was willing to play ball, to a point, because he was a team player- which is quite apparent when you look at his post Marvel work for DC (“Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen”, anyone?).  Ditko wasn’t a team player.  When he left Marvel, Stan Lee didn’t even know why (Ditko himself has said that Stan Lee deliberately didn’t ask, for the record).  He eventually showed active disdain for his Marvel work, destroying originals of Spider-Man out of contempt.  As time went on, he became an artistic recluse.  I’m not trying to assign blame here, and I can only speculate on events that happened well before I was born,  but the more I learn about this, the more I feel like Ditko has only himself to blame for becoming a pariah.

So what does all this have to do with me taking forever to talk about a comic book?  Because all of this is going on in the background for the first half of the book, followed by the aftermath of “Shit, well, now what?”  Dr. Strange was more Ditko than Spider-Man was, mostly because Spider-Man was more popular, and, I think, Stan Lee liked the character more.  I think both Stan and Steve felt empathy for the character, which gelled at first, until their differing philosophies pulled the two of them apart.  Ditko wanted Spider-Man to become a conservative character, crying out against the college hoodlums protesting around the country.  Lee wanted him right there, protesting with them.  Ultimately, the two could never had stayed a team, and Lee’s vision of the character won out (which, I wholeheartedly admit, is my preferred version).

We see what Spider-Man without Ditko is like, because Romita steps in, and the book stays consistent in terms of tone; the story just goes on.  But because Ditko had more creative freedom on Dr. Strange, he finished his story, and everything he’d wanted to say, he’d said.  What did he have to say?  Well…. I’d rather get into that with the actual Dr. Strange review.  But to say that Steve Ditko is a complicated individual is more than an understatement.  In any case, Post-Ditko Dr. Strange becomes a very different animal.

Again, I’d rather focus on story when actually talking about the story, not the behind the scenes, but I will say this: Unquestionably, Steve Ditko is a brilliant artist, and just as responsible for the look of cosmic weirdness in Marvel Comics as Jack Kirby.  I hate it when Spider-fans get into pissing matches of “Ditko vs. Romita” because no matter what, it just boils down to personal taste*.  Both are brilliant, but incredibly different artists.  There’s no such debate with Dr. Strange fans (there are also far fewer of them), Ditko is the definitive Dr. Strange artist.  And in a way, that immediate assessment is a disservice to the artists on Dr. Strange after him, like Marie Severin, Dan Adkins, and Bill Everett.  They had to follow the footsteps of an artistic giant, and often showed similar- but different- levels of genius. 

With Ditko gone, and no clear vision as to where to go, the people working on Doctor Strange afterward did what they could with a property no one but Ditko really understood.  And rather than try to rehash everything before them, they did it the same thing that Ditko had- they made him their own.

Anyway.  I just wanted to get all of this out of the way, because when I talk about Dr. Strange, I want to actually talk about Dr. Strange.  This behind the scenes stuff is a little off putting when I just want to see dudes in capes punch other dudes.  Doctor Strange is weird enough without all this bullcrap baggage on top of it.  Next Week! (maybe?)  Making Marvel Mine on Dr. Strange.  And stuff.  Yeah.

  

*= ….*sigh* If I have to do this, I’m afraid I’m on Team Romita.  Everything’s just so pretty!  Alright, you can now stone me to death for committing Spider-Man Heresy.