Jonathan Ross’ superb documentary
A couple of choice pieces of original art currently on Heritage Auctions.
I can’t say for sure if the Pro-White changes on Doctor Doom were made by Joe and/or someone at the Marvel office. In this collection of Joe’s brushes, in the middle of the container you’ll see one with dried Pro-White.
Ditko’s inking is a good contrast to Joe because he favored a pen for outlines, using a brush for emphasis and solid areas.
Chuck Jones hated Bob Clampett for claiming he created Bugs Bunny. Jack Kirby resented Stan Lee for claiming he created the Marvel Super Heroes. Fans often express their opinions in these matters as if they have a personal stake in them, regardless of whatever the full truth may actually be.
Steve Ditko’s position on the creation of Spider-Man is a particularly frustrating example. Ditko wanted credit that he felt was denied to him by Stan, which wasn’t legally Stan’s to give anyway. But Ditko also acknowledged that he had accepted payment under a work for hire arrangement. The rigid Ayn Rand logic that Ditko followed allows both of these viewpoints to be valid, leaving them irreconcilable.
With that in mind, as a follow-up to yesterday’s post, did Ub Iwerks hate Walt Disney for claiming he created Mickey Mouse, and did Walt resent his studio’s co-founder for leaving to become a competitor? Not likely from this photo, taken not long before Disney’s death.
As a sensitive 10-year-old kid, the first time I saw Jack Kirby’s art it looked, well, scary. As I liked to tell my dearly departed buddy Joe Sinnott, his “friendly faces” on Kirby’s art got me started buying the Fantastic Four.
My first comic book from the Marvel Comics Group was Daredevil #19. It was drawn by John Romita, who had previously worked for DC, drawing romance comics. In hindsight, this made the art less intimidating for me.
As a kid I thought of Stan Lee as a sort of Walt Disney, but saying that to anyone in Hollywood would have, at best, elicited a loud laugh. I say “at best” because that would have at least meant the person laughing knew who Stan Lee was. Much more likely would have been a puzzled expression and “who?” Forty years later, after Disney bought Marvel, that’s where Joe Sinnott’s retirement money came from. Joe would joke with me that he’d finally arrived as a Disney artist.
For most of my life, the question of who did what in creating the MCU (Marvel Comics Universe), as it’s now called, was a topic of heated debate only among comic book fans and the True Believers of the M.M.M.S. (Merry Marvel Marching Society). How times have changed. The New Yorker is weighing in with an historical analysis. I haven’t read it yet, so I don’t know what conclusions it reaches.
Wear a mask and maintain social distancing!
Not everybody will get the joke, but for those of us who do it’s very funny.
Note at the end of that 1967 cartoon, credit is given to “Jazzy Johnny Romita” as an art consultant, and not Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko. I can see where some of the animation was based on drawings by Romita, especially Aunt May. But the series also included direct photostats of some Ditko art. This was a technique that Grantray-Lawrence had used extensively in The Marvel Super-Heroes series a year earlier, which was in production when Ditko quit Marvel Comics.
I have an account with Heritage Auctions but, so far, haven’t acquired anything through them. Much, if not most, of the high-end original art for comic books, comic strips, and cartoons is handled by Heritage. The high-resolution scans provided by HA are valuable resources in studying the work of many noted artists.
There are only a few days remaining to bid on page #9 from Amazing Spider-Man #7. Right now it’s going for $54,000, including the “buyer’s premium.” This early example of Steve Ditko’s work on the series clearly shows where he inked with a pen, and where he instead used a brush.
An article in The Objectivist Standard has a remembrance of Steve Ditko by someone who seemed to have been inspired by Ditko’s comic book stories to look into the the ideas of Ayn Rand.
