Heroes on buildings and differing looks/Fighting some tentacles/webbing some crooks/These are few of my favorite Spidey things (artists)...

Editor's Note:  I've really neglected Spider-Man in this blog, and I apologize for that.  I'm about to make up for it with one giant post!  Here we go!

Spider-Man has gone through a lot of artists over the decades, and while his costume basics have remained the same, some artists have taken it upon themselves to tweak the details.  For some people, the Todd McFarlane version of Spider-Man is their favorite.  Huge eyes, lots of weblines on the red parts, really exaggerated insect-like poses and fingers that resemble circumcised penises and feet made out of garden spades.  Some may be into the black costumed Spider-Man.  Or the Ultimate Spider-Man.  Or that guy who dresses like Spider-Man and climbs skyscrapers.  Whatever your taste, Spider-Man has been around long enough there's probably one for you, and that one is more than likely the one by whatever artist handled the character when you first got into him.

I'm pretty damned old, so my first Spidey crush was on what was probably a John Romita Spider-Man on a Mead Trapper-Keeper I had in elementary school back in the late 1970s.  Given the era, it could also have been a John Buscema or Gil Kane drawing.  Actually, it may not have been a Trapper Keeper at all, but a folder or even a notebook.  There's a chance it's the one with the cover to Amazing Spider-Man #135 (which means Romita), but I remember it more as a collage of cover images, which means it could be any combination of artists.

Whichever one it was, and however vague my memory of its specifics, what I definitely remember is how it imprinted in my brain a certain vision of what the ideal Spider-Man looked like.  After all, that Spidey matched up well with the Mego Spider-Man, the Spider-Man on the The Amazing Spider-Man TV series, the one on The Electric Company, the bodybuilder who dressed like Spider-Man at the mall we had our photos taken with and, most importantly, the Spider-Man still appearing in Marvel comics like The Amazing Spider-Man, Peter Parker the Spectacular Spider-Man, Spidey Super Stories and even in the Hostess Fruit Pie ads.  Spider-Man de rigueur for the 1970s.

Then I learned of Steve Ditko from a Dr. Strange story collection. That he was the original Spidey artist meant I had to give his rendition careful consideration in light of its preeminence in Spider-Man history.  Well, it didn't take long for Ditko's vision to take over my imagination.  Here's a typical Ditko Spider-Man.

Amazing Spider-Man #8 (January 1964) Art by Steve Ditko

This is from Amazing Spider-Man #8 (January 1964), touted on the cover as a "Special 'Tribute to Teen-Agers' Issue!!"  Since the character himself is a teen-ager, Ditko's Spider-Man is muscular in a youthful, long-distance-runner way, but isn't quite as classically proportioned as some later versions.  While this isn't particularly a good example of it, Ditko also tends to put heavier shadows in the costume's blue areas, which makes me think his intention is for that part to be navy blue rather than the royal blue the subsequent Spideys sport, or even black.  But given the way comic books treated colors back then, and with all the recoloring and touch-ups in the years since, it's hard to say.  What we can see is Ditko favors larger eyes with heavier black outlines, to emphasize the insect-like aspect of Spidey's mask.  He aso gives Spidey more underarm webbing than most artists-- and it runs from his belt all the way to his gloves!

Using the three-tier page format, Ditko chops action into small increments, which makes sequences more movie-like and easy to follow.  But he also uses mostly medium shots, which keeps the action at arm’s length.  It’s simple storytelling at its finest, and reduces events to something approaching the comic book version of documentary-like as opposed to the heightened or epic.  Spider-Man’s powers may be the one fantastic element in a world Ditko means to represent our own, but he’s hindered by the same things we deal with ourselves and so we identify with him even if we’re not right in his face masking ourselves as him.  With his funky take on facial expressions and body language—with his rough-hewn finishes few of Ditko’s people are blatantly gorgeous—this makes Spidey’s adventures just a bit larger-than-life rather than massive.  There’s our trod-upon hero (literally) coming out from under a door, in the confines of some functional corridor rather than high above a cityscape.

John Romita took over the title when Ditko left, but we'll look at him later because we're doing this in order of what I own.  So keeping that in mind, here's John Buscema's version, inked by Jim Mooney, from a few years later.  We have to acknowledge the influence of Romita's slight revision of the costume, but the rest is Buscema all the way.

Amazing Spider-Man #76 (September 1969) Art by John Buscema and Jim Mooney

Buscema’s Spider-Man (from an issue actually printed within my lifetime!) is muscled like some gorgeous Renaissance sculpture come to life, a full nine heroic heads tall.  Spider-Man, not Spider-Teen.  Buscema puts us inside the action and this time, the entire thing is made up of fantastic elements—other than the (fairly) realistic buildings, but even they’re skewed with deep perspective shots.  By varying panel size and shape, changing point-of-view and enlarging the images so he can fit only four on a page, Buscema creates a heightened dynamism that’s at odds with Ditko’s reductionism.  This isn’t to say one is right and one is wrong.  They may represent differing philosophies or thought processes on what constitutes heroism.  Or maybe Buscema just liked big takes.  Both are totally valid approaches, but I like how Ditko's Spider struggles a bit more.  On the other hand, Marvel tended to push Buscema’s powerful approach to storytelling on us through things like How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way.  This had a huge influence on my tastes as a teenager.

 

I don't see any armpit webbing on this page, but that may be because Jim Mooney forgot to ink it.  They include it on other pages, but it's subtler than Ditko's.

 

As much as I love both Ditko and Buscema, these days my preferred Spider-Man artist is his second penciller, none other than the aforementioned John Romita.  Let's take a look at his Spidey.

Amazing Spider-Man #88 (September 1970) Art by John Romita and Mooney

This is a clever sequence from the September 1970 story, "The Arms of Doctor Octopus!," where, true to its title, Spider-Man fights Doctor Octopus' arms.  Only the arms.  The good Doctor controls them from his prison cell.  Romita's Spider-Man is slightly slenderer than Buscema's, but they share body language.  Romita also brings us inside the action with this two-tier layout.  In the Buscema page, we have three Spideys roughly the same size with a smaller one for variety.  Romita gives us three Spidey sizes:  small, medium and large.  It's not quite as bombastic as Buscema's, but it's still bold.  Romita's characters tend towards the pretty, maybe due to his romance comics background.  I don't think anyone handled the soap opera stuff in Amazing Spider-Man better than Romita.  Slick Mooney finishes keep some surface consistency with line weights and the treatment of Spidey's blue areas.  I haven't seen the pencils for this page or the Buscema one, but I'm going to guess Mooney has a great deal to do with the near-identical eye and web pattern treatments.  The color choices here interest me, but I'm not sure how much is due to the original colorist and what might have been changed in the years since.  Anyway, it works.  Since Doc Ock's arms are gray and wouldn't have popped in the foreground otherwise, notice how the buildings on the Buscema page are gray, but the colorist here used a lot of yellow and yellow-orange.

Also, THOP!  FLAK!  BROK!  And the return of the armpit webbing.  It's finer than Ditko's and only reaches Spidey's elbows.

While I've stated my preference for Romita, I wouldn't care to meet the fan who finds fault in Gil Kane's interpretation.

Amazing Spider-Man #121 (June 1973) Art by Gil Kane and Tony Mortellaro

Here's our first extreme close-up!  It appears in Amazing Spider-Man #121 (June 1973), in a story you may have heard of called "The Night Gwen Stacy Died."  Not sure what happens in that one, and with an obscure title like that, your guess is as good as mine.

But I am pretty sure Ditko, Buscema and Romita all used close-ups before Kane.  But Kane, like Ditko, excelled at facial expressions.  Look at some of his cover work with those giant screaming heads.  Kane puts extreme close-ups to effective use throughout this issue.  Yeah, Peter Parker's face is hidden under a mask most of the time, but the idea's basically the same.  This is an important little moment Kane chooses to emphasize with a cutaway to Spider-Man holding his head because it "feels like a thermometer is about to burst--"  Spidey on this page isn't feeling well, and in his one high-flying moment of web-swinging, Kane gives him wonky body language, then confines him to wall-crawling and slipping in windows and crouching on newspapers.  I like the last panel especially, with the high angle from-behind shot giving us both Spider-Man and the pumpkin bomb he's reacting to all in one shot.  There's a nice use of a missing panel here, with Spidey on the windowsill cutting to Spidey in the room in such a way the omitted leap is implied.  It's almost animated.

No armpit webbing.

Ross Andru, who drew Amazing Spider-Man for five years (impressive!) gives us two superheroes for the price of one, but we're going to ignore Nova and his golden bullet-helmet.

Amazing Spider-Man #171 (August 1977) Art by Ross Andru and Mike Esposito

Once again, we have medium shots and three panels in a row with high angle views, the last with a larger foreground Spider-Man inducing vertigo as Nova drags him through the air.  And then an inset panel with the two of them so high they're tiny to the cops left behind on the ground.  Andru's Spider-Man retains the crouching body language of Kane's, but is noticeably chunkier than any of the ones we've looked at previously.  He's got the Ditko-style dark shadowing on his blue uniform areas (maybe inker Mike Esposito contributed that part), but again, none of the armpit webbing.  Did Marvel abandon that look, or was that an Andru flourish?  It's not as if the armpit webbing has any real function and it wouldn't have worked in the panel with the largest Spidey anyway-- it would have obscured his chest and been a challenging artistic exercise for Esposito, like when a penciller puts speedlines in front of an object.  How do you look through those?  Do they distort the background image?  Just how much of that should remain for clarity's sake, or for simplicity?

Andru came over from DC where he worked on war comics and Wonder Woman.  Can you see any of those elements informing his work here?  I know he did a classic take on Wonder Woman and he's giving us a clean, house-style Spider-Man on these pages.

Oh, and the yellow sky in the inset panel.  That was originally the work of Glynis Wein, who colored a pile of Marvel books.  It reminds me of Harvey Comics.  For some reason, colorists at Harvey seemed to love making the sky yellow.  Here it makes a good depth contrast for the figures heavy on the blue side in the foreground. In fact, whoever colored this seems to have put some extra effort into popping figures by contrasting cool colors on top of warm (although you still have to put up with Nova's yellow arms).  I'd love to see the original printed page to see how accurate Marvel has recreated Wein's colors here.

And there you have it.  Ditko, Buscema, Romita, Kane and Andru.  They're in my Spider-man Hall of Fame.  Yeah, I like the way Ron Frenz and John Romita, Jr. and even John Byrne-- to name three more-- draw the character, but when I think Spidey, I think Ditko, Buscema, Romita, Kane and Andre.  Their versions combine into my platonic ideal of Spider-Man.

The Amazing Re-colored Spider-Man!

Here's the book that started it all. Sort of. While Fantastic Four was the book that inaugurated the "Marvel Age" of comics, Spider-Man was the character that became the company's Mickey Mouse. As we all know, Spidey bowed in Amazing Fantasy #15 (August 1962), which had formerly been titled Amazing Adult Fantasy, which sounds like a shop that sells sex toys and latex lingerie. Weirdly, #15 wasn't merely the debut of Spider-Man; it was also the final issue. The Amazing Spider-Man came next and ran for decades until Marvel killed it in favor of whatever it is they're doing now. I don't know, I don't wanna know. I do know this...

Painted Amazing Fantasy, huh? What about the original line work?

Recolored, by gum!  Did they do the same for the interior art?

Yep!  This isn't the worst recoloring job I've seen, but it's a bit too intense and the computer-generated smoothness of the gradients and color modeling (to create an illusion of roundness and depth) doesn't mesh with Steve Ditko's rough hewn finishes.  Ditko's treatment of anatomy was expressionistic and unique.  He wasn't trying to recreate the world in any kind of photorealistic way.  It's better to just leave it alone rather than try to interpret it with a lot of extra tones where you can only conflict with it or else muddy it up.  We also don't really need some latter-day color artist's impression of an artistic treatment of foliage in the trees.  Big open areas were good enough for Ditko; they're good enough for you.

On the other hand, just because something was originally printed with 100% magenta/100% yellow* to make red, or 100% red (depending on the inks used-- I worked for a newspaper that ran cyan, magenta, yellow and blue in its four-color printing process, but some substitute true red in there, and you have to adjust accordingly) doesn't mean the reprint has to follow suit.  When Marvel's reprints do that, on glossy, slick paper, the end results are often hideous, from the early days when color palettes relied largely on primary and secondary colors and even on material from the mid- to late-1980s, when the company's colorists apparently had a love affair with magenta, purple and big untouched areas.

The old schoolers needed that intensity because the paper was low-grade newsprint.  The press workers don't seem to have put much effort into registering the plates, so you ended up with floating reds or yellows or blues and characters with apparent milk mustaches.  Or pages that looked as if they were intended to be read with 3D glasses.  The paper wasn't even white.  It was slightly gray, and it yellowed or browned pretty quickly in direct sunlight.  Marvel covers from the time tend to flake or chip, as well.  These comics weren't intended as museum pieces or to compete visually with National Geographic.  Steve Ditko probably had no idea people would still be reading this book more than fifty years after he drew it, much less on archival paper or digitally.  Who could have foreseen that?

Well, now that we're reading comics on computers we're free from all those limitations.  But companies with deep back catalogs need to balance the sweet nostalgia of the historical with the flaw-fixing capabilities of modern technology.  Use naturalistic colors if you want, but mostly just try not to compete with what better artists than yourself did.  If you can't match the artist's intent, at least try not to compete with it or obliterate it.  You can make it look brand new to a certain extent, but above all, color restoration has to preserve the clarity of the original artwork.  Don't cover it up with a lot of extraneous visual noise or someone else's interpretation of anatomy or form.

Especially avoid going nuts like with some of the Neal Adams reprints I've seen in recent years where digital painting on top of the original inks has just covered them or rendered almost all the values the same--  some of those went from gorgeous to absolute mud.

*My original 50/50 formulation would have made "pure" orange, not red.  That's what being out of the game for over a decade will do to ya...

Happy Birthday, Steve Ditko!

Steve Ditko is 84 years old today.

The first Ditko artwork I remember seeing came to me inside Dr. Strange Master of the Mystic Arts, one of those Marvel trade paperbacks featuring Marvel's "Sorcerer Supreme" in a selection of memorable tales from the 60s and early 70s.  This was sometime in 1979, or maybe 1980.  I greatly preferred the Barry Windsor Smith's story to any of the Ditko-drawn ones, but something about Ditko's rendering of Spider-Man felt right to me. I also enjoyed the way Ditko drew all the magic radiation coming out of Dr. Strange's hands whenever he cast a spell.  No one bought the book and it ended up on the clearance table.

As soon as I saved enough money (from picking up pine cones in the yard and digging in the sofa cushions), I snagged Dr. Strange for myself-- along with its companion volume Captain America Sentinel of Liberty-- and read it over and over again, usually while eating cornbread. So even now I associate Steve Ditko's artwork with the delicious taste of my father's country cornbread, baked in the oven and covered with butter.

Sometime that same year or the next, I bought Micronauts Annual #2 at a small grocery store across the highway from the beach down in Florida one year and felt appalled by the interior artwork, which was by Steve Ditko again!  I'd been hoping for more of the Pat Broderick/Armando Gil team or a return engagement from Michael Golden.

Ditko's work was not a love at first sight kind of thing for me.  Clearly, at age 12 I had a lot to learn about art.  As I grew older and supposedly more sophisticated in taste, I came to appreciate Ditko.  His run on the early issues of The Amazing Spider-Man, his punchy graytone work for Warren's horror titles-- Ditko's take on human form is as idiosyncratic as Jack Kirby's, but more down-to-earth, no matter how strange the setting.

Peter Parker is a skinny little worm, Flash Thompson beams with misplaced confidence and egotism, the Vulture is a gnarled old man.  The back alley thugs Spidey fights look muscular and slow-witted.  There's a nitty-gritty feel that adds weight and believability to their soap opera antics.  Ditko's Dr. Strange is slender but with a hauteur befitting his magical prowess.  He journeys through Escher-esque worlds and dimensions where he might find the lovely Clea reclining on a floating island made up of some kind of magical or quantum particles, or engage in a mystical duel with the Dread Dormammu!  And then it's home to Greenwich Village and a cup of hot cocoa whipped up by his old pal Wong.

Ditko made the Marvel Universe feel more like our own.  And he did it his way, and continues to do so.  It's difficult to understand someone like Steve Ditko.  He's like comics' answer to J.D. Salinger, although their worldviews are probably as different as the Crimson Bands of Cyttorak are from the Eye of Agamotto.