Happy Birthday, Steve Ditko!

He’s one of the founding fathers of modern superhero comics—along with giants like Jack Kirby, John Buscema, and Wally Wood—but he’s also an extremely private, fairly reclusive man who’s been referred to as the J. D. Salinger of comics. Today, Steve Ditko, the art legend who brought us such characters as Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, the Question, the Creeper, and Shade the Changing Man, turns 88—and I once had the privilege of speaking with him!

Back in 1997, I was an editor for a company called Byron Preiss Multimedia (named after its owner), which had the rights to publish original novels and anthologies based on Marvel Comics’ massive stable of characters. Although for sales purposes, Stan “The Man” Lee and writer Peter David were listed as the editors, I was the behind-the-scenes guy responsible for “their” upcoming anthology, The Ultimate Hulk—a collection of all-new Hulk stories from various points in his history. My job was to select the stories, submit them to Lee and David for approval, and then do the actual editing. (Full disclosure: I wound up co-writing one of the tales, “Assault on Avengers Mansion,” with Richard C. White, currently the author of SWC’s Terra Incognito: A Guide to Building the Worlds of Your Imagination.)

One selection was “Transformations,” by Will Murray. Set in the Hulk’s early days, it involved a run-in with Magneto, the X-Men’s number one super-villain.

“You know who I’d like to have draw the illustration?” Murray asked. “Steve Ditko. He’s a friend of mine—do you want his phone number?”

Holy crap.

It wasn’t as though Ditko wasn’t familiar with the Hulk—he’d drawn some of his early appearances after Kirby had left the first 1960s series. Not exactly Ditko’s best work (just check out the weird feet on that Hulk  in that cover below), but having him in the anthology would be a major marketing draw for the book.

Of course I said yes to Murray, but with reservations. I knew that, at the time, Ditko and Marvel had been working together on various projects, so there’d be no problem in getting him approved by the licensing division, but Ditko also had a reputation of being touchy about drawing characters from his Marvel past—he’d flat-out refused to ever again draw Spider-Man and Doctor Strange after his initial falling out with Marvel decades earlier, and nothing would change his mind. (His stance has remained unchanged up to the present day, by the way.)

Murray was well aware of this—but this is the Hulk, he pointed out, not one of Ditko’s co-creations. Maybe Ditko would feel differently. “Anyway, it doesn’t hurt to ask. The worst he can say is no.”

So I called him. I explained the project and Murray’s involvement; pointed out that it was the Hulk, not Spider-Man or Doctor Strange, I was asking him to draw (he chuckled!); and that it was a single illustration.

“Well, it was very nice of you to call,” Ditko said, “but I’m afraid I’ll have to decline. I’m happy that Will suggested me, but I just don’t see any future in doing pin-ups.”

Well, that was disappointing. If you’ve ever seen his black and white art, you know it would have been amazing, and that the anthology would have been all the better for it. Still, I did get to speak with a living legend, so that more than made up for the disappointment.

(By the way, the more-than-capable replacement for Ditko was Neil Vokes, artist of the graphic novels The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Life, The Universe, and Everything, The Black Forest, and my own Lorelei: Sects and the City. Neil even gifted me with the finished illustration as thanks for including him in the book.)

Happy birthday, Mr. Ditko!