A few words about the late, great Steve Ditko

We at GhettoManga are heartbroken to hear about the passing of the mighty Steve Ditko, co-creator of Spider-man, Doctor Strange, the Question, the Creeper, Shade the Changing Man, and Hawk and Dove.


If I never heard of any religion, I would have learned all I needed to know about being a man from the "life" of Peter Parker.  So much of that was poured out straight from the unflinching, uncompromising personality of Steve Ditko.

Besides having a comic book character persona himself, Ditko's art was exploding with imagination and innovations still employed in the medium today.  I steal from him daily, and remind people of his greatness often!

Of course, Ditko's conflicts with fellow Marvel Comics architect Stan Lee are the stuff of legends.  I love and owe a debt of gratitude to them both, but we know Stan was prone to overreach...



Like the mighty Jack Kirby, Ditko is most associated with his work at Marvel, but he created many fabulous characters for DC.  The association with Marvel can be credited to Stan's interdisciplinary brilliance.



(which is not to mention that the characters he helped create at Charlton wound up being absorbed into DC, and being knocked off in Moore and Gibbons' transformational work, WATCHMEN)




Anyways, I often say "Real artists don't retire, they just quit working for other people", and Ditko lived it.  He made independent comics all the way up to his death.  




It is without hyperbole that I say that Steve Ditko's work has had a profound effect on me as a person, and as an artist.  Whatever his flaws, the world is better off from having had him here with us.





Samax Amen is a professional Content Developer, Illustrator and Cartoonist. He is the artist of many great comics you never heard of like Herman Heed, Champion of Children, The Brother and The World As You Know It. He even writes and draws his own comics, like Dare: The Adventures of Darius Davidson, Spontaneous, and Manchild when he gets around to it. Because making comics is hard and stuff, he started GhettoManga as a blog in 2006 and as a print magazine in 2008.



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