Poll of the Day > co creator of Spiderman has died

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/steve-ditko-dead-spider-man-creator-was-90-1125489

Steve Ditko helped Stan Lee create Spiderman, but never became as famous as Lee is

Zikten posted...

Steve Ditko helped Stan Lee create Spiderman, but never became as famous as Lee is

Mostly because he never wanted to.


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Another victim for Stan Lee's immortality machine.
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I can only read his name in Linkara's voice
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Pretty sure Peters parents died a long time ago
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GanonsSpirit posted...

Another victim for Stan Lee's immortality machine.

Excelsior!
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FrozenBananas posted...

GanonsSpirit posted...

Another victim for Stan Lee's immortality machine.

Excelsior!

Maybe Stan Lee is a Lakshmi and survives by sucking the talent out of others
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Mostly because he never wanted to.

He could have made a lot more money if he did.
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Zikten posted...

Steve Ditko helped Stan Lee create Spiderman, but never became as famous as Lee is

One of my all-time Stan Lee quotes goes along the lines of, "I'll take any credit that isn't nailed down." >_>

Realistically, though, Stan Lee was involved in a lot more than Ditko so the idea that the two could have ever stood on equal footing is absurd.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Zikten posted...

Steve Ditko helped Stan Lee create Spiderman, but never became as famous as Lee is

Mostly because he never wanted to.

tbh, the man was a hermit.

Revelation34 posted...

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Mostly because he never wanted to.

He could have made a lot more money if he did.

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Revelation34 posted...

He could have made a lot more money if he did.

Yes, but he didn't actually care about that.

He was an Objectivist. His ideology was basically that when you take a contract for work, you do the work. Once you get paid, the contract is over. You don't get to claim future rights on work-for-hire jobs, because part of the original contract was that the person you were working for would own the work. Over the years, he actually threw a lot of shit at artists or writers who pushed for creators' rights and royalty agreements in comics, because he saw them as parasites.

There are stories about people who visited him at his home, and noticed that he had original pages and panels from early Spider-Man comics that Marvel had returned to him, and he used them as cutting boards because he considered them useless garbage. When people told him he should sell them, he wouldn't. Supposedly, he was annoyed that Marvel gave them back to him in the first place, because as far as he was concerned, they owned them and they were no longer his responsibility.

For all that people tend to shit on Objectivists, he was one of the ones who really walked the walk as well as talked the talk, and didn't just use it as an excuse to be selfish or self-centered. Even in cases where his attitude was actively detrimental to himself.



Zeus posted...

Realistically, though, Stan Lee was involved in a lot more than Ditko so the idea that the two could have ever stood on equal footing is absurd.

The problem is, because of how the Marvel Method worked, an artist could do 90% of the creation, design, working out of backstory, plot, and characters for a comic, and then Stan Lee would come in, write in dialogue that matched what the artist had already drawn, and get 50% of the credit. So it's hard to say how much Stan Lee really WAS involved in.

Kirby always hugely downplayed Stan's role, and the counterbalance of Marvel always playing up Stan's role was mostly predicated by the fact that he was willing to play ball with the company while Kirby was suing over creator rights. So it's hard to say where the real division of responsibility lies - and whether Stan is a talentless hack leeching off the success of others, Kirby is a bitter old fuck shitting on someone who was absolutely necessary for his success, or somewhere in the middle.

Though it is worth noting that, as much as Ditko didn't like Kirby, he wasn't overly fond of Stan either, so it's hard to use him as a reference for how much input Stan actually had. And for a lot of early Spider-Man, Ditko apparently DID do most of the work. Soooo...

The other argument that a lot of people use is that Kirby had already created Captain America long before meeting Stan, and that artists like Kirby and Ditko had success creating characters without Stan, but Stan never really had success creating characters without a strong supporting artist. Which is hard to argue, but it's kind of true that a lot of Kirby and Ditko's work without Stan was never as popular as their work WITH Stan (even Captain America benefited more from his appearances in the 60s than his initial 40s run).

Personally, I think Stan was crucial to Marvel's success, not just as a writer, but as a booster and a personality that played to fans in a marketing sense. Attempts to downplay his role are just as unfair as attempts to marginalize Kirby. And Stan himself has always had nothing but praise for Kirby. It's not a Bob Kane/Bill Finger scenario, where the more popular person is absolutely a piece of shit who spent decades actively covering up the involvement of the other, far more creative half of the pair.


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Lokarin posted...

FrozenBananas posted...

GanonsSpirit posted...

Another victim for Stan Lee's immortality machine.

Excelsior!

Maybe Stan Lee is a Lakshmi and survives by sucking the talent out of others

I thought that's what rock groupies did.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Yes, but he didn't actually care about that.

He was an Objectivist. His ideology was basically that when you take a contract for work, you do the work. Once you get paid, the contract is over. You don't get to claim future rights on work-for-hire jobs, because part of the original contract was that the person you were working for would own the work. Over the years, he actually threw a lot of shit at artists or writers who pushed for creators' rights and royalty agreements in comics, because he saw them as parasites.

There are stories about people who visited him at his home, and noticed that he had original pages and panels from early Spider-Man comics that Marvel had returned to him, and he used them as cutting boards because he considered them useless garbage. When people told him he should sell them, he wouldn't. Supposedly, he was annoyed that Marvel gave them back to him in the first place, because as far as he was concerned, they owned them and they were no longer his responsibility.

For all that people tend to shit on Objectivists, he was one of the ones who really walked the walk as well as talked the talk, and didn't just use it as an excuse to be selfish or self-centered. Even in cases where his attitude was actively detrimental to himself.

That's just really stupid then. The original creator is always far more important than the company.
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Revelation34 posted...

That's just really stupid then. The original creator is always far more important than the company.

Plenty of cultures throughout the world and human history in general would argue that the individual isn't important at all when compared to institutions or society as a whole. We only tend to believe that individual rights matter as much as they do because that's a strong tenet in the Western culture we were raised in.

That's part of why China doesn't give a single shit about copyright laws for the most part, and why bootlegging is so endemic in Asia in general. As far as they're concerned, individuals don't necessarily deserve to monopolize or profit from their ideas, or otherwise place their own needs over those of the collective.

It's all subjective. The entire concept of rights and obligations is mostly a social construct, and social constructs change over time and across different social groupings.

If Ditko wanted to believe that creators operating under work-for-hire contracts should have no further right to their work, and was willing to personally sacrifice in his own life to support his beliefs, more power to him. If nothing else, he's got more integrity than 90% of the rest of the people on either side of the argument, who don't give a shit about ideology or morality as much as they do making sure THEY get paid.





...and that's not even getting into arguments like whether or not copyright laws in general are inherently stifling to creativity, as some people would argue, because they allow individuals or companies to monopolize intellectual property that other people could be doing far more interesting things with. Which is when we get into discussions of things like public domain characters or Disney constantly getting the US to re-write copyright law so they never, ever lose the rights to Mickey Mouse or other characters (and then do things like sue a pre-school that dares to draw Disney characters on a wall without legal permission).


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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Zeus posted...

Realistically, though, Stan Lee was involved in a lot more than Ditko so the idea that the two could have ever stood on equal footing is absurd.

The problem is, because of how the Marvel Method worked, an artist could do 90% of the creation, design, working out of backstory, plot, and characters for a comic, and then Stan Lee would come in, write in dialogue that matched what the artist had already drawn, and get 50% of the credit. So it's hard to say how much Stan Lee really WAS involved in.

I can assure that the the "thee"s and "thou"s that Stan added to the comics were more important than any other artist or writer's contribution!

Otherwise, as Stan himself argued, he came up with the concepts for the characters and ultimately artist contributions were interchangeable because if one thing didn't work, he'd do something else. (Which isn't necessarily a strong argument for personal involvement but speaks to the overall trend -- he involved himself in a lot of stuff, some would become successful, a lot of it wouldn't, and if one thing didn't hit he'd just go with something else.)

ParanoidObsessive posted...

The other argument that a lot of people use is that Kirby had already created Captain America long before meeting Stan, and that artists like Kirby and Ditko had success creating characters without Stan, but Stan never really had success creating characters without a strong supporting artist.

Stan wasn't an artist himself, right? And it seems like, where credit is concerned, that people tend to favor the person who first drew the character when it comes to creator arguments rather than the person who just came up with the concept then who decided on things like the final design, which is also essential for building a character. (And, of course, essential for ensuring that a character will be a hit.)
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