Who is Steve Ditko? with Mark Ditko & Alex Grand

Read Alex Grand’s Understanding Superhero Comic Books published by McFarland Books in 2023 with Foreword by Jim Steranko with editorial reviews by comic book professionals, Jim Shooter, Tom Palmer, Tom DeFalco, Danny Fingeroth, Alex Segura, Carl Potts, Guy Dorian Sr. and more.

In the meantime enjoy the show:

A sit-down chat between Alex Grand and Steve Ditko’s nephew, Mark Ditko on various key aspects of the Spider-Man co-creators life, characters, and motivations in this career-spanning interview. Also rare photos, and 2 prior unseen photos.

Stephen J. Ditko was an American comics artist and writer best known as the artist and co-creator, with Stan Lee, of the Marvel Comics superheroes Spider-Man and Doctor Strange. Steve Ditko studied under Batman artist Jerry Robinson at the Cartoonist and Illustrators School in New York City.

Transcript published in Roy Thomas’ Alter Ego Collectors Items’ Classics:

 

🎬 Edited & Produced by Alex Grand. Thumbnail Artwork, CBH Podcast ©2021 Comic Book Historians

Images used in artwork ©Their Respective Copyright holders
“Who is Steve Ditko?” with Mark Ditko & Alex Grand

📜 Video chapters
00:00 Introduction
01:03 Bottleworks Ditko Exhibit 2021
04:02 Mark Ditko’s relation to Steve Ditko
05:04 When Steve Ditko visited his family
05:58 How Steve Ditko traveled during visits
06:32 Steve Ditko’s methodology in creating Spider-Man
08:50 Steve Ditko’s secret identity
10:00 Konga
11:53 Why was Steve Ditko secretive?
13:02 Mysterious Travelers by Zack Kruse
15:17 Was Steve Ditko religious?
15:48 Steve Ditko’s childhood comics
17:18 Lenny Schwartz Ditko play
18:01 Is Peter Parker actually Steve Ditko?
20:06 How did Steve Ditko like Joe Gill at Charlton?
22:12 Why Steve Ditko left Marvel & Stayed at Charlton?
22:54 Steve Ditko’s flare-ups of Tuberculosis
24:34 Steve Ditko’s discovery of Ayn Rand & De Bono
30:10 Did Ayn Rand turn Steve Ditko into a hermit?
32:05 Steve Ditko looked to Aristotle
32:38 Dispelling myths
34:10 Did Steve Ditko vote?
35:32 Steve Ditko’s favorite music
37:04 Did Steve Ditko date?
37:30 Jack Kirby’s question about Steve Ditko
39:00 Steve Ditko’s crush on Flo Steinberg
40:22 Steve Ditko’s relationship Eric Stanton
43:30 Eric Stanton is Peter Parker?
44:32 Did Steve Ditko ever mention Stan Lee?
46:52 Safest Place
47:20 Steve Ditko’s relationship with Jack Kirby
48:22 Blue Beetle, the Question & Mr. A
48:58 Steve Ditko’s direction for Spider-Man
51:47 Steve Ditko’s faceless characters, Chameleon
53:12 The Question is or isn’t Steve Ditko?
53:33 Steve Ditko’s problem with modern comics
55:20 Steve Ditko’s sense of right & wrong
57:09 Steve Ditko’s friendship with Wally Wood
59:05 Creeper, Dr. Strange & Shade the Changing Man
01:00:50 Character naming of Question & Mr. A
01:03:21 Did Steve Ditko work outside comics?
01:04:49 Steve Ditko’s time with Jim Shooter
01:09:14 Death of Kirby and Wood
01:09:30 Steve Ditko does not use Internet
01:11:21 The World of Steve Ditko by Blake Bell and Steve Ditko
01:17:21 Bleeding Cool criticized the Ditko’s
01:19:11 Cleaning out Steve Ditko’s studio
01:24:36 Steve Ditko’s legal relationship with Marvel/Royalties
01:27:03 Kevin Feige on Steve Ditko
01:28:33 Robin Snyder
01:31:45 Ditko’s estate upcoming book on Steve Ditko
01:34:21 How many photos of Steve Ditko exist?

#SteveDitko #MarkDitko #MarvelComics #ComicBookHistorians #SpiderMan #DoctorStrange #CharltonComics #ComicHistorian #CBHInterviews #CBHPodcast #CBH

 Alex Grand:

Welcome back to comic book historians, I’m Alex Grand. Today we have a very special guest, Mr. Mark Ditko [born 1959], nephew of the great Steve Ditko. Mark, thank you so much for joining us today.

Mark Ditko:

Good to be here. Finally.

Alex Grand:

Nice. So now let’s kind of start off with, first, tell us your exact relation to Steve Ditko, your dad is his brother, right? Basically that’s the relation.

Mark Ditko:

Yep, yep. Steve Ditko is also my godfather. So I’ve known him since I was born pretty much, obviously he was around as I, when I was a kid, but then he and I kind of connected up after I moved out of Johnstown, in the early 90s, ’90, ’91. We kind of connected up through written correspondence. I mean, I would go back every now and then and see him over Christmas or something when I was visiting. But we pretty much started a written correspondence around ’90, ’91 and then that continued for kind of the decades beyond that.

Alex Grand:

So then it sounds like when you were a kid, he would come and visit on holidays. And then as you grew up and you moved out of Johnstown, your connections were through letters. And then if in person it’d be back at Jonestown again on a holiday or something like that.

Mark Ditko:

Yeah, exactly. Because he would, when I was a kid he always popped in at least two or three times a year. He was always there. I remember him being around obviously Christmas and then he would come in the summer sometimes, because we would have family, we always have a family barbecue and get together in the summer. And he was always there flipping burgers or something. So always saw him around then. I don’t know when he stopped doing the kind of the summers or the multi visits, but he always maintained his kind of holiday Christmas visit. So sometimes I would go back over Christmas and I would, I’d see him then. But early on as a kid he was always around multiple times a year. You know what? I didn’t even really realize that he didn’t live there because as a kid, he was around, we would have family get together as he’d be around. He was just there.

Alex Grand:

So what, he was driving to Johnstown from New York then?

Mark Ditko:

No, he would take the train in.

Alex Grand:

The train. There you go.

Mark Ditko:

Yeah. He was always on the train. In fact, he wrote to me one time that he was on one of his train visits, on the way back, he wrote multiple, like the issues of a certain character he was working on. Because he’d work, he’d work on the train.

Alex Grand:

First, so the audience knows you’re an engineer by trade, you’ve written books on it, you’ve managed big projects, from what I’ve understood and the way I’ve analyzed Steve Ditko’s work, he approached everything analytically. Like for example, he would see the Jack Kirby version of what could be Spider-Man and then Stan kind of scrapped that and said, “Steve, you come up with something.” And then he analyzed what would be a Spider-Man better than anyone in history ever has before or since with webs coming out of the wrist and the weird body movements, the web costume which is the best costume I think in history, it seemed to me like he analyzed what would make a proper Spider-Man and then hashed it out. And if that’s correct, would you say that you share a similar analysis of the environment around you?

Mark Ditko:

You know what, you mentioned it earlier is really, to me it’s just analytical thinking, you’re not getting lost in some kind of emotional something you’re creating a fantasy. I actually thought about what you just said when he was creating Dr. Strange, and he was creating this alternate universe, what would it be like now if you… When we went out to clean out his studio and his apartment, I ended up taking his library and you look at what he read or what he studied and the magazines that he had subscriptions to, he was taking all of that into account when he was creating something. And yeah, I would say, Okay, art, we know art is a… I don’t want to say subjective type thing, or I guess I would say, let me rephrase that because really art is subjective from the observer, but from the creator’s perspective, I think the creator does have a thought process that obviously goes into, especially panel layouts and things like that and then the imagery. So yeah, he was very, I’ll say scientific. I mean as a kid, I know my dad told me that in the barn, he had his own little place that he had built that was kind of the secret room where he had all of his collections and stole collections and chemistry sets.

Alex Grand:

Oh cool.

Mark Ditko:

And he was a, I would say a mad scientist of sort, so yeah.

Alex Grand:

Yeah.

Mark Ditko:

Yeah. He needed that just in his thought process.

Alex Grand:

So when did you find out that he was the same Steve Ditko that co-created Spider-Man?

Mark Ditko:

That probably really wasn’t until I was in my, I would say maybe mid teens, because as a kid, he was just another one of my uncles, my fun uncle that we would goof around with and he would play, he would goof around and wrestle with us. And as I got older, he taught us how to throw knives and hatchets and just playful type stuff. But early on, as a kid, there were always comics around the house. And at some point I probably need to ask my dad, “Where did those come from?” Because, they just appeared. I’m a kid I’m four years old, I don’t know where this stuff just appears from. I don’t know if my uncle was sending it to the family. I’d have to not believe that my dad was buying it. I think my uncle probably was sending it to everyone, but they just appeared around the house. So I started reading Konga, that was kind of my earliest recollection of reading comics.

Alex Grand:

And what year would you say you started reading comics?

Mark Ditko:

I probably remember Konga around the ’63, ’64…

Alex Grand:

Oh, okay.

Mark Ditko:

… era, maybe ’65 or so.

Alex Grand:

Right.

Mark Ditko:

So reading Konga and I’m loving Konga as a kid, it was just a great storyline. It was very upbeat, it was fun and playful, but then my uncle would come in, I remember some Christmases, my older brother who was two years older than me, he would draw, he was always sketching and drawing stuff. Although we all, we all drew, but he was older. He took that first leap into there and I remember that he would show my uncle and my uncle would give them pointers. He would put a piece of tracing paper over it and kind of comment on it and stuff. But when I found out that he could draw, I would say, “Uncle Steve, can you draw me a gorilla?”

Mark Ditko:

Because I love Konga. So I’d say, “Hey, can you draw me a gorilla?” And he’d just whip out this gorilla and I’d be like, “Man…” It was so fun so I was like, “Man, can you draw.” I had no idea he was drawing the comics that I was reading. I had no idea. So it really wasn’t until, I don’t know when, I don’t know when the cat got out of the bag, but it wasn’t something that the family talked about. My dad didn’t talk about it, my aunts and uncles didn’t talk about it. When my uncle came, when uncle Steve came home, it wasn’t like, “Oh, here’s what I’m working on now look at me.” It wasn’t like that. So it probably wasn’t until I was maybe 14, 15 or something that I realized what he had created.

Alex Grand:

Yeah. That’s great. What a cool revelation too, huh?

Mark Ditko:

Yeah, I know. It was just like, “Whoa, uncle Steve you rock, man.”

Alex Grand:

Why do you think he wasn’t telling everybody that… Was he just keeping stuff close to the chest? Is that something in the mind of his generation and being a Ditko of that generation that they just didn’t verbalize their achievements so much? What was the source of his, let’s say aversion to soaking in the limelight on his achievement with Spider-Man and Dr. Strange.

Mark Ditko:

No, I think you kind of hit on it sort of multiple layers is, and this is just my opinion at some point because I don’t know why he did what he did really other than, I know what we wrote together. I know what we talked about. And a lot of this stuff I kind of have to extrapolate from the family because Hey, the kids are similar. My dad is obviously has similar characteristic as my uncle and my aunts and their, and even my grandparents, his parents, they were just, I want to say with that kind of immigrant mentality, For second generation Americans, they… In fact, Zack Kruse, his book Mysterious Travelers, he mentions a book in there and I talk about it all the time.

Mark Ditko:

I wish I could remember the name of it from Bread with Butter or with Bread and Butter, the history of the immigrants in Johnstown. And it starts, it talks about their attitudes and how education was not the highest priority. It was a priority, but doing something, having a good work ethic and buckling down and doing a job was actually the highest priority. Because look, you’re an immigrant, you got to get paid. You just got to have that work ethic. So he had that, my parents have that, my aunts and uncles have all of them. I saw that in my family, which was really probably something that was an, just a general immigrant mentality. But I’d say not everybody could be successful because they have to have a certain talent. They have to have a certain intelligence and mindset.

Mark Ditko:

And you know what, I’ll just say it, my grandfather on my mom’s side, there was grandma and grandpap, on my dad’s side it was poppy and bubba. So, that was how we kind of referred to them. So they were, I’ll say they were geniuses, learning the language themselves, learning their own skillset, become a master carpenter by himself and just learning and learning. They were sponges and they had the intelligence to do that. So I think that that work ethic is what I saw in my uncle, that he had that capability to just put his mind to something that was a real passion and just commit and be able to really be successful.

Alex Grand:

So I know that there are basically two layers to every question about Steve Ditko to you, right? There is what you learned from him about that particular topic. And then there’s also then the subjective of your impression of why something could be.

Mark Ditko:

Yeah.

Alex Grand:

And I know that interplay exists anytime anyone asks you about your uncle, but I wanted to ask you a couple of things. Was he religious or atheist or agnostic?

Mark Ditko:

No. Well, I would say that he, of course he was born, we’re in a religion, we’re Byzantine Catholic.

Alex Grand:

Yeah.

Mark Ditko:

So we were born in that. But no, that wasn’t something that he really followed. He believed that this was one lifetime and when it was done, it was done and make the best of it.

Alex Grand:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mark Ditko:

So that was kind of his attitude.

Alex Grand:

Did he ever mention any childhood comics influences, it said that he loved Jerry Robinson’s Batman.

Mark Ditko:

Yup.

Alex Grand:

Will Eisner’s Spirit. And then he also, Mort Meskin had made an impression on him when he worked under him at the Simon-Kirby Studio. Did those discussions ever come up about his childhood comic collection and as a budding comic artist ever?

Mark Ditko:

Well, the only thing that I have are kind of like the stories that my dad would have told me, how he was, well, his dad, poppy was just a fanatical comic industry nut. He loved reading comics. My dad said his vacations, when poppy would take a vacation, his vacation was getting a collection of comics sitting down in his favorite chair and reading comics.

Alex Grand:

Yeah. So that’s right. There’s a third route of information here is what your dad also told you too. So that’s great. Okay. So, basically then Steve Ditko’s dad was a big comic person. Was it like comic strips or comic books or what was it?

Mark Ditko:

Everything. Yeah. It was comic books. Otherwise he was reading the strips out of the paper, so yeah. Patrick or Steve was always getting up, getting the latest comics and getting the paper so that their dad could read those comics. He just, he loved them. Somebody made a comment about, in fact, I think it was, oh, I know what it was. I read it in Lenny Schwartz’s Ditko play that he put together. He sent me the play, the whole script of that before they did it the first time. So I like read through it and it was so painful because it wasn’t truth, it wasn’t accurate. He’s, and I didn’t get it, just like apologize to Lenny. I gave him so much crap for, say, “Oh, you can’t say this. You can’t say that that’s not true.” Because he’s putting my uncle into the role of Peter Parker, because it’s a play, and once it clicked, I was like, “Oh, this is actually for entertainment.” It was like, “Okay, I get it.”

Alex Grand:

People make that comparison to him and Peter Parker all the time. But the Ditko family does not feel that that’s accurate, right?

Mark Ditko:

I don’t know what anybody else really thinks in the family, I have my own opinion and to me, Peter Parker was just an amalgam of that attitude because just to kind of take that little tangent there on that comment, I was looking at some books, I think Craig Yoe, there was one book in Craig Yoe and that he did and then Ditko unleashed, there were some pictures of supposedly Steve Ditko in the ’44 yearbook, he graduated in ’45, but there were these pictures that were supposed to be a ’44 yearbook of him.

Mark Ditko:

And I posted it on Facebook and I did some research like, “No, that’s actually not him.” And that was so controversial. But what I did is I went through everybody in the ’45 yearbook where he was in there and I found like it must’ve been eight or 10 people that all look like Peter Parker, they all look the same. They all had to slick back here, they had around glasses, they were all of that same imagery. So I have this strip and something I should post is like, in fact, I think I did on Facebook, which one is Peter Parker, they all look like him.

Alex Grand:

Yeah. So he’s an amalgam of that era, basically.

Mark Ditko:

Yeah, exactly. He was just having a Walt Wood type of figure there, like you said, he had a task and he’s looking at all the imagery and all the kind of the creativeness is how would a geeky person really look and round glasses and skinny and scrawny and how would he be perceived? He may have pulled elements from his own past, but he wasn’t saying, “Oh, I’m writing myself into this character.” No, he was just creating a brand new character, Peter Parker.

Alex Grand:

Yeah, that’s cool. And I love that you’re shedding light on stuff like this. So then did any discussions ever come up about his time at Charlton, Joe Gill? Any of those people, has any of that ever come up?

Mark Ditko:

Oh, yeah. What little fragments. In fact, I really need to periodically go and re-read through all of our letters because that’s one thing that he really, first of all, he loved working with Joe Gill, he really did. And he loved working at Charlton. And I think that’s been noted many times, but I also noticed that in writing to him, because it was about the level of freedom that he had, he loved that ability to have sort of uninhibited creative outlet that he was able to do whatever he felt was right and he didn’t feel encumbered by.

Mark Ditko:

He wrote to me about how sometimes editors just would just drive him crazy and colorists would get it wrong. He would do color samples of different things and they wouldn’t use them. I mean, he was a big proponent of the division of labor. He did his role, he let the others do their role and he was strong enough as an individual to just go, “okay, look, this is just the mechanism, the machinery, the way it works.” Do I agree with it? No, but you know what, I’m moving on. I’m moving on. I’m going through then, I got more work to do. So he would just sort of let that go, but didn’t necessarily agree with it.

Alex Grand:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). What aspect of Joe Gill do you think he liked? Was it that Joe Gail was just a professional and he pumped out a script and that was it. What do you think that was?

Mark Ditko:

I can’t really come up with anything specific other than I think just naturally what my uncle liked, was somebody who he could really communicate with.

Alex Grand:

Oh, cool.

Mark Ditko:

He could say something, he could work with them. There was obviously a meeting, just a meeting of the minds.

Alex Grand:

Oh, that’s cool. So they actually had inner interplay with each other. I didn’t know that.

Mark Ditko:

Obviously there was a dynamic there, there was something that clicked and I’ll just kind of go back to at the end of the Marvel days, there was something that was not clicking with Stan and him. And he was one that liked a positive environment. There was a creative environment, it wasn’t stifled, at Charlton. He liked that he had that with Joe Gill.

Alex Grand:

That’s cool to know, because it actually helps understand, his essay on why he left Spider-Man saying that there’s a breakdown in communication and he just didn’t feel like being there anymore. And that’s interesting to put those two next to each other, those situations. So this is another thing we’ve spoken on the phone about before, but he had a couple of flare-ups from tuberculosis, one in the later fifties and another one in the later sixties. And I think during these times, he would leave New York, come back to Johnstown. Did your family ever talk about that? And how psychologically impactful do you think tuberculosis really was to him? Was it not really? What’s your take?

Mark Ditko:

Okay. And this is my take, is that I didn’t necessarily, I personally didn’t witness any [transformation]. I didn’t see him change in any way from what I knew to before and after these episodes, although the first one had happened, I wasn’t even born yet.

Alex Grand:

Right.

Mark Ditko:

That was the mid fifties, but I asked my dad about that. And I said, “okay.” When he got really sick and bubba, his mom actually had to come and get him because he was really sick, when he got back there, my dad was, this was in the I guess the mid fifties, my dad would have been late teens, late end of high school, or later years of high school. I said, “Do you remember him on his death bed in some traumatic physical condition?” And he said, “No, no, I don’t really remember that.” So that wasn’t something that he, that was visibly just traumatizing from my dad’s perspective. So he didn’t see that.

Alex Grand:

I see and that they felt he was pretty much the same guy before and after these flare-ups.

Mark Ditko:

I never really asked them that, but I never got, that never came up in a conversation that, “Oh, yeah. He really changed after that.”

Alex Grand:

Yeah.

Mark Ditko:

We didn’t see any, I didn’t hear any of that.

Alex Grand:

Yeah. And you were actually there during the second one.

Mark Ditko:

Yeah.

Alex Grand:

And during that time, you didn’t feel any change in body language from him or anything like that really?

Mark Ditko:

No. No. And you know what, even beyond that is later when we would write and when we would meet and we would talk….

Mark Ditko:

he was just uncle Steve. I didn’t see him just having some skewed point of view on certain topics or interaction because of some experience that he had, I didn’t see anything like that.

Alex Grand:

Right.

Mark Ditko:

It was not like he was more withdrawn or anything like that.

Alex Grand:

Yeah. It’s not like a Syd Barrett from Pink Floyd. He was never the same after that one.

Mark Ditko:

That one was very observable. Yeah.

Alex Grand:

Yeah. I get that. So now, did he ever discuss with you? I see you have the John Galt T-shirt on, which is awesome. Did he ever discuss his discovery of Ayn Rand and how that changed his perception of things? Or if it did.

Mark Ditko:

If you really get down to what our relationship was, initially he was just a fun uncle and I had experiences with all my uncles and my uncles would take us fishing, somebody used to show magic tricks every time they would come over. There was some interaction with the kids and the uncles, and uncle Steve was the fun uncle who was a really good artist. So we kind of had that sort of relationship, but then it sort of changed when I was in my late teens and I remember being at the kitchen table and he was sitting there which is just me and him and I’m like long hair braids, hippy, like a real throwback from the sixties and just complaining about it. I think it was my first or second year of college. And I’m just complaining about war some worldwide distasteful situation. We were just chatting about stuff. And he said, “So what are you doing about that?” Nothing. I’m just a kid, it shouldn’t be and he said, “You don’t have any right to complain about it”. He said, “If you’re not doing something about it, then you have no right to really complain about it.” And basically said shut up. You don’t know what you’re talking about and you’re just going to be a whiner over there. So I think at that point, my relationship with him shifted into being more of a guru or a philosophical guru of sorts. So when we would write back and forth together, it was thematic where I would update him on what I was doing in the business.

Mark Ditko:

And then I would update him with some family activity that’s happening with the kids or the brothers or sisters, or my dad. And then it would go into sort of a philosophical conversation about something that is happening in the world or something that is happening in my life or something, and it would be a philosophical thing. And he would always come back with an answer to each and then sometimes it would be a little industry section. Hey, on the creeper who came up with this or that? Or what did you mean when you did that? So, because at the same time now I’m re-engaging myself into his comics. So I am reading those and asking him questions. But then he would respond, and on the philosophical side, that was probably the more the meat of our dialogue, but he would then send me things.

Mark Ditko:

He would send me, he says, “Have you ever read de Bono?” He would then send me books. So I have through the 90’s, he was always sending me stuff out of his own library, which I’ve now kind of shifted back. This is his library back here.

Alex Grand:

Oh, that’s great.

Mark Ditko:

Part of it. And then the other part is here, but you have things like that purple Dr. Strange Marvel masterwork. He probably got that from Marvel and he just sent it to me. Because he knew I was interested. But he would send me a lot of philosophical books and at some point Ayn Rand came up. I never really pursued with him like, “Oh, when did you start reading this?” Because it was more of like a dialogue about the present and saying, “Hey what, have you ever read this? This is actually a really good book.”

Mark Ditko:

And he started sending me stuff back when I lived in Johnstown, when I was probably complaining about something, he ended up giving me some tapes, some cassette tapes that he had been listening to and said, “You should listen to this.” It wasn’t a discussion about how his own interests developed. Well I’m not interviewing him. It’s just, we’re having a conversation. It’s almost like, “Hey, have you read this book?” And here…

Alex Grand:

And that’s actually like connecting as human beings is what that is.

Mark Ditko:

Right. Yeah, I wasn’t doing an interview. I wasn’t doing a documentary.

Alex Grand:

There is this myth I think, and tell me if it is a myth, that he was as normal social person, and then when he read Ayn Rand, he became a hermit. To me, and I may be wrong but correct me please, if that’s the case, did he always just have a certain analysis and skepticism of the world about him and that it was more of a healthy digestion of what’s going on around him, and that was pretty much the same guy before and after Ayn Rand or did he really just get withdrawn after reading Ayn Rand?

Mark Ditko:

Have you ever read a book that really shifted your perspective on things? Because I know that I have, I’ve read stuff because I am a studier of life. I am one of those guys that reads and I’ve studied the religions of the world. And I do that because I’m just interested. I’m a curious cat. And I think he was similar in that way. And sometimes when you read something, it aligns with your own philosophy and then you go, “Oh wow! You know what? Yes, that’s actually accurate. I could believe that.” So I think in my opinion, it wasn’t some light switch bulb that just popped on when he read and ran because he had, I think for him and I would say, and maybe he even wrote me.

Mark Ditko:

I’m not sure where I got this. I just read so much. And now since I’m connected to all these people I’ve read so much information articles about him. It’s kind of a blur sometimes what I got directly from him, that’s why I need to reread his letters. At one point he said, he’s not really a spokesman for objectivism. He’s an Aristotelian. It would always go back to Aristotle. To him, that is what made sense. That’s what clicked I think for him, and then things aligned with that. And so to me, I don’t believe that there was some aha moment where all of a sudden he became a different person and this whole idea of him being turning into a cranky recluse or something is just absolutely absurd.

Alex Grand:

Yeah. And it’s funny, I think fandom, they either worship or they’ll get behind some weird negative sentiment or they’ll get hyper-ly positive or it’ll be different camps. It gets confusing for people that just kind of try to casually figure it out. And sometimes a lot of misstatements become a truth in a group of people. And that’s why it’s so important for you and your family to do what you’ve been doing.

Mark Ditko:

Well, I’ll just add to that is, I think a lot of that comes from people who don’t actually know him. You talk to Mort Todd and you say, “Mort, do you think he was a strange recluse that hated people?” No, people who really knew him, Craig Yoe and anybody else that really connected with him from the early days to the later days, Paul Levitz, all those guys. They know him as a person. They know him as an individual. And I think a lot of that stuff it comes from someone who actually didn’t know him and they latch on to some fragment of something because they wrote a letter or they saw a letter that came back and he was curt with someone and then that’s enough rivet in, “Oh, he was a cranky old recluse.” It was just like, you didn’t really even know him. You didn’t know him.

Alex Grand:

First, would he consider himself a libertarian. Did he have a voter registration? I mean, did he click something there? Did he talk about politics? Would he vote? Was he a voter?

Mark Ditko:

I asked him one year. I think it was to in fact, let me open this document that I grabbed a few snippets out of, and I did ask him about voting, I kind of want to try not to continue to just paraphrase. So it was December, 2004, so whatever the 2004 election was, I asked him if he had voted, and he said, “No, I didn’t vote. No candidate is for our constitutional Republic, for inalienable, individual and property rights. I didn’t hear any political candidate mention them as a value to be protected.” So he didn’t vote. So I think that’s just an illustration of what his attitude was. So he was for the constitutional Republic, he was for the constitution. He was for the founding fathers and the framers. And he says he didn’t see this in the parties, so no, he’s not going to vote for anybody because no, he doesn’t want to eat either mule meat or dog meat. It’s like, no, I won’t eat. I won’t eat.

Alex Grand:

Did you ever see him get excited about something, about music? What kind of music did he enjoy? Did he digest pop culture that way?

Mark Ditko:

I think he was more old school because when we went into his studio, I’m not sure if it was his studio or if it was in his apartment. I think it was… he had a keyboard, and he had sheet music, and he had obviously tapes, the music that he would listen to. But it was all old school stuff but he was teaching himself the keyboard.

Alex Grand:

Oh Really? Oh, that’s cool. So he was actually all about learning. That’s cool.

Mark Ditko:

Yep. He was expanding his skillsets of capabilities and abilities of just life. So, yeah, he liked music. I mean, he had a radio that he probably listened to, and I think he had a CD player and he had music. My dad has it now. But the music, it was more of the old school stuff.

Alex Grand:

When you say old school, do you mean like 50’s?

Mark Ditko:

Yeah. Lenny asked me, because he wanted to play some background music in his Ditko play. So I remember talking to my dad and asking him what music he had, that we had taken from the studio. So I have a list of that somewhere, I can’t think of it off the top of my head. Some of those artists are just before my era.

Alex Grand:

Did he date or have a girlfriend or ever talk about anything like that?

Mark Ditko:

Well, obviously not to me. And it was funny because when I was going to comic conventions in the early 90’s, I did what my uncle hated. I would tell people who I am so that I could go back and see Jack Kirby and Stan Lee and see these guys. So I was talking with Jack Kirby one time and he says, “So, how is your uncle? Did he ever get a girlfriend?” So he was just kind of joking in all those lines, but not that I know of, although when I talked to my mom, my mom said there was a time when he was coming back, that there was a girl that he liked, that liked him back in Johnstown. So when he would come and visit, there was definitely a connection there, but nothing ever really developed from it because he was in New York and she was in Johnstown. I don’t know whatever happened after that, or what might’ve happened in New York, but there was definitely a connection in Johnstown with a girl that just never developed.

Alex Grand:

It never developed.

Mark Ditko:

Yeah.

Alex Grand:

He’s known for his unflinching principles and he’s appreciated for that and valued for that. Could that have in any way, made it difficult to compromise for a relationship you think? Or is that just too much conjecture to try to go for?

Mark Ditko:

I think probably the best person to really answer that is somebody who chose not to get married, and what was the reasoning behind that? Because I think initially it was just a natural thing where he was interested and he tried these developed connections, but distance just didn’t make it work, or there’s always this story about him asking who was the secretary for Stan Lee, Flo Steinberg? . Asking her if she would go out, but she said no. So I’m sure that whole ritualistic kind of connecting up or trying to connect up happened. But I think about my younger brother, Patrick, he’s not married, he’s dated and he’s gone through his I’m not interested, I’m interested, so he’s not married. And he says he probably won’t get married. So it was almost like my brother Patrick would probably have a better assessment of why wouldn’t you do that?

Mark Ditko:

But I think at some point, some people don’t get married. I know I have friends that don’t have kids. It was like, wow, okay. Is that unusual? Oh, maybe. But that’s just the choice. So I think at some point he decided, Hey look, I’m committing to my craft, and this is where I’m dedicating my energy. He probably did. When I would suspect just as a normal guy, he had tried to develop that, it just the right pieces weren’t there. Although I’ll throw in another, just sort of wild tangent here is, it could be that he saw relationships not go so well. And maybe that sort of colored things like with Eric Stanton that whole thing.

Alex Grand:

I was going to ask you about him . Yes.

Mark Ditko:

I have my own assessment that I think his relationship with Eric Stanton, he saw his first wife just not go so well and really hated what he did. But my uncle obviously clearly saw the talent that Eric had and they just connected. So it could be that he was maybe colored by that.

Alex Grand:

That’s interesting. What’s your impression of him and Eric Stanton? They shared a studio together for like 10 years I think. Eric would have all these pretty girls in garter belts come on over and hang out and stuff. Were they kind of like two buddies connecting at the right age and with similar skillsets, what’s your impression of them being buddies like that?

Mark Ditko:

Oh, that’s exactly what it is. It’s two people with such a common reality of just art and an admiration for each other. They were both sort of second generation-ish Americans. Eric was from the Eastern Europe block, just like we were, the Ditko’s. They connected, they were able to talk, they played off of each other, they probably taught each other things, they probably they helped each other on stuff clearly.

Alex Grand:

They were wingman together too probably.

Mark Ditko:

Absolutely.

Alex Grand:

Two wild and crazy guys.

Mark Ditko:

Yeah. You know what, yes. I think that’s kind of the thing and then I have kind of my own spin of, look who his studio mate was. You think he’s going to go back to his mom, back in Johnstown and start promoting what he’s working on these days with his buddy? So I think that tended him to go, “You know what? I should probably just not talk about this right now.” Because that stuff that Eric was doing was really taboo in that era.

Alex Grand:

Kind of adult oriented stuff.

Mark Ditko:

Yeah.

Alex Grand:

The Eric Stanton reprints are awesome to look at.

Mark Ditko:

Yeah. I know. I mean, so they obviously connected at an artistic level and also at a sort of a human relationship level. So yeah. Hey, they stayed together for 10 years. Clearly there was something there magnetic, they kept them together. But going back to what we talked about is I think that, that potentially could have colored his opinion of getting married and then my uncle from what I heard, he wasn’t so happy when Eric ended up getting married second time.

Alex Grand:

Right. I heard that was the cause of their split actually.

Mark Ditko:

I didn’t know that or didn’t hear it, but I think it was probably into that book, Eric Stanton book, that maybe that kind of came out. I don’t know where that really was, but clearly there was something that held them together for that many years, there was a common thread. So again, going back to his decision to maybe not get married and keep his head down to the grindstone and do what he loved, it could be that Eric had some influence in there. Something that threw that 2 cents in there.

Alex Grand:

Yeah, makes sense. I remember I think we spoke on the phone once, you had mentioned that his relationship with Eric Stanton influenced the construction of Peter Parker, Spider-Man. What was your spin on that? Do you remember? I think we talked about it some time.

Mark Ditko:

Oh yeah. Right. Because you know, that’s where everybody says, Steve Ditko is Peter Parker.

Alex Grand:

And then they say, Eric Stanton is the human torch, but maybe that’s not correct. Huh.

Mark Ditko:

You know what my spin is that I think he took a lot of Eric’s life because Eric was very similar to my uncle, but he took a some of Eric’s life, and that was illustrating Peter Parker. Like the whole Aunt May. I mean, Eric Stanton, I think he had an aunt May that used to watch him. So I think he took a lot of influence from Eric Stanton when he was building Peter Parker.

Alex Grand:

I remember on that panel, you did with Jackie and Matt Dunford.

Mark Ditko:

and John.

Alex Grand:

Someone had asked, “Hey, did he ever speak about working with Stan and what that was like, or his impression of Stan.” And you had said that he never really talked about that. Is that something that you asked or just never came up?

Mark Ditko:

Obviously, I’ve just dove in headfirst into his life a little bit more so to speak beyond what I knew from our letters and my family connection. I wish I could go back in time through the 90’s and 2000’s and ask him all these burning questions that are on other people’s minds or that I hadn’t ever considered before, because no, I never asked him about Stan because I didn’t think about it. And that was really it. So some of that stuff never came up, not because, oh, I asked him, but he avoided the question. No, I asked him about Spider-Man or Dr. Strange and anything that came to mind as a personal interest that I was wondering about, I asked him and he answered. So it was just that I didn’t think about this stuff.

Alex Grand:

Yeah. I know. And also it’s like, he’s your uncle. There’s a routine of just being uncle and nephew also as well and sometimes we don’t get out of that.

Mark Ditko:

And you know what, no, it wasn’t even that it wasn’t like, “Oh, this is taboo, I have to stay away from this.” Look, I did a lot of stupid shit with him. I said a lot of stupid stuff. Perfect example, I knew that he didn’t really like signing stuff. So what do I do when he sends me a box of comics? You know, he sends me Spider-Man five through 38. What do I do? Send them back and say,

Alex Grand:

For him to sign it.

Mark Ditko:

Could you sign these for me? It’s like, Okay, dude, that was really stupid and arrogant but I did it. So I can’t claim to have been the smartest nephew in some of those instances. So it wasn’t like I was holding back. Luckily he probably, maybe cut me a little more slack than usual because I’m the nephew. But yeah, he said on those things that I’m lucky he didn’t just throw them in the trash.

Alex Grand:

Did he sign them?

Mark Ditko:

No, but he sent them back. At least he sent them back. But then after that, he did a comic of his own, The Safest Place, and he sent me a whole bunch of signed copies.

Alex Grand:

Oh, that’s cool.

Mark Ditko:

Yeah.

Alex Grand:

That was what he was proud of at that time.

Mark Ditko:

Yeah. But then I did go back and see him, I can’t remember when, and I took some Spider-Man comics I had, a couple of comics to 38 and a couple others that I took back and Creeper, I had just a collection of comics later when I went back to Johnstown one time he signed them for me.

Alex Grand:

So he did sign sometimes.

Mark Ditko:

Oh yeah. Yeah.

Alex Grand:

What’s your impression of his attitude toward Jack Kirby as a creator? They weren’t really close friends, right? But they worked at the same place around the same time. Was that the full extent of it? Were they mainly acquaintances with respect for each other? What’s your impression of that?

Mark Ditko:

Yeah, I think that’s all that it was. They weren’t buddies, they didn’t hang around. They were just acquaintances. They clearly knew of each other and they were just two ships passing in the night on certain comics because they didn’t necessarily collaborate all that much. Yeah he inked Jack’s work on the covers and stuff like that, but I never really talked to him about that. I wrote to him when I had met Jack, and Jack and I had talked and I wrote him, I can’t really recall what the response was on that, but it wasn’t something that they were buddies connected at the hip. Yeah. It wasn’t like that.

Alex Grand:

As far as some of his post Marvel characters you can see some elements of objectivism within Blue Beetle and most certainly the Question and Mr. A, just from your impression of it, is that probably the direction he was going to take Spider-Man or do you think he looked at those characters as these are different concepts and I’m going to do this with them?

Mark Ditko:

This is really covered in Zack’s book, Mysterious Traveler, that I think there was an evolution going on with the way he created characters. So I think, to me, Spider-Man would have evolved in that direction to where early on, in fact my spin on, oh, he created this Peter Parker flawed character. He didn’t build these flaws into him and expect them, in my opinion, to be maintained.

Alex Grand:

Right.

Mark Ditko:

The reality is all of a sudden you have super powers and you’re going, “Whoa! What the…” And then you’re trying to get your head wrapped around that until you figure out where you’re at, and it’s a microcosmic life that you’re learning. Like, how do I function now with this? And then eventually you start to sort it out. You start to have more experiences and you start to just get more of a focus and little by little you evolve. So I think Spider-Man would have gone that way.

Alex Grand:

It was because he was a 15 year old that he had those flaws in that…

Mark Ditko:

You would expect it.

Alex Grand:

That you would expect it. And then when he lifted that large weight..

Alex Grand:

in that later issue, overcoming a lot of his mental anxieties, that was a metaphor of a growth moment where he was going to achieve a more final, more adult worldview of what he would think would be more appropriate. And that’s why I think a lot of people feel that when he left, it wasn’t really the Spider-Man that was intended, at least from his perspective anymore, that it became more of an anxious mascot for Marvel comics.

Mark Ditko:

Yeah. I mean, look, he was a storyteller, and he mapped and plotted those things out. He knew where he wanted to go with that, because it’s almost like, okay, Harry Potter. How many volumes is that? Do you think it just kind of made it up as you went, the author? I think there was a master plan.

Alex Grand:

Yeah. There was probably an A to Z on this.

Mark Ditko:

Exactly. So I think he saw where it was going to evolve, he just jumped ship before he could complete that evolution. So he goes, and now he’s doing Blue Beetle, and it is sort of an extension of that. I mean, the artwork of Blue Beetle, to me, is just mind blowing. It’s very Spider-Man-ish kind of, but that’s what he’s known, for that action, integrating that action into static panels. So I think it was all an evolution, and Spider-Man, Peter Parker, would have eventually kind of gotten there. And that’s why I think later on he was like, “Okay, you know what? I’m I’m done with that. I could actually set that aside, because it’s not going where I would have taken it. So I’m not going to sit here and whine about it. I’m going to move on to my next character and I’m going to do what I’m going to do.”

Alex Grand:

A lot of people don’t put these two characters together. Knowing what you know of your uncle and your discussions and just studying the guy as well, the concept of the Chameleon who is faceless, and then the Question and Mr. A. In Charlton, he did a Chameleon type character before the Marvel one, and then even later, he did a character that was kind of similar. What do you think it is about the faceless character that seemed to appeal to his artistic sensibilities?

Mark Ditko:

You know what? I’ve never thought about that. And that’s something though where I think if I’m, say, deficient in kind of my knowledge is all of his characters and their personalities and all that stuff. I know the main characters, but I am by no means a comic historian. I watch your show and you talk about stuff, and I’m just like, “Whoa, that is over my head.” I mean I had no idea of any of that stuff. So I don’t know. My thoughts on it now is that it was just a way to make that imagery stand out.

Alex Grand:

Like a vehicle. More like a storytelling vehicle, maybe.

Mark Ditko:

Exactly. Yeah.

Alex Grand:

Some people will say that the Question is him, just like some people want to say Peter Parker is him. But is the Question more him, or is that another construct that he analyzed and put together, you think?

Mark Ditko:

I don’t think any of those things are him. He wrote to me at one point and he said that he thinks comics should have evolved to be more of a educational medium. So I think all he was doing is telling a story. And he’s trying to get a moral across.

Alex Grand:

Yeah, teach a lesson of some kind.

Mark Ditko:

Exactly. And, to me, a lot of that stuff he’s doing, he’s just trying to do it in what he sees as an entertaining way of trying to get some life, whether it’s ethics or morality or integrity, some point across, and getting them to try to look at something in a medium that maybe they wouldn’t otherwise have seen. So I don’t think he was trying to tell his life story or create a image of himself.

Mark Ditko:

And even with him, Mr. A. The black and white. He says everything is black and white. People go, “Oh, that’s harsh. It’s ridiculous. You can’t have that attitude.” Well, you know what? Maybe it can’t be applied across the boards, but in some instances, he’s getting you to process life through maybe a different lens. I’ll just make a strange analogy. My dad has this saying sometimes, which I don’t really agree with, but he says it. All things in moderation. And I get what he’s saying. And in a certain frame, that actually makes sense. Don’t overdo. Don’t eat four gallons of ice cream every single night. That’s not going to be a good thing. So all things in moderation.

Mark Ditko:

And so my uncle had this sort of, okay, black and white. But that doesn’t mean everywhere, because, for example I could tell my dad I only did a little bit of heroin tonight. Look, I’m moderating it. I only do so much a week. It’s like, no. To me, that is a black and white. No, don’t do that. So my uncle, in this sort of black and white mentality, could say, “Look. Do you think it’s okay to just steal,” oh, I don’t know, maybe just pads of paper? Because look, it’s not like you’re stealing bills. You’re not taking a computer or something. You’re just taking some paper. What’s the harm in that?

Alex Grand:

Or take a pen from the bank with you home.

Mark Ditko:

Yeah, why not? I mean, come on. You don’t mean black and white, It’s like, no, actually. No. Stealing = bad. Let’s stay on the white side of that. There are areas of life where there’s no gray. And to me, I love Mr. A, but I read him differently than anybody else would read him. To me, it’s just all those things that people believe that there’s an acceptability in a gray, when in reality, you actually even know that there is no gray in that area. And you should be on the white side and live in that sort of straight and narrow. “Hey, I only cheated once in my marriage. I mean, it’s only once. Come on. Cut me some slack.” No. There’s a black and white there and I think it does apply.

Alex Grand:

That’s true. That’s a good point. Now, did he ever talk about Wally Wood? Did that ever come up? Were they friends? Do you know about that?

Mark Ditko:

You know what? I can’t recall any specific and I don’t have any kind of notes that I could refer to right now about Wally Wood, but my recollection of that is they were buds. It was almost an Eric Stanton kind of relationship in terms of he really admired Wally Wood. It’s unfortunate that Wally Wood had problems drinking and where his life went, but I think there was an absolute connection with him and Wally Wood. He really admired his skillset. There was definitely a connection that he had with Wally Wood, in my opinion.

Alex Grand:

That’s cool. Yeah, because it sounds like there’s more of a connection between Ditko and Wood than Ditko and Kirby, actually.

Mark Ditko:

Oh, no doubt. No doubt. I mean, just look at Witzend.

Alex Grand:

Yeah. That’s right. That would take a connection there. Yes.

Mark Ditko:

And Wally Wood even said, he’s like, “Look, no. I’m putting this in just the way you want it. This is you.” In fact, I thought there was some little tension there when all of a sudden, Wally Wood kind of backed away a little bit and someone else didn’t want to put in just what my uncle had created. So he had that relationship with Wally Wood, and I think Wally Wood had a mutual respect back that was just like, look, this is a platform. I’m letting him take it.

Alex Grand:

I know that when Wally left and was doing the Tower comics, Ditko was doing work with that. They did some Jungle Jim together. They did quite a bit of things that were not considered necessarily mainstream, but they had that connection. And that’s cool to hear that confirmed on your end too, that there was a good emotion there between the two. Now, you had mentioned earlier that you had asked him about the Creeper and there are other characters for DC Comics, when he went to DC, like Hawk and Dove. What did he tell you about those characters or what has come up?

Mark Ditko:

I have a couple snippets that I pulled out of my letters, but when I was asking him about those things, I mean, I could just read some of this. He said, and this was in 2005, November of 2005, that he wrote me this. He said, “Yeah, the Creeper.” He said, “Yes, the Creeper’s colors were mine. His costume was a put together affair to get into the costume party. So it was a thrown together disguise, which made it different in not being a chosen costume for a heroes career, like the Batman or Superman. Offbeat ideas like with the Creeper costume can lead or have led to other offbeat ideas. One just has to be mentally open, not censoring, considering what does pop up, and some never originally thought ideas will emerge. It was like that with Dr. Strange.”

Mark Ditko:

And then he talks about Shade. And he said, “Shade. Oh, yes. I had a number of Shade episodes ready to pencil. I remember going to Johnstown for…” This is where we talked about it. “I remember going to Johnstown for a summer vacation. On the seven- or eight-hour trip, I worked on continuing Shade stories and books. Ideas and stories rolled along the tracks. I can’t claim that at every train stop I had a completed story for a book, but with Shade, I did the color overlays on tracing paper for the panels and pages. But the problem was the coloring department was unwilling to follow my color schemes. In one book, I got the reverse of what I wanted. So one is always dealing with others who believe that they know best. Another example is the ‘democratic collaboration.'” So he makes a little political comment there.

Alex Grand:

That he didn’t like that, basically.

Mark Ditko:

No. No. And then he was talking about the names of his characters and he says, “Yeah, character naming. Yes, all of those characters names were mine.” And I can’t remember what I asked him. He said, “But some editors didn’t like the names. One editor said an odd name can have one unusual one, but also a very ordinary, common other one, like Indiana Jones.” You have one common name and one unusual one. “It’s a matter of thinking up names to fit the character. Some names can have a meaning like Rex Graine, for Mr. A, is against the grain of the usual moral thinking.” That’s where Rex Graine comes from. “Then Vic Sage,” he said, “The question is victory through wisdom,” is where Vic Sage comes from. Yeah. He says, “If art is to be creative, every aspect of doing a comic book story should involve creativity. I go for short names because of space for dialogue balloons and captions. I had the Creeper as Jay Ryder in my rough script. The comic writer assigned made Jay into Jack with the common conventional thinking.”

Alex Grand:

That is great. That’s awesome. What a great insight that was.

Mark Ditko:

Yeah. So he didn’t fight or resist when I would ask him these things. And I don’t know, maybe because I was a nephew, but I don’t think so. Even David Currie, when he wrote Ditko Shrugged, they had corresponded for 10 years. He asked him industry questions all the time. So it wasn’t like he wasn’t willing to answer that. In all of the letters, especially when you see these really abrupt ones or curt ones, it was probably because they were just pushing a button, that, “Hey, draw me Spider-Man.” You get a letter. “Draw me Spider-Man.” It’s like, oh my gosh, you’re the 8000th person to ask me that, okay? No – Steve Ditko. But that’s why I go back, because I wish I could have asked him some of the questions that sort of are burning on people’s minds or that I think about now.

Alex Grand:

Yeah. But it’s great that you’re the resource that you are already anyway. So it seemed like during the ’70s, it was almost a fanzine period, where he was submitting a lot of stuff more in the fanzine world, rather than mainstream comics. It seemed to explore more of his ideas and concepts. One of the things I wonder is how do you afford a studio in New York on that? Are you aware of him doing other things too, to make a living beyond? Was that it?

Mark Ditko:

I think once he committed to what he was doing, that’s what he did. And I don’t know that he did anything else. And the only time that I know that he was doing something else was when he was going to art school, That he did have some sort of day job or some way to sustain and have some kind of money, which I don’t know what he did, and I’ve never had a conversation with anybody who knew. But once he started in the business, he was all in. He committed, in fact, I think that really is what developed his attitude of, “look, I don’t do these little one-off things. I need a long-time job. You got to give me a commitment. I’m not going to just draw you a picture and you’re going to give me a hundred bucks. That doesn’t pay the bills. I need commitment. I need regular work.” So that’s what he was always after.

Alex Grand:

I also like how he wrote in that letter, he implied more about thinking beyond the grain with Dr. Strange, because that was revolutionary, his Dr. Strange. I mean Spider-Man was too, but Dr. Strange, when I read his series of that, it opened my mind. From comics before that to after, and exploring metaphysics and dimensions, he was so innovative with that. So, that’s cool that he threw that in to that letter to you there.

Mark Ditko:

Yeah.

Alex Grand:

When I interviewed Jim Shooter, I asked him about what was up with Steve Ditko’s return to Marvel around ’78 or ’79 or so. And he was saying that Steve Ditko played a little hard to get in the beginning, but he told him that you’re a founding father, we’ll always have something for you, and that when he took him up on the offer, that he would tell people like, “Hey, this is Steve Ditko.” He would tell his secretary, “Look, we have to give him ultimate respect, make him feel as comfortable here as possible.” And he always had something for him. And then it seemed like he also then continued to work for Shooter over at Valiant Comics, even at Defiant after. What was your impression of their working relationship, because it seemed to go beyond Marvel there.

Mark Ditko:

I met Jim down in San Diego at a comic convention and we kind of chatted a little bit. But yeah, my sense was that’s just the reality of a relationship. Just take even correspondence. Somebody writes you a letter, you don’t know who this person is, but they’re engaging. They go, “What are you working on now? What’s your next project?” Okay. So he responds. And then you write back and as the relationship evolves, you’re probably more willing to maybe say something or do something that you might not have done at sort of first contact. So I think that Jim, he knows the industry. He knew who was who. He had the proper respect for the people who did what they did early on. And I think it only took a matter of time before my uncle saw that this guy’s legit. So yeah, “I’m going to pursue him.” Just again, as long as the project aligned with.

Alex Grand:

his values…

Mark Ditko:

his own values, right, because that’s why he left Defiant, although I loved him on Dark Dominion. I wanted to see him continue that one, but he backed off because it just didn’t click with his philosophy at the time, which is why he ended up leaving that. He did the first bit there, because he had a commitment with Jim Shooter. I think it was just that Jim is a great guy. I don’t care what anybody else says. I like Jim Shooter. I think he did right by my uncle. I think he did right by a lot of people in the industry. But I think it was just the matter that he was willing to develop a relationship with my uncle, which, again, it just aligned with what my uncle wanted and was interested in.

Alex Grand:

I like Jim Shooter too. And I agree with that whole thing with your uncle, working with him those years, it seemed like there was a mutual respect and loyalty there between the two and maybe they spoke the same language to an extent. I think you’re right. Shooter did say something like, well, if that didn’t promote the ideal of a hero, he didn’t generally want to be a part of it. And did he ever talk about anything else about Valiant or Defiant or his later time at Marvel beyond that Defiant anecdote you had mentioned?

Mark Ditko:

You know what? Again, I got to go through my letters, because that was the era that I actually started reading comics. I got into comics probably in the early ’90s. So I attended kind of the early ’90s comic conventions and started to buy comics and I had my own reading list. And the stuff from Triumphant, Prime, stuff from Adam Pollina that he worked on. I can’t think of some of the names, but Chromium Man and Defiant stuff, I was reading all of that. So I’m sure I probably wrote to him something about the Defiant era, but I don’t have anything right now. I mean, that was a lot of years ago, so.

Alex Grand:

And then you had mentioned that after death, he felt like that was it. There was no real afterlife. You got to use your time here now. Did he ever discuss how he felt about the death of, let’s say, Wally Wood or the death of Jack Kirby or any of these people?

Mark Ditko:

No. No, I don’t ever remember having any conversation about that at all.

Alex Grand:

What was his view of the internet in general? Did he ever mention anything like that? Because I know he wrote letters, but he wasn’t really an email kind of guy, I guess.

Mark Ditko:

No. There were others that he was writing letters with pretty regularly who would send him clippings and send him things that they would print out. He was really dialed into what was going on and all the happenings. He had a TV. But no, he’s not surfing the web. I mean, he’d go to the library and had access to whatever happened to be there. But I think most of his connection was with correspondence with others that they would print out things and send him things. So they kept him really updated on what was going on.

Alex Grand:

I got you. So it was more just kind of being set in your ways and the way you communicate and that’s what you’re comfortable with. It wasn’t necessarily being against the internet as a concept or anything like that.

Mark Ditko:

No. No. I think it was just he was old school in that way. And you kind of think about his time, you know what? I’d put money down that he woke up at the crack of dawn. He got dressed. He did his normal morning routine. He walked over to his studio. He went in his studio and he worked. And in the early days, I know he would work till the late night hours trying to just meet deadlines. But even in his later years, I’ll bet you he walked in his studio and his normal hours, and he worked all day, and at the end of the day, he shut things down, and he went home, and he worked on his correspondence and he worked on research or something. And I bet you he had his routines and he probably just did that day, after day, after day,

Alex Grand:

The Blake Bell book about his life, for a while, that was the only thing on Ditko’s biography that was around. The timeline seemed to be intact throughout it. But at some point there seemed to be some judgment by the author on Ditko and some of the decisions he made. What’s your impression of the way Steve Ditko felt about that book or books that tried to do that?

Mark Ditko:

Well, in fact, there’s a quote that I kind of dug up that he had mentioned, because there’s always this thing about privacy. He was a private person. He didn’t want this to come out, wanted this to come out. So in 2007, he wrote to me and he said, “Every person should value his privacy and it is important to know and understand what is meant by privacy. Claims about most things regarding me have come not from me, but from others who believe they are qualified to speak for me or about me. They’re speaking about me is supposed to prove that they know what they are talking about.” So one of the things I think maybe with Blake, because everybody knows the phrase that he says, that’s a “poison sandwich,” that book. So I think on that one, something in there that just turned his stomach a bit, “he is claiming to be a Ditko aficionado and able to speak for me, when I didn’t authorize him as my personal biographer.”

Mark Ditko:

So I think there was something. It’s almost like that Cat Yronwode book that she was doing all that research, and when it got to the point where it was really invading other people’s privacy to a degree, calling my dad and all this stuff, it got to the point where he was like, “No, I didn’t sign up for that. I am not on board with that.” So I think he would have been more amenable to something like what David Currie was doing, where he was right from the horse’s mouth. He’s just corresponding with him. But when it gets to the point where there’s somebody who says, “Oh, I’m an expert,” that’s why I try read a lot of stuff that he wrote me and try to refer back to that, because I’m not him. I only know what I know. But he didn’t like the idea that others would try to kind of live off of some authority label when he didn’t give it to anybody. So I think that really set him off. He didn’t like that. In fact, I believe that his distaste for other people sort of intruding into his life via the family or friends really caused him to just go, “Okay, look. I’m going to protect my family.” And he would tell people, “I have no family. There is nobody.” And I’m going to keep my mouth shut. I’m not going to make it so that people are going to go hunt other people down. We went to his studio to clean it out, and the security guard, the guy at the front desk sees my dad come up and dad says, “Yeah, we need to get into Steve Ditko’s studio. I’m his brother.” And the guy looks at him and says, “You’re not his brother. He didn’t have any family. He told me that multiple times.”

Mark Ditko:

And probably at the front desk, he’s telling the guy, “Look, don’t let anybody in here. I have no family. I don’t care what they tell you.” So I think he was really trying to protect the family and saying, “Look, I don’t have any family. Don’t go hunting. There’s nothing to see there.”

Mark Ditko:

He did have that kind of sensitivity to the privacy, but only in a sense that people were trying to speak for him. Early on, after he had passed away, and I went off to Johnstown, my dad said, “Hey, we should do a book, Steve Ditko, the man. We should tell our story of what we know how he was.” Now, I don’t think he would necessarily have a philosophical problem with that because we’re just saying what we know.

Mark Ditko:

We’re not speculating. I’m just, I’m saying, “Look, he drew me gorillas as a kid.” So I’m not making something up. This is a reality, and we could speak to that reality of what we knew and what we had. He did this, he said this, he showed me this. He drew me this, he was this way. I try not to speculate in that way. And I don’t think he would have had a problem with that.

Mark Ditko:

Now, if he was alive, and we didn’t do any of that stuff, obviously while he was alive, because he didn’t want that. He didn’t want to have that extra awareness put on him. We just think it’s honoring him right now, that other people need to understand that.

Mark Ditko:

I was talking to Kevin Feige after the Spider-Man premiere down in Hollywood a couple of years ago. And we were just chatting, because I said, “We’re going to be doing some things, getting more people aware of who he was.” And he said, he says, “You have to do that.” He said, “because if you don’t 10 years from now, his life and who he was will only be a caricature of who he really was.” And it’s true. And I don’t want that. I want people to actually know who he really was. Not some caricature cartoon, exploded, blown up speculative kind of picture of who he was as a crazy recluse, which is just absurd.

Alex Grand:

Yeah, I agree. And in fact, when that Bleeding Cool article kind of came about and people are sharing it, acting like it’s a note of justice…

Mark Ditko:

Travesty. Yeah.

Alex Grand:

Which I thought was a silliest thing. And I actually made a very straightforward comment about how much I disagreed with it from the bottom of my soul. Because what they claimed is that the Ditko estate is printing Ditko’s Mr. A, reprinting it against his wishes, trying to put some negative spin on ultimately just trying to correct the record on who he was and make sure he’s not forgotten and making sure that fandom doesn’t just distort him into some caricature of a trench coat and a hat and a Spider-Man mask and that’s all it is. I think you guys are doing really great work, and I’m with you 1000%.

Mark Ditko:

In 1991, I wrote to him about some of his characters and regarding Mr. A, he said, “He is one character from the past that I would like to see in the present and the future.” So that was something that he wanted that character … That really was a manifestation, a representation of a strong belief that he had. That’s why we’re doing that collected edition. That’s why I am promoting Mr. A, and I just think it needs to get on the right channels to send the message that there are some philosophy philosophical decisions that really are black and white and you need to consider that. So yeah, I am promoting it. He wanted to see him in the future.

Alex Grand:

You mentioned you guys were cleaning out his studio, the library. So was that basically when you were notified about his death, what you and your dad went there and cleaned everything out? How was that?

Mark Ditko:

I flew out to Johnstown about a week after he passed away. My younger brother, Patrick, and my dad had plans to just go into New York, and I was like, “Look, I’m going. I’m definitely there to help.” So I flew out. I was out there for a while, a couple of weeks, probably, in Johnstown. And we’re trying to figure out, okay, get the logistics of how do we get in there? And we had heard that he had died in his apartment, that that was sealed by the police. And then they had also sealed his studio. Nobody can get into any of that stuff. And we didn’t have any kind of will. There was nothing legal that said that we could get into any of those places.

Mark Ditko:

So we stared doing some research and my dad on the phone, call after phone call, eventually found out that we can’t get in there. Nobody’s going to allow us to get in there. Nobody’s getting in there until we have some kind of a legal paper that has whatever, death certificate and authorization from the state that you could actually get in there. It took us probably a month or more to get that. So I ended up leaving, coming back to Los Angeles and then going back out in sometime. I think it might’ve been in August or something the following month that we ended up. Then I rented a van, and we all drove out to New York eventually, started to just get into his studio and apartment and clean things out. But my dad made a comment. Putting it in perspective, there’s my dad and me and my younger brother, Patrick. And just talk about a bonding experience between a father and two sons, that he said it was probably one of the funnest in, if you could put it that way, experiences that he has ever had, because we spent almost a week in New York, just going back and forth from his studio to the apartment and going through everything and cleaning all this stuff out, packing up the van and eventually driving back. It was surreal in many ways of what we kind of had to do in his apartment and then also in the studio. He had a big studio. There was a lot of stuff in there.

Alex Grand:

Was there anything surprising that you saw in there?

Mark Ditko:

You know what? For us, I think I kind of flashed back to my dad and me and my brother and my dad going in there. It was like opening up some crypt, a vault that you’ve never been in, and you have no idea what’s in it that’s been buried in an Egyptian tomb, for thousands of years. That’s kind of the level of sort of excitement. We finally, after about a half an hour of convincing the security guard and getting the building manager to come down to eventually escort us up there, we turn the key in the Steve Ditko door, 715, and you can’t open the door, you’re pushing and pushing the door, and it’s just packed with mail behind it, letters and stuff.

Mark Ditko:

We finally pushed it open. And they walk away, and we just sort of walk in to this first room and just piles filing cabinet stuff, and then walk into the main room. And it was like, wow. And it was so funny, because all of us, we kind of first, we sort of trying to take it all in. And then my dad goes right to his desk and where he would sit and draw. And my dad sits down there and it was like one thing after another, he would be sitting down, and he’d go, “Look at this.” It is like, oh my gosh, he didn’t even just … One thing after another, one of us just finding something and then eventually obviously getting our heads wrapped around what our task really is of how to clean this place out. But yeah, it was a real adventure that I’ll never forget.

Alex Grand:

Yeah. That sounds like fun.

Mark Ditko:

As far as finding something that was unexpected, everything was kind of unexpected in a way. I don’t know that my dad was even in that studio. My dad and my mom hooked up with him a couple of times in New York, but I don’t know if they were in his studio. I had never been, my younger brother, never did. So it was all just like, wow. Everything we looked at was a diamond. You know?

Alex Grand:

Wow. How fun. Gosh, that sounds like it was less disappointing than Al Capone’s vault with Geraldo, right?

Mark Ditko:

Yeah. Right.

Alex Grand:

It sounds a lot better. This one should have been televised.

Mark Ditko:

Yeah. Right. Exactly.

Alex Grand:

You’d mentioned this at the panel you were on with Matt Dunford. Did Steve Ditko ever get any money for the Spider-Man movies?

Mark Ditko:

Not that I’m aware of.

Alex Grand:

I’m not sure what they did legally, but with the Kirby estate, it took a lot eventually for them to say created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, but in the movies, it’s pretty established early on. It says created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. But it doesn’t seem like any of us are aware of what occurred to get that byline up there. Right?

Mark Ditko:

Yeah. I don’t know. You don’t know. I think during that period, when those movies were coming out, then all of that was being done. I was writing back and forth with my uncle, but it wasn’t something that I had attention on or was asking those questions. That was all just something just happening over there.

Alex Grand:

And so now, is there currently any legal relationship of any kind between Marvel corporation and the Ditko estate as far as royalties or any of those things?

Mark Ditko:

My dad handles the financial side of things and has. So I do think that he gets a check from Marvel on royalties or commission on the comics. So it’s one of those, I think he gets them from DC as well, but it’s five cents for a reprint here, or seven cents on this one. And it adds up to a buck 25 or something.

Mark Ditko:

I’m pretty sure he does get some sort of a royalty type check on some of the reprints of things, but I don’t really know what those numbers are. And I think that’s as far as it goes, as far as the relationship. I remember early on, I was talking with Marvel, trying to get … I was kind of handling the legal side of the estate, and I was talking with Marvel to try to get their existing contract. And they said they didn’t have anything. There was nothing that I could find or get from Marvel of there was actual contract between them two.

Alex Grand:

And then you mentioned speaking with Kevin Feige of Marvel Studios. Did he indicate that he was a fan of the comics himself? Is that your impression of him as far as where he comes from when he’s making those movies?

Mark Ditko:

You know what? I don’t know. Clearly, he knows who Steve Ditko is. He asked me, “What did you think about the tribute that I did at the end of the Spider-Man movie, where they the signature of Steve Ditko & Stan Lee?” He was kind of proud of that. He said, “So what’d you think of that tribute?” And I was like, “Eh,” And he said he really wanted to do something much more elaborate, but he didn’t want to keep showing the same old six pictures that are out there. And he said, he wanted to do something much more elaborate. He said he just didn’t have the material. So I think there was an intent to sort of do a much bigger, broader tribute. He just didn’t have the content, which I gave him my card. And I was like, “Hey, in the future, when you want to do something, I’ll get you all the content you need.” But to me, he was legitimately interested. And I’ll tell you, when we were talking out there in front of Grauman’s Chinese theater, he was engaged, he was interested.

Alex Grand:

He was interested.

Mark Ditko:

He was happy to have met me enough to have this conversation, when I muscled my way in past those handlers.

Alex Grand:

So then Steve had a long publishing history with Robin Snyder, with the comics and why he left Marvel and his history. What was your impression of their working relationship? Was it kind of similar, do you think, to him working with Jim Shooter that, “okay, this guy’s fair to me. I’m going to work with him. He understands what I’ll work on and what I won’t.” Was it more like that was a vehicle to continue working on his own terms?

Mark Ditko:

Oh, I think it absolutely was. And of course then just the longevity of it, every year that would go by, every project they would do solidify that relationship. So I think as the years went by, that true bond just grew and grew and grew, because here’s somebody sticking by your side and putting your material out the way you want that material to go out. So I think that just continued to solidify over the years. So I think it probably started out as a business relationship, because he had approached others prior to Robin, to have that relationship, Ron Frantz. So he asked him, would he be his publisher? And Ron was like, “The material, I just don’t see I can get the material out and then make it viable as a business.” But Robin had maybe some other things going on and enough diversity with other activity Robin’s doing. So he took on my uncle’s publishing and then they sign a contract in ’99 that they signed, where there was an agreement that he’s leasing the material to Robin Snyder to be able to publish and just to profit and split the profits basically, while he was alive. So I think that bond just kind of grew and grew and then sort of what that really allowed my uncle to do, and going back to his division of labor, it allowed my uncle to just keep his nose to the grindstone and do the artwork and didn’t have to worry about getting it out there. I know Darren Ford, Darren, even approached him.

Mark Ditko:

And others I’ve talked to have approached my uncle about publishing his work and about the quality and different comments. And he would always redirect them and say, “Look, that’s not my area. Go talk to Robin. Robin is the one that’s putting that stuff out there. So that question is for Robin, that’s not for me, I’m the artist, I’m the creative in that side.” I think as the years went by, that relationship became very attractive to him because he was able to just, like I said, keep his nose to the grindstone and just keep cranking out what he wanted and didn’t have to worry about distribution and printing and all that stuff.

Alex Grand:

Do you feel, as far as what we’ve talked about your uncle; is there anything you feel is important about him that we may have missed today? I know it’s hard to capture someone in a bottle like that.

Mark Ditko:

Well, I think one of the things that we’re working on now is when my first went off to Johnstown and my dad and me and my brother Patrick were sitting down, and my dad said, “Hey, we should do a book, Steve Ditko, the man. And we should tell people who he was as a person,” just to kind of combat all those kinds of rumors that were out there and innuendo and all these other opinions.

Mark Ditko:

We have a draft version of that right now. I read it a couple of weeks ago, Bob Jeschonek from Johnstown is actually writing it. He’s an accomplished author. So he’s the one doing all the legwork and interviews and everything. So I think that is going to be an interesting book that will be coming out, probably not going to have that done, just because of the whole kind of COVID lag, probably not until 2022.

Mark Ditko:

So I think that, that is one thing that will give more insight into what we as a family want to get out regarding Steve Ditko. So we would want to try to get people to understand who he was as a person. Beyond that, I just want to get his name out there more. I think his artwork, his distribution has been, I don’t want to say intentionally throttled back, but it hasn’t been as broad as I think it should be for the caliber of artist that he was. So that’s why we’re doing the Mr. A stuff.

Mark Ditko:

I’m going to start doing more merchandise and only for just visibility. Look, I mean, to me, okay, I’ll just say it, this is a money pit. I mean, I’m doing nothing, but just money, money, money. I’m not in this for the money, but I’m committed to doing this stuff.

Mark Ditko:

And I’m talking to people about doing more animated cartoons and trying to just get his name out there, connected to his creations. I think I would just say stay tuned, because we are going to continually do stuff. It’s like with this Bottle Works show. This is the first sort of launch point of trying to get his name out there broader and what he has done, then the Mr. A book, and then the Steve Ditko: The Man, as a working title right now, that book out there, and then just getting people more access to who he was.

Alex Grand:

You said that there were maybe six photos of him out there. Just out of curiosity, rough estimate, just from family gatherings, you guys probably have considerably more photos than that. Is that right?

Mark Ditko:

First time I went back to Johnstown, I went through our cabinet, just our personal one, the family one in Johnstown, and I found over 200 photos.

Alex Grand:

Amazing.

Mark Ditko:

Yeah. Then my brother, Patrick, and my dad went to the relatives and to others. Then we started finding the movies, because everyone including my dad was filming eight millimeter videos. So we obviously have home movies that he’s in. And the photos, that kind of stuff. That’s going to be really interesting for some people to see this, the antics that he would do all from a family perspective.

Mark Ditko:

I don’t know how much of that stuff will really make it in the first book, but eventually it will all just leak out, over time.

Alex Grand:

I appreciate you sharing that one home video with the CBH channel. That was really nice of you. And I asked you if you would share it with me, and you were kind enough to say yes. I think it’s a little annoying when people do that without asking permission. But I’ve always appreciated your kindness to me and our developing relationship over the past couple of years and in the upcoming years. So, Mark, thanks so much for joining us today here at Comic Book Historians.

Mark Ditko:

It was my pleasure, and I’m sure this is just the start.

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