seanhowe: seanhowe:Above: Stan Lee’s open letter about Steve Ditko’s role in the creat
seanhowe: seanhowe: Above: Stan Lee’s open letter about Steve Ditko’s role in the creation of Spider-Man, 1999. After Stan Lee reminisced in Comic Book Marketplace about his inspirations for writing an acclaimed late 1965 issue of Amazing Spider-Man, Steve Ditko broke his long silence. “Stan never knew what was in my plotted stories,” the artist wrote to the magazine’s editors, “until I took in the penciled story, the cover, my script and Sol Brodsky took the material from me and took it all into Stan’s office, so I had to leave without seeing or talking to Stan.” A few months later, after Lee was identified in Time as the creator of Spider-Man, Ditko popped up on that magazine’s letters page, too: “Spider-Man’s existence needed a visual concrete entity,” Ditko wrote. “It was a collaboration of writer-editor Stan Lee and Steve Ditko as co-creators.” This time Lee picked up the phone and called Ditko, for the first time in more than thirty years. “Steve said, ‘Having an idea is nothing, because until it becomes a physical thing, it’s just an idea,’ ” Lee recalled. “And he said it took him to draw the strip, and to give it life, so to speak, or to make it actually some- thing tangible. Otherwise, all I had was an idea. So I said to him, ‘Well, I think the person who has the idea is the person who creates it. And he said, ‘No, because I drew it.’ Anyway, Steve definitely felt that he was the co-creator of Spider-Man. And that was really, after he said it, I saw it meant a lot to him that was fine with me. So I said fine, I’ll tell everybody you’re the co-creator. That didn’t quite satisfy him. So I sent him a letter.” Text from Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. Steve Ditko, 1927-2018. -- source link