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Fans ignoring Ditko and twisting his words Patrick Ford 22 September 2016 Ditko's TSK-TSK essay and a portion of an insightful column by comics scholar R.C. Harvey. I recall purchasing COMIC BOOK MARKETPLACE #63 and reading Ditko's letter concerning the "lifting sequence" in ASM #33. As mentioned in the TSK-TSK piece by Ditko no one else said a word. At the time that struck me as amazing. Steve Ditko had written in to call Lee out for telling a blatant lie and while the magazine did print his letter there was no mention of the letter anywhere in the magazine. You might think that a letter from Ditko would possibly have been mentioned on the magazine cover considering how directly Ditko contradicted Lee, but nowhere is the letter mentioned. Not on the cover. Not in the editors notes column at the front of the magazine. And not anywhere on the letters pages. Here's a funny thing about fandom. If a person has never read Ditko's essays and only knows of them via word of mouth the average fan "knows" that Ditko has been critical of Kirby and supports Lee's version of events. They know that despite the fact nothing could be further from the truth. So how is it they know this? They know it because fans of Lee have cherry-picked and quoted out of context a few words Ditko has written about the Kirby Spider-Man. And then they ignore many thousands of words Ditko has written about Lee, while hardly mentioning Kirby at all. The fact is Ditko (read the quotes from the R.C. Harvey comments on this post) supports Kirby's version of events and totally contradicts Lee's. And yet Lee's defense force has twisted the facts to such an extent that the "knowledge" of the uninformed is that Ditko supports Lee and has some kind of grudge against Kirby. Chris Tolworthy: And as far as I can tell, Kirby supports Ditko's version of events 100%. Or 99% maybe. Kirby's reference to inventing Spiderman seems to refer to the initial concept only, and maybe the initial versions of the first issues, but Kirby was clear that Ditko deserves credit for making the title a hit, and that's what counts. Others can correct me I am sure, I'm just working from memory. Patrick Ford: To my knowledge Kirby has never claimed he created the Ditko costume. He says, "I created the character. I created the costume." He's clearly talking about his Spider-Man. Patrick Ford: All Kirby has ever said is he brought Lee a Spider-Man and obviously that character had a costume which was created by Kirby. Patrick Ford: Chris Tolworthy one thing which intrigues me is that prior to seeing Ditko's numerous essays I was under the impression that Ditko sided with Lee and held a grudge against Kirby. Once I saw the essays it was obvious that Ditko backs up Kirby 99%. He only falls short by saying he does not know if certain Spider-Man ideas and the name came from Lee or Kirby. Which is an interesting thing to mention because Ditko never talked to Kirby about Spider-Man and it was Lee who told Ditko about any Spider-Man ideas. So isn't it curious that Ditko felt the need to add he didn't know if those ideas were Kirby's? Patrick Ford: Similarly until seeing more of the Dick Ayers autobiographical comic book I had only ever heard that in it Ayers accused Kirby of stealing the Rawhide Kid assignment from Ayers. No fan who mentioned that ever mentioned any of the criticisms of Lee either veiled or direct. Patrick Ford: Here's another example. Groth's later comment that some of Kirby's comments should be "taken with a grain of salt" is a comic book meme. Every fan of Lee knows it and repeats it. And yet taken with a grain of salt does not designate a lie. It means is that when Stan Lee says he has spoken at every university in the Western world the reader should take that the same way as Kirby saying he never inked anything, or Lee never wrote a word of dialogue. Chris Tolworthy: Plus Groth is not God. He could only say what he thought at the time. It is common for fans to think that the people close to the work must have a special insight. No, they only see what they see. That is why we need historians, Historians come along years later, and have access to more sources: sources that were not available at the time, for whatever reason. It's like when a fan says to a writer "what exactly did you mean by X" and the writer honestly can't remember, as he did ten jobs that day, forty years ago. It is the job of historians to do the remembering for them, by piecing together the past from actual documents, not from how it felt to be in a particular place. Historians bring perspective. History and recollections are not the same thing. I know I keep harping on about this, but fandom is a religion. It is possible to be completely dazzled, overwhelmed by the evidence at one point, then years later stand back and see the same material in a completely opposite light. While on the topic, I sometimes worry about treating Evanier as the final word on Kirby. Evanier is an extremely important source, obviously! No history of Kirby would be complete without reading everything Evanier says and grilling him repeatedly. But he is just a human, he was busy, he only saw what he saw, and concluded what he concluded using the same fallible mental tools we all have. None of us have perfect minds. Patrick Ford: And while every Lee advocate knows about the grains of salt in Kirby's comments none of them know what Groth said about Lee in the same interview. Patrick Ford: It just seems to me that "obvious bullshit" outweighs a grain of salt. Dave Rawlins: Hopefully Ditko and Snyder will eventually collect all of Ditko's essays on the subject of Marvel in one volume. Dave Rawlins: Lee has been accorded an inordinate amount of slack by Fandom because of the semi humorous tone he's taken in matters of credit since day one, as well as his well worn "bad memory" excuse. Ditko has written on both ploys in his essays. Dave Rawlins: The great thing about Ditko's essays is they are extremely thorough, there's no mistaking the points Ditko is making. Nobody can say that an interviewer goaded Ditko into this or that statement. Patrick Ford: Dave Rawlins, There is no mistaking what he writes. He is so aware that his words will be twisted that he not only nails down his arguments with nails spaced and inch apart, but after that he coats the edges with a thick layer of pitch. And what do you know. Lee's fans still twist his words to mean the exact opposite of what he wrote. Dave Rawlins: True, that is if they even bother to read what Ditko writes. Of late the True Believers modus operandi appears to be to totally ignore what Ditko writes.

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