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Ditko opposed Lee and supported Kirby's general position Patrick Ford 29 October 2016 A short excerpt from Steve Ditko's essay "Creative Crediting." Notice that Ditko makes a point of saying it was Lee and not Martin Goodman who was responsible for the style of crediting used by Stan Lee. http://ditko.blogspot.com/p/ditko-book-in-print.html CREATIVE CREDITING Copyright 2008 S. Ditko. "Hollywood producers are known for their 'creative' bookkeeping. This is how they can control, manipulate, and convince others of their claimed production costs and losses. ... Stan Lee had his 'creative' credit keeping method. Lee's method served to unfairly upgrade him and downgrade others. It was done simply, easily, by his choice of identifying credit words, using false labels. Lee's crediting method was using words to conceal, manipulate, distort and falsify the factual truth. And the creative crediting stunt was not done by the front office." J David Spurlock: what publication did the essay appear in? Patrick Ford: THE AVENGING MIND. Essential, in print and available here: http://ditko.blogspot.com/p/ditko-book-in-print.html Patrick Ford Before I was aware of Ditko's essays on Stan Lee I was under the impression that Ditko supported Lee and held a grudge against Kirby. That impression came from the cadre of Lee's advocates who follow Ditko's work to this day only because Ditko once worked on Spider-Man. What they did was completely ignore the huge volume of words Ditko has written about Lee and cherry-picked a very small number of words Ditko wrote about Kirby. Any full reading of Ditko's few comments on Kirby shows that Ditko's version of events concerning Spider-Man supports Kirby's version and is completely at odds with Lee's. Unfortunately to this day most fans believe that Ditko supports Lee and has some sort of grudge against Kirby. That is based on the fact Lee's fans have grossly misrepresented the content of a single Ditko essay. Dave Rawlins: Precisely, it's Ditko's ideas on what constitutes a creation that the Lee loyalists have seized upon, ignoring that Ditko's argument does nothing to bolster Lee's claims. Patrick Ford: As Dave says Ditko's "problem" with Kirby is simply that when Kirby speaks of "creating" Spider-Man, Kirby is talking about the undeveloped idea. Kirby has been completely honest that his contribution consisted only of coming up with the basic undeveloped idea for a teenage super hero named Spider-Man who has spider powers. Ditko believes that an undeveloped idea has little or no value. Copyright law would disagree with Ditko. Patrick Ford: Ditko has the same issue with Lee. However, Ditko's issues with Lee run far deeper and cover many different topics. J David Spurlock: Dave Rawlins: Yes, Ditko examines the question from a purely philosophical perspective. I suspect that he has little use for legalistic hair splitting. Meanwhile, since Kirby did actually produce five pages of Spider-Man I would think that under Ditko's definition he would have more claim to being a creator of the initial idea than Lee. Ditko himself says he doesn't know whether it was Kirby or Lee who came up with the name. Hardly a ringing endorsement of Lee's claims. Patrick Ford: Ditko also says that the Kirby Spider-Man was "The Fly." One thing virtually everyone somehow has missed over the years is Lee has never acknowledged the existence of a Kirby Spider-Man based on The Fly. Instead Lee says that Kirby and Ditko worked from the same Lee idea and that Kirby's version was rejected because it was "too heroic" looking. Which of course would only make sense if Kirby's presentation was not based on The Fly since the teenage orphan in Kirby's Spider-Man used a magic ring to transform himself into Spider-Man. Patrick Ford: Here's what Kirby said about Ditko and Spider-Man. J David Spurlock: publication, issue number, date :) Patrick Ford: Radio interview with Tim Skelly, 1971. Michael Hill: Reproduced in TCJ Library Vol 1: Jack Kirby. Patrick Ford: Actually in TCJ Library Vol. 1 the editor Milo George altered Kirby's words. Go have a look and compare. Michael Hill: That's an outrage. How would that be allowed? Where can I find the original? Patrick Ford: I posted the original above. Patrick Ford: I think it was allowed because it wasn't noticed. At least until I noticed it. Patrick Ford: "Actually Steve created Spider-Man, and got him on a roll" When the interview was reprinted it reads: "Actually Steve got Spider-Man on a roll." I wrote Gary Groth concerning this and he said he didn't think it was possible it was a transcription error. Michael Hill: Did Groth fire George's ass when he found out? Patrick Ford: Milo George was no longer working for Fantagraphics by the time I noticed the edit. The Library was published in 2002. TCJ did not make it's archive of back issues available online until 2013. Patrick Ford: A transcription of Tim Skelly's May 14, 1971 radio interview with Kirby was published in the very first issue of THE NOSTALGIA JOURNAL published by Gary Groth in July of 1976. No photo description available. Patrick Ford: Check the edited interview which was published in 2002. "Steve created Spider-Man..." was changed to "Steve got Spider-Man on a roll." Patrick Ford: The cover of that issue:

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