By all rights, Steve Ditko should be one of the most famous faces in comics, standing alongside Smilin' Stan Lee in each of the Marvel mastermind's media appearances, photo ops and now-mandatory movie cameos. Ditko is the artist who came up with Spider-Man's historic threads and co-created many of the character's nemeses during the early years, along with relaunching The Hulk and coming up with Dr Strange in collaboration with Lee. And yet, despite being one of the principal architects behind many of Marvel's most famous characters, Ditko remains relatively unknown about comic book fandom. And he likes to keep it that way. Since leaving Marvel, and later skipping out on DC too, Ditko became a complete recluse. He never makes appearances at comic conventions, refuses all interviews (including a request by Jonathan Ross, who made a documentary on the artist a few years ago), and is incredibly camera shy. That's not because he's particularly anxious, or anti-social, just that he likes his privacy and lets his increasingly weird work do the talking. In the place of any real public persona, countless folk tales have popped up around Ditko. There's the story that a couple of fanboys happened upon Ditko outside of a party, and decided to snap a pic of him, knowing that photos of the comic book legend were few and far between. Noticing the flash and the retreating offenders, Ditko hopped in his car, ran them down and stole the camera, or so the legend goes. Then there's the tale of the writer who visited Ditko's New York studio, where he discovered to his horror that the artist was using original Marvel pages he drew - worth upwards of $10,000 dollars - as cutting boards. Or the supposed time when Ditko was informed that kids were dropping acid and reading his trippy Doctor Strange comics, which horrified the teetotal Objectivist? Ditko is the very definition of a living legend in comic books, a man so mysterious that people invent stories to fill in his absence from public life that somehow manage to be even stranger than the comic books he's created over the years. Yep, even the one about the woman who accidentally pulls Satan at a party.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
