Comments on: The Art of Ditko http://ulyssesseen.com/landing/2010/03/the-art-of-ditko/ Online graphic adaptation of the 1922 edition of James Joyce's ULYSSES Fri, 18 May 2012 18:08:00 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v= By: robberry237 http://ulyssesseen.com/landing/2010/03/the-art-of-ditko/comment-page-1/#comment-2145 robberry237 Sun, 07 Mar 2010 18:04:31 +0000 http://ulyssesseen.com/landing/?p=2893#comment-2145 Recently, for another lengthy project other than this one, I spend a lot of time researching the complete Marvel Universe prior to 1965. One thing that really stuck out was how unique and completely cohesive the worlds of Spider-man and Doctor Strange are compared to the other titles. Ditko had a handedness that was immediately recognizable from all the other early Marvel artists but through which even the oddest environments seemed to work somehow. He sets up and works within those environments a lot more like a strip cartoonist would, like Milton Caniff or Walt Kelly for instance, than the kind of work Jack Kirby was leading the rest of the Marvel house style towards. Kirby's work of that period was much more about motion, power and melodrama and the whole of the comic, everything drawn in every panel, was in service to those elements of the story. Cartoons as a kind of diagram for what makes the story work. Ditko's work, while not as illustrative or academically-centered as someone like Burne Hogarth or Hal Foster, gives us a window instead of a diagram to follow. Very few people are working that way in the mainstream these days, sorry to say. -Rob Recently, for another lengthy project other than this one, I spend a lot of time researching the complete Marvel Universe prior to 1965. One thing that really stuck out was how unique and completely cohesive the worlds of Spider-man and Doctor Strange are compared to the other titles. Ditko had a handedness that was immediately recognizable from all the other early Marvel artists but through which even the oddest environments seemed to work somehow. He sets up and works within those environments a lot more like a strip cartoonist would, like Milton Caniff or Walt Kelly for instance, than the kind of work Jack Kirby was leading the rest of the Marvel house style towards.

Kirby’s work of that period was much more about motion, power and melodrama and the whole of the comic, everything drawn in every panel, was in service to those elements of the story. Cartoons as a kind of diagram for what makes the story work. Ditko’s work, while not as illustrative or academically-centered as someone like Burne Hogarth or Hal Foster, gives us a window instead of a diagram to follow. Very few people are working that way in the mainstream these days, sorry to say.
-Rob

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