Post by Admin on Jul 7, 2018 0:33:15 GMT
www.deadline.com/2018/07/steve-ditko-dead-spider-man-creator-doctor-strange-stan-lee-marvel-1202422534/
Steve Ditko Dies: Comics Artist Who Created Spider-Man & Doctor Strange With Stan Lee Was 90
Steve Ditko, a comic-book artist who co-created the Marvel characters Spider-Man and Doctor Strange with Stan Lee, has died in New York. He was 90. The NYPD public information officer told Deadline that he was found in his apartment on June 29 and likely had been dead for a couple of days.
Ditko studied art at the Cartoonists and Illustrators School under early Batman artist Jerry Robinson. His first two published comic books — Fantastic Fears 5 and Black Magic 27 — were for DC and drawn in 1953. The iconic Spider-Man character first appeared in 1962 in issue #15 of Amazing Fantasy.
During that span, Ditko also worked for Charlton Comics, where he had full autonomy over his creations. In 1955 he met Lee, then an editor at Atlas Comics, which was run by Lee’s uncle Martin Goodman. The company would morph into Timely and soon to Marvel Comics.
Ditko started working for Marvel and would continue to do so for the next two decades, while also drawing for Charlton. For the latter, he bowed the Captain Atom character in 1960’s Space Adventures #33. Spider-Man’s arrival two years later, followed by the 1963 debut of Doctor Strange, would help launch the so-called “Marvel Age of Comics.”
Ditko would go on to draw such characters as Blue Beetle and The Question, both from 1967-68. Ditko would follow Charlton editor Dick Giordano to DC Comics in 1968, where he and writer Steve Skeates created the Hawk and the Dove, who first appeared in Showcase #75. Ditko left DC in 1969 and would work exclusively for Charlton and other small indie publishers into the mid-1970s.
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