My grandfather, father, and uncle were all Masons, and other than their family nothing made them prouder in their life than that. I own my grandfather’s Masonic ring that he wore for at least the last 50 years of his life. Somewhere he is happy about that and the one thing I know is that I can own that ring, but am never allowed to wear it.
They were all electricians. The entire fraternal side of my family is pretty much nothing, but electricians. Early in my life I tried reading about being an electrician and I read a lot and retained a lot when I was young, but to this day know almost nothing about being an electrician. I’m not even sure how much of being a Mason involves being an electrician.
There is probably nothing I could do in my life to make my father proud than to become a Mason, and I’ve thought about it.
One genius thing about the Masons, and if anything it prevented me from making my father proud by becoming one, is that the Masons have one completely unbreakable rule. They do not recruit. They do not proselytize. No matter how much you want your son to become a Mason you can not push him into learning about being one. They must seek out the information on their own.
That is wicked smart and it was one thing I thought I knew earlier than almost anyone about education. If I could best express the genius of this concept and I have many times I would say.
You could assign a student a book report on their favorite comic book, but once you do they will instantly hate it and stop reading it forever.
My godmother, my great Aunt Rose, had no children and told me over and over again how special I was to her because I was her godson.
I too have no children and I feel the same way about my goddaughter.
Other than marrying for true love there is nothing more in my life that I ever wanted to do than share my love for the things I consider art with my goddaughter. When she was young I wrote an entire book for the express purpose of doing that. I for the most part completely failed, and it was because I was so passionate about this that I ignored what I knew about education. I wanted her to metaphorically be a Mason so bad that I broke the cardinal rule of the Masons, and as a result will forever have to live with the fact that I did not follow their lead.
I slipped some stuff in. When she was young my mother bought her an iPod and I filled it with songs I loved appropriate for children her age as well as I believe one movie.
The movie was the “The Princess Bride” and it was likely the only time in my life with her that I did not fail. It remains her favorite movie.
Tales of the Dread Pirate Roberts
I passed on Spider-Man to her too, but it was a happy accident and another total failure by me.
When she and her brother were young. I bought them each collected editions of comic book classics. I gave the “Amazing Spider-Man” to my nephew and “Wonder Woman” to my niece. Neither of them read their gifts. I had no idea, but Wonder Woman was a horrible choice for my niece. It proved to be a fortunate mistake by for me. My only mistake that made my life better.
My niece just finished her freshman year at the University of Maryland and made the Dean’s List. Now she probably would not have read any book I gave her as a gift out of pure stubbornness, which I am now aware of and respect. My niece is a beautiful girl and always has been, but she has always considered herself something of a tomboy. I’ve always fallen in love with tomboys. So she indeed did not read “Wonder Woman,” which I should have known would happen. She read the “Amazing Spider-Man” collection that I bought my nephew instead.
They were all drawn and co-plotted by Steve Ditko and she loved them, and they were not even in the magnificent color of the “Amazing Spider-Man Masterworks”, which comprise every Spider-Man comic Ditko ever worked on, which I own and treasure. They were cheaply produced and cynically sold black and white versions of the real thing, but she loved them anyway thank God.
Now if I get her attention, which is hard, she is at least willing to hear a little bit about Spider-Man. She loved “Spider-Man: Homecoming.” I did not. She is in love with Tom Holland, who she thinks made the perfect Peter Parker. Stupidly, I tried to tell her that I thought Holland’s Peter Parker was not true to what I felt to be the real thing, even though we both strongly identified with who Peter Parker was. I thought Holland was too immature and silly. We argued about exactly how old Peter Parker was when he became Spider-Man. To me Peter Parker as Spider-Man indeed had a biting sense of humor, but he was not that carefree and joyful. Peter Parker had a lot of shit to deal with back in the day.
I was upset that Holland had his costume and much of its genius devices given to him by Tony Stark. To me the fact that Peter Parker was a science genius and created his own web shooters and his many other effective gadgets was essential.
I was again silly to bicker when I just should have been showing the path, but passionate people often fail due to their passions.
I did my best to tell her that although it was now hard to find and nowhere in the cinematic world that there were two important women in Peter Parker’s life Gwen Stacey and Mary Jane Parker and that there was one big difference between them.
Mary Jane was in love with Spider-Man.
Gwen was in love with Peter Parker.
The difference between those two things is immense to me.
I was Peter Parker. I was scrawny. I was a bookish nerd. I was extremely shy with girls. I was very smart. I was picked on mercilessly by the Flash Thompson’s of the world. No fictional character better embodied both who I was and who I wanted to be more than Peter Parker.
The one last thing I tried to get her to understand, likely with little success, but maybe some day was Steve Ditko, Steve Ditko, Steve Ditko!
No one but the most obsessive Spider-Man comic book nerds know Steve Ditko. For a short time today some people will finally hear about him, they may read about him, but they probably still will not appreciate him like I and many like me obsessively do. To me that and the last details of his life is a crime of such epic proportions that it will just fuel my mourning even more.
Steve Ditko was found dead is his apartment on June 29th. It has just now been reported on July 6th. His dead body was likely not found for two days. He was 90.
Many articles about him will feature this picture.
It will also be an epic crime. Steve Ditko co-created the Spider-Man with Stan Lee. Spider-Man first appeared in “Amazing Fantasy #15.” If you own it in near mint condition, it has sold for over one million dollars. If I were dead broke and on the streets with nothing, but a near mint copy of it, I would indeed sell it, but it would break my heart.
“Amazing Fantasy #15” was released in August of 1962 for the incredible, life changing, bargain barrel price of 12 cents.
But Steve Ditko, who was responsible for so much of the drawing and art and everything it contained did not draw that cover Jack Kirby did.
Stan Lee was the other co-creator of Spider-Man. Stan Lee is now in dire straights. I love Stan Lee too. Stan Lee did not earn nearly the money for his contributions to the multi-billion dollar current industry that is Marvel as he legitimately deserved. However Stan is not only as a writer of comic books, which was his profession, but is also in his real life a garrulous, magnificent, charismatic story teller and legacy builder. That is no knock on Stan Lee, honestly.
Thomas “Amarillo Slim” Preston “won” the main event of the 1972 World Series of Poker. First prize was $80,000 dollars and second prize like Alec Baldwin said famously in “Glengarry Glen Ross” was “You’re Fired!” There were only twelve entrants. Due to the attractive side action only eight actually competed. Preston was sill alive with few chips against Doyle Brunson and William “Puggy” Pearson. Brunson did not want to win. He didn’t want to chase away money from inferior players, and he did not want his taxes audited. For similar reasons, Pearson also did not want to win. So they came to a decision that they would split up the money according to their chip stacks and let Preston “win.”
Preston too was a genius hustler, but he also had an ego. He is credited historically for saying this and who knows he may have even said it.
This is Amarillo Slim’s Memoir: “Amarillo Slim in a World Full of Fat People: The Memoirs of the Greatest Gambler Who Ever Lived “
It is incredibly entertaining and tells you everything you need to know about how to be a hustler. It is filled with hilarious stories designed to build the mythic legend of Amarillo Slim. Ninety-nine percent of memoirs are written to do just that. Some of the stories in that book have elements of truth to them. What percentage and how much is pretty much anyone’s guess, but it does again prove forever what a great hustler Slim was.
Stu Ungar is considered to be by consensus the best Gin player in the history of the world, but the purpose of winning money at cards is indeed based on the above Preston quote. That purpose is to make as much money as possible and to do that takes great talent and a lot of hustling. From what I’ve read and heard mostly via his wonderful biographer, Nolan Dalla, Stu Ungar was the worst hustler ever.
Stu Ungar, the best Gin player in the history of the world, hit Las Vegas as a complete unknown and sought out the best Gin player in town and just destroyed him and likely verbally abused him so badly in doing so that he was soon unable to get into another profitable Gin game ever again. He not only skinned the sheep, he essentially stomped on its dead carcass and bragged about it to whomever he met.
Preston was smarter than that but he did have a big ego, so he was willing to be named World Series of Poker Champion of 1972.
Slim and his personality parlayed that “win” into many appearances on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, where he built his myth and made the game of poker more and more popular each time. He didn’t really cost himself a ton of money with his notoriety, because he was so affable that from then on a lot of rich people would play poker with him and lose money to him just to enjoy his company and say they played with him.
Stan Lee accomplished a ton of truly artistic things, but he was also a great hustler, a great showman, and a great storyteller.
Steve Ditko to my knowledge was not, and from what I can tell never cared to be. Steve Ditko was a pure artist and most pure artists create great art, but often get crushed when credit or fame is involved. To their credit a lot of them don’t care.
Steve Ditko was likely angry about how much credit he got for his contributions to “Amazing Fantasy #15” and indeed “The Amazing Spider-Man” for which he did the art and added to the plots and contributed tons of incredible ideas to until his last issue #38, which came out in July of 1966.
To me his and Lee’s work on Spider-Man from its debut through #38 is high art of the level of anything ever created, and you don’t need to stand in line and wade through tons of people to be unimpressed by it and have your picture taken with it like you do with “The Mona Lisa,” which is why I love pop art and Keith Haring’s ideas about it so much.
Lee had the original idea of a teen superhero and brought it to Jack Kirby, whose additions and adaptation of it despite his great talent were kind of silly.
Steve Ditko was not fond of talking and even if he had been, no one can out talk Stan Lee, so I believe he rarely tried. I believe indeed the older he got the less he talked to anyone.
He did apparently say this. “The Spider-Man pages Stan showed me were nothing like the published character. In fact, the only drawings of Spider-Man were on the splash and at the end Kirby had the guy leaping at you with a web gun… Anyway, the first five pages took place in the home, and the kid finds a ring and turns into Spider-Man.”
“One of the first things I did was to work up a costume. A vital, visual part of the character. I had to know how he looked … before I did any breakdowns. For example: A clinging power so he wouldn’t have hard shoes or boots, a hidden wrist-shooter versus a web gun and holster, etc. … I wasn’t sure Stan would like the idea of covering the character’s face but I did it because it hid an obviously boyish face. It would also add mystery to the character….”
I have no idea who came up with the spider bite by a radioactive spider, but it should never be forgotten that so many Marvel heroes gained their abilities via radiation, likely due to the fact that every child was being raised to practice hiding under their desk in the case of nuclear annihilation.
What was his and what was Lee’s will be argued forever, but it’s pretty undeniable how epic Ditko’s contributions really were and how responsible he was for me loving Peter Parker as much as I did and do.
Just solely as an artist, you can tell a Steve Ditko page from a hundred miles away. He often used a lot of small square panels on entire pages, which sounds “within the box,” but nothing about his Spider-Man work is anything close to that.
The consensus among the “comic book nerds” is that his zenith was in #33, the final issue of a three part story called “If this be my destiny ..”
Here it is described as “The Greatest Spider-Man Story Ever Told”
In it, Peter Parker/Spider-Man is trapped under a ton of heavy machinery, so trapped that there is no possible way for even someone as strong as him to get free.
Superheroes always get themselves trapped in absurdly impossible, escape proof situations. Watch any of the Adam West “Batman” episodes or watch Mike Myers mock such situations hilariously in “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery.”
Everyone knows the stale tripe by now. The hero will escape and win 999 times out of 1000, in fact likely far more often than that. If they do fail, they will die and be soon resurrected just to boost sales figures. True artists working in a pop medium does have its downside.
The thing about mostly Ditko’s, but yes Lee’s work here too, is that it isn’t a super ingenious trap set by a super smart super villain. It is a simple, treacherous situation, precipitated by bad luck, with huge stakes, that is conquered not merely by the hero’s power, but through sheer will motivated by undying genuine love, and no one ever could have drew it and depicted it better.
To me the loss of Ditko from Spider-Man, was unfathomable and impossible to underestimate.
When I first got to Northwestern University in 1984, while everyone else was drinking and meeting girls, I was in the their library reading the first 200 issues of “The Amazing Spider-Man” and I don’t regret a second of it.
Nothing really matters to me more than Spider-Man’s inception through the death of Gwen Stacy, which occurred in issue #122.
After that I would still read about Peter Parker’s adventures, but remember what I tried to tell my niece. Gwen Stacey did not love Spider-Man she loved Peter Parker. Nothing after her death meant nearly as much to me. Their love story, as was the case in my life, was a way sadder tragedy to me at least than “Romeo and Juliet.”
I read tons of comics when I was a kid, and almost all because of their titles. It wasn’t until I hit 16 or so that I began to understood that the truly great ones had nothing to do with who they featured and everything to do with who wrote and drew them.
So I treasure every “Amazing Spider-Man” through #122, but all of them are not equal.
When Steve Ditko worked on and did the art on “The Amazing Spider-Man.” Peter Parker was a scrawny, bookish dork both in person and in costume.
After Ditko quit, John Romita took over and that ended. The John Romita Peter Parker was a matinee idol and muscular. Gone forever was that guy, who was exactly me, and gone forever was the way that superhero distinctively moved and fought.
Today, for at least a day, Steve Ditko will get his due.
The above is only what he meant to me. Today, people will get lost in the arguments over who deserves credit for what. Even here, the fact that his work on “The Amazing Spider-Man” and his feud with Stan will muddle up the fact that the work that did mean so much to me was just the tip of the iceberg of his lifelong catalog. I’ve read more about him than most. Everything in this essay by me came mostly from what I will never let leave me head.
The only sort of bad thing I can say bad about Steve Ditko is the fact that he loved Ayn Rand for a long time and did work based on that love, but artists are artists and the good ones do whatever they want and like Miles Davis and Bob Dylan, so did he.
It doesn’t matter that I knew more about Stan Ditko yesterday than perhaps 99% of the world. Better writers with less knowledge and less personal reasons will be able to scour the internet and write more fact based, perhaps better detailed accounts of his career than me. I’m fine with that. Like most obituaries 1000 already had been pre-written waiting for today, only needing the sad ending to complete them, but today I don’t really care about that.
The only thing I ever cared about was that people understood why Steve Ditko meant so much to me, that they actually know who he was, and everything about him. Sadly, only his demise will cause that to happen, and it may fade quickly with news of whoever dies tomorrow.
It doesn’t matter. I am sad by his death, but overjoyed that people will read about him even if they just scan a badly written article put out by a pathetic, unromantic site.
All I care about is what I tried to tell my niece. Steve Ditko, Steve Ditko, Steve Ditko!
I’ll end with my favorite quote about my true feelings about art.
Bob Dylan: Great paintings shouldn’t be in museums. Museum’s are cemeteries. Paintings should be on the walls of restaurants, in dime stores, in gas stations, in men’s rooms … Music is the only thing that’s in tune with what’s happening. It’s not in book form, it’s not on the stage … It’s not the bomb that has to go, man, it’s the museums.
A SuperTight ™ Tribute!