Comic book fans who receive the G4 gaming TV channel might want to catch a current edition of their series, Game Makers, entitled "Ultimate Spider-Man." Though it's something of an infomercial for an Activision Spider-Man game, the first part is a history of the character and it's one of those strange/awkward bits of double-talk journalism that vacillates between treating Stan Lee (above right) as the sole creator of the comic and giving Steve Ditko (above left) some of his props. Ditko is acknowledged mostly in a brief interview with Erik Larsen, who is to be congratulated, though I might quibble with his statement, "All of his [Spider-Man's] major foes were created during Steve Ditko's run." Uh, how about the Kingpin? Or The Rhino, whose first appearance — five months after John Romita replaced Ditko — was selected by the show's producers to illustrate the quote. (I'm being too fussy here, I know. I should focus on how pleased I was that Ditko was acknowledged as much as he was. Okay, forget I said anything.)
There's an occasional problem of semantics in creator credits…one which has caused some anger and accusations of credit-grabbing. The usual, accepted creator credit for Spider-Man is "Stan Lee and Steve Ditko." Assuming that's correct, is it wrong to refer to "Spider-Man Creator Stan Lee?" Is that giving him sole credit? A few weeks ago, a journalist who'd done that in an article argued to me that it was correct; that it did not assert there were no other creators. It was, he said, like making reference to "Baltimore Oriole Rafael Palmeiro."
"That doesn't mean he's the only Baltimore Oriole," the guy said and he's right in the sense of being literally accurate. He's also wrong in terms of making sure the reader does not get a false impression even when the language is technically correct. Everyone knows baseball teams don't have one player apiece so they're not going to misunderstand. Not everyone knows that Stan Lee did not create Spider-Man all by his lonesome. So it's misleading…and it's also a short step from "Spider-Man creator Stan Lee" to "Spider-Man was created by Stan Lee." That mistake has been made way too many times.
This episode of Game Makers airs several times over the next few days. Here's a schedule.