Rolling Stone has posted an article about the personal side of Steve Ditko, co-creator of Spider-Man and Doctor Strange (among others) and one of the most gifted and personally-secretive figures in the comic book industry. Since he died in 2018, the world has learned much about him through his family and will learn more.

I read the piece on the Rolling Stone site yesterday and there was much in it that I thought needed additional context or correction. Since I was so busy, I decided I'd get back to it today and write something here…but now it's behind a paywall. I don't want to pay to reread it or to write a lot about an article that you folks can't read once without paying. If you are a subscriber, you can read it here.

Three things I remember from it that I can write about: One is that it's long been part of The Official History that a rift developed between Ditko and Stan Lee that at some point led to Stan refusing to talk to Steve. That, in turn, led to Steve ultimately quitting because, as he put it in one of his much-later writings…

Why should I continue to do all these monthly issues, original story ideas, material, for a man who is too scared, too angry over something, to even see, talk to me?

Ditko had been handing his work in to production manager Sol Brodsky who, in turn, passed it on to Stan. And what he wrote may be true but…

1. Both Stan and Sol told me it was the other way around; that Ditko refused to talk to Stan and would deliver the work to the office on the days when Stan was not there. It was no secret that Stan worked at home on certain days of the week.
2. My pal Steve Sherman and I spent an afternoon with Ditko in 1970 — not all that long after he quit — and he didn't say anything about that. His stated reasons for leaving Marvel then were frustrations with Stan changing his stories, Stan being too often credited as the sole creator and writer of comics that Ditko largely plotted, and with the company heads not making good on promises that he would share in the merchandising and profitability of Spider-Man. And…
3. I met with Stan in that office. If he was in there and didn't want to talk with me but I wanted to talk with him, I would have just walked into his office and confronted him. I don't think he kept his door locked but if he did and Ditko tried to see him, I think Ditko would have mentioned that.

As I said, Ditko's version may be true. I'm not saying it isn't; just that maybe it shouldn't be accepted at face value. Then there's this…

It's also part of the legendary tale of the creation of Spider-Man that Jack Kirby started drawing the first story and Stan stopped him after five pages and turned the job over to Ditko because Stan wanted the character to be a teenager and felt Jack was drawing the character too muscular and heroic. I don't buy that. Here's just some of what's wrong with that narrative…

1. Before Jack started drawing that first story, he drew a presentation piece showing what the character would look like. Stan had okayed it.
2. The story then was about a young orphan kid (roughly early teens) who lived with his aunt and uncle and who gained the powers to turn into the mighty, adult super-hero Spiderman (sans hyphen) at will thanks to a magic ring from a mysterious stranger. It was much the same way young orphan kid Billy Batson could turn when needed into the mighty, adult super-hero Captain Marvel or the way young orphan kid Tommy Troy could turn when needed into the mighty, adult super-hero The Fly. Jack wasn't supposed to be drawing a super-powered teenager. That wasn't the concept then…and a young kid turning into an only-slightly-older teenage super-hero is kind of a weird premise for a comic.

3. Jack and Steve agreed that Jack drew five pages before he was stopped and that the costumed Spiderman only appeared once on those pages — in the first panel. But if that's what Stan wanted, that first panel could have been redrawn by Ditko when he inked it.
4. It could also have been redrawn by Jack. Stan was never shy about asking Jack to redraw things — it was a source of frequent friction between the two men — and he apparently didn't even ask this time. He just decided not to use the five pages…which, by the way, do not seem to exist anymore. Ditko in one article said he thought he threw them away.

5. And Jack could so draw teenage figures. Look at Johnny Storm in Fantastic Four.  In fact, Ditko drew a cover for Amazing Fantasy #15 — the first time the comic-buying public would see the new hero — and Stan tossed it and had Jack draw a new one making Spider-Man more powerful and dynamic.  He also later had Jack redraw the Spider-Man figures that Ditko drew on the covers of Amazing Spider-Man #10 and #35.
6. And lastly for this list, Stan did not hand the same story to Ditko and tell him to redraw it making the character younger. They changed much of the concept of the strip. He was no longer a young kid. He was not able to turn into an adult super-hero at will. There was no magic ring or mysterious stranger. He was instead a teenager (all the time) who had super powers (all the time) and how he got those powers was completely different.

Why the changes?  We may never know for sure but I have what I think is a good guess.  Ditko once wrote…

Stan said Spider-Man would be a teenager with a magic ring that could transform him into an adult hero — Spider-Man. I said it sounded like The Fly, which Joe Simon had done for Archie Publications. I didn't believe Jack was involved with that feature because the issues I had seen lacked the usual Kirby flair.

I'm thinking someone was worried about a lawsuit. Simon was quite litigious and so were the folks who owned Archie. My guess is that once alerted by Ditko, Stan or someone at Marvel looked into it and decided that their new strip bore too much resemblance to The Fly. Simon was somewhat litigious and so was John Goldwater, who owned the Archie company. Ergo, the theory sez, they decided the strip required major changing. Logical deduction, right? Right — but it has this hole in it: I asked both Stan and Jack and neither man recalled that as a concern.

Which doesn't mean it wasn't the reason.  Anyway, I think that Stan didn't decide to make the new spidery hero a full-time teen until after Kirby's pages were discarded and they needed to differentiate the strip from what Simon and Kirby had done.  Something is wrong with the "Jack made him too muscular" explanation. (Note how in Ditko's above-quoted recollection, he recalls Stan saying the strip Jack was then drawing was about "a teenager with a magic ring that could transform him into an adult hero.")

And the third thing that the Rolling Stone article said that brings up another theory is the story that Stan and Steve did that first Spider-Man story in Amazing Fantasy #15 knowing it was the final issue so they got experimental with it. My theory — and it's not just mine; others came up with this — is that they didn't find out it was the final issue until well after it had gone to press.

Which is why #15 tells you twice — once at the end of the Spider-Man story and again on the letters page — to make sure to not miss future issues. It does not say — and this was the kind of hype Stan excelled in — "This is the last issue unless you readers get together and buy lots of copies and tell your friends and floor our publisher with letters demanding more Spider-Man!"

What some of us believe is that after finishing that 11-page Spider-Man origin story that ran in Amazing Fantasy #15, Stan and Steve created a 14-page Spider-Man story about an astronaut that was planned for Amazing Fantasy #16. Then they at least started on a 14-page Spider-Man story for Amazing Fantasy #17 about a villain called The Vulture. In each issue, the lead Spider-Man story would have been followed by a couple of the short non-series fantasy stories that had appeared previously in that comic like the two non-series fantasy stories that ran in #15 after the first Spider-Man story.

But before #16 went to press, the company's publisher Martin Goodman decided to pull the plug on Amazing Fantasy. This would have been before he had any sales figures on #15 and it would not have been unusual for Goodman to do such a thing. He did tend to cancel a book, then see later sales reports and decide to bring it back…especially when he had purchased-but-unpublished material on the shelf.

Soon after, he got some encouraging response (sales figures and letters) for #15 and since he had that already-paid-for Spider-Man material on the shelf, he okayed a new comic called Amazing Spider-Man. #1 featured the astronaut story plus a newly-concocted ten-page Spider-Man story to fill out the issue. And #2 featured the Vulture story followed by another newly-created ten-page Spider-Man story. That would explain why Amazing Spider-Man didn't feature one book-length story — like all the other Marvel super-hero titles did in their first issues and almost every one thereafter — until #3.

There were a few other things in the Rolling Stone piece that I might have something to say about. It's overall a good article and its author reveals some things I'd never heard before. If it comes out from behind the paywall, make sure you read it. It might even be worth buying a subscription. I just think there are some illogical things about the way the story of how Spider-Man was created is usually told.

Mark's busy today. There will be something here before nightfall but probably not much. See if there's anything else on the Internet to read today. I hear there's some stuff somewhere about politics, porn and recipes.

Robert Rowe sent me this question about It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World…

Some Internet search results say Bob Hope was unable to appear in the film because a studio he was under contract to forbid it. Is that also your understanding?

I could give you a short answer but I don't do that when I can give a long, wandering answer. What I know about this and how I know it is buried deep within the following. But first, I need to post another one of these…

Now then: In 1980, I left (on good terms and not forever), my long-term employment with Sid and Marty Krofft. I turned down writing their new series, Barbara Mandrell and the Mandrell Sisters and took a job on a non-Krofft series done at a different studio. I wasn't away from them for long. They decided, not because of me, to tape the Mandrell show at the studio where I was now working and moved into offices just down the hall from mine. Suddenly, I was writing on my new gig and also helping out unofficially on the Mandrell series…all this while also story-editing and writing Richie Rich cartoons for Hanna-Barbera and whatever I was then doing in comics.

So one day, Marty Krofft walks into my office and says, "Mark, I need you to help me out with something. Can you come with me?" Marty was a hard guy to say "no" to and saying "yes" had usually turned out to be the right answer. So I went with him and as we walked, he explained that they had a guest star who was there that moment to tape a spot with Barbara Mandrell and also one for another show the Kroffts were producing concurrently — a series of syndicated specials for the Oral Roberts Foundation.

Things were running behind on the stage where both shows were taping and this guest star was waiting in his dressing room, getting impatient. Marty said, "I need you to baby-sit him for a half-hour or so…just keep him company." But he didn't tell me what star I was going to be baby-sitting.

Then he took me into the dressing room and said, "Bob, this is my head writer, Mark Evanier. He's one of your biggest fans and he knows absolutely everything you've ever done." I shook hands with the star and he said, "Great! If the writing business doesn't work out, he can make a good living as a blackmailer."

And then Marty left me there with Bob Hope.

This was not the first time someone had done this to me. Marty did it to me once with Jerry Lewis and another time with Sid Caesar. And both Marty and my friend Susan Buckner did it to me on separate occasions with Milton Berle. Oh — and a producer I worked with named Bonny Dore did it to me with Dick Clark and later, Dick did it to me with Henny Youngman and James Coburn and I could probably think of other instances.

I wound up talking with Mr. Hope for about twenty minutes — about his movies, about his co-stars, about whatever came to mind. I told him how I used to sneak in to watch him tape his specials at NBC Burbank.  Every time Hope got a line wrong, he'd yell at his cue card guy, Barney McNulty, like it was Barney's fault.  When I mentioned that, he said to me, "We paid Barney real well to take the blame because I never learned how to read."  Then he told me some affectionate stories about Barney.

I asked him about the Bob Hope comic book that DC Comics published for eighteen years and he told me he had a complete collection and someday, might get around to reading one of them. And of course, I asked him about It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and why he wasn't in it. His reply went roughly like this…

Yeah, they really wanted me in it. Stanley Kramer must've called me a half-dozen times and I wanted to do it. All my friends were in it. The trouble was I was under contract to a movie studio at the time. I owed them a picture and I kept turning down these terrible scripts they sent me and they were getting impatient. So when I went to them and asked if I could do a bit part in Stanley's picture, they said, "Not until you commit to a start date on that picture you owe us" and I wasn't about to say yes to one of those lousy scripts.

I also asked him if he had any idea what he would have done in the film if he had been in it. He had no idea. I'm fairly certain it would have been a quick cameo that would have been written expressly for him. He would not have played a part that someone else played in the movie.

That was all I got out of him and his answer raised some questions I was not prepared to ask at that moment. Mad World began filming on April 26, 1962. At the time, Hope was filming Critic's Choice for Warner Brothers and then the next film he made was Call Me Bwana, which began filming in September of that year. Call Me Bwana was made for a company called Danjaq that made a lot of the early James Bond films and released its movies through United Artists — the same company that released It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

I can't quite figure this out. Why would Hope sign to do a picture with Danjaq if they didn't have a script he wanted to do? Or if the company he owed a picture to was United Artists, why wouldn't they let him do a cameo in a film they were distributing? At the time he officially committed to Call Me Bwana, Mad World was still in production…so I don't get it. Maybe Hope was committed to yet another company, they refused his request to do Mad World and later that deal was canceled…but then he still would have had time to do a day on Mad World before he started.  Or maybe…

Never mind.  I give up. This might be a time to fall back on the simplest explanation which would be that what Hope told me wasn't the truth or at least the whole truth…but that's what he said and he apparently said it to others who asked.  Make of it what you will. People do sometimes make up simple explanations when they don't want to give you the complicated or embarrassing real one.  I suspect some contractual commitment prevented him doing the cameo but it's a lot more complicated than we could imagine from afar.

Lastly, before someone writes to ask what Bob Hope was like in our somewhat-brief encounter:  He was very much like the way Dave Thomas played him in "Play It Again, Bob." That was (in my opinion) the most brilliant of the many brilliant sketches on the old SCTV show and it really nailed the Hope I met. A very clever writer I knew named Jeffrey Barron — who wrote for SCTV and also for Hope — told me he worked on the sketch but he was not a credited writer on the program at that time. Someone familiar with the off-stage Hope had to have written it.

I'll post a link to the sketch here for you but first, I need to insert one of these…

That said, I've embedded the entire episode of SCTV below but the link is configured so on most browsers, it should start playing with the sketch in question. "Play It Again, Bob" is in two parts with a commercial break in the middle but stick with it through that. And if you want to watch the entire episode, move the little slider back to the beginning. Thanks to Robert Rowe for jogging me into telling a story I've never told here before. Amazingly, I still have some…

Just got an e-mail from someone eager to hear my "take" on this morning's Supreme Court decision which Trump backers are hailing as some sort of "Get Out of Jail Free" card for their boy. My "take" is that I'd like to hear more analysis from legal scholars who've had more than twenty minutes to read the decision and it would be nice if they'd kind of "peer review" each other before going on CNN.

For future reference: My "take" will always be not to panic over political matters, especially this year. I think even Joe Biden in a coma would be a better president than Donald Trump and I think there's plenty of time for the roller coaster that is Politics to go up and down and up and down and up and down (etc.) a few steep hills. We are in very-much-uncharted territory with this election. Very few precedents apply. A great many scenarios are possible. It all changed a lot the day Trump was convicted of 34 felonies. It all changed a lot the night Joe Biden seemed lost at the first debate. There will be more moments when it all changes a lot.

And if/when you read political views on this site, always remember what I do for a living. I do not practice law. I do not mingle with Heads of state or important legislators or functionaries in the political world. The next items on my "to do" list are to compose a letters page for the Groo the Wanderer comic book and then to decide what script the actors are going to read on the Cartoon Voices panels at this year's Comic-Con International.

John Oliver and his crew are taking a few weeks off by they've left us a gift. The entirety of Season 3 has been uploaded to YouTube. Go watch 'em. Download if you know how.

Here's the third episode of the mid-seventies revival of Laugh-In without the show's original hosts, Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, or any host at all. This one guest stars Frank Sinatra and it originally aired Wednesday, November 2, 1977. The guy you'll see hanging out in some scenes with Frank is "Jilly" Rizzo, a Sinatra crony who was the proprietor of Jilly's Saloon, a popular place in New York. They guy you'll see with the bushy black mustache is Sergio Aragonés, an Evanier crony who draws a popular comic book…

From Steve Aldred comes this question…

I do have a question for you that I hope you can answer, it relates in a way to the question a few weeks back about Joe Kubert's covers for Jack Kirby's final Kamandi issues after he returned to Marvel. When Jack Kirby came back to Marvel in the mid 70's he was soon doing a lot of covers for them across most of their superhero titles.

Was this simply to let the wider Marvel readership know that Kirby was back at the company or was there another reason for it? As with Kubert's Kamandi covers, I never thought that they were the best of Kirby's work especially where he had been asked to draw some of the newer characters that he was obviously not familiar with.

Marvel had Jack doing covers because the folks in charge then — and this would have included Stan — felt that Jack was their best choice for the job. Simple as that. He did not design most of them. In most cases, he was given a sketch that had been generated in the office and approved there…something drawn by Marie Severin, Dave Cockrum, Al Milgrom or one of about a half-dozen others. When a cover featured characters that Jack didn't know, they'd send him reference — or at least, they were supposed to. He told me that often, the reference material was insufficient or missing altogether. And they were almost never for stories he knew.

I agree with you that these were not the best Kirby work. My admiration for Jack's skills is huge but I don't think he drew many memorable covers after about late 1967 when Marvel increasingly began giving him roughs by other artists. This was not long after Carmine Infantino took over as the guy in charge of covers at DC. Previously, each DC editor had supervised the designs for his or her comics, usually working with the artist who would do the finished art or at least, the pencils for the finished art.

There was some panic at DC around 1966 when Marvel was gaining in sales. Most of the folks in power at DC then thought the Marvel books were badly-written and badly-drawn — or at least, nowhere as good as the concurrent DC product. They had to come up with an explanation for why readers were increasingly opting for Marvel over DC and Infantino supplied one they could accept: Marvel's covers, he said, were simply more exciting.

DC's too often had the hero standing around uttering word balloons that described the premise of the story. Marvel's had the heroes in action. Here are two covers that were on newsstands in February of 1965. Which one do you think would attract more buyers?

That was why Infantino was brought into Management and assigned to design or at least supervise all their covers. In response, Marvel began having more and more covers designed in the office — this at a time when Kirby for personal reasons was trying to cut back his trips into town to the office.

So more and more, Marvel covers started with Stan Lee working with an in-house artist — most often then, Marie Severin — to generate a sketch that would be finished (usually) by someone else. As good an artist as Jack was, I don't think you got the best out of him by having him draw a cover that someone else had laid out…especially a cover for a story he hadn't read and in which he had no emotional involvement.

What he handed in was always workmanlike and professional but he just didn't have the same level of inspiration even when it was for a comic where he'd written and drawn the insides. Even in those cases, he usually drew the cover long after he'd finished the story and it had left his mind. Jack was always about the story he was doing now.

Also, I think that at the time — and this had nothing to do with Jack — comic book covers from most publishers were getting too cluttered with word balloons and blurbs and story titles and logos that distracted from the art instead of enhancing it. I don't recall many exciting covers by anyone in the mid-to-late seventies, a topic we've discussed at those "Cover Story" panels I moderate at comic conventions. As my amigo Sergio Aragonés has said, "If you need to put a lot of words on a cover, it's not a very good cover."

But I agree with you: I don't think Jack's covers during the period we're discussing were him at his best.

How do I feel about rules that The Ten Commandments must be posted in every classroom? Seems to me like this would be a good time to remember the words of one Mr. George Carlin…

If you're still interested in fact-checking of last Thursday's debate, one of the best fib-exposing websites — factcheck.org — has this pretty good report. And they also fact-checked the other "debate" last Thursday, which was the shadow version by independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

There are an awful lot of online discussions 'n' debates as to whether Joe Biden should step aside and let someone else be the Democratic nominee. I also see a wide range of articles and arguments as to how possible — legally or practically — it would be to make that switch. Not that I have any say in the matter but I'm on the fence because I lack a couple of pieces of vital information. One big one would be how often he's like the guy we saw on the debate stage in Georgia on Thursday night and how often he's like the guy we saw in North Carolina on Friday.

I think it would also be worth seeing some poll numbers over the next week or two before deciding. We may think Biden's numbers will take a big plunge because of his debate performance but we also thought Trump's would if he was convicted of 34 felonies or if it came out that he'd cheated on his wife with a porn star. If nothing else, we should be learning that these days, the poll numbers do not always do what a person might expect.

For those of us who think it is vital that Donald Trump never again resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, I think it comes down to this: If we're prepared to trust Joe Biden with being President for the next four years, we oughta trust him to do the right thing as to staying in the race or stepping aside. One of the reasons I've supported him is because I think he's the kind of man who would put The Country ahead of his personal concerns. Unlike his opponent.

There was a speech given today in North Carolina. Watch at least a few minutes of it and then I have a question to ask…

Where the fuck was this guy last night?

I never met the man but I had the privilege to see Martin Mull perform here and there, now and then. I recall him popping up as an unbilled opening act at times for someone I went to see…and he was usually better than the someone I had gone to see. He was laid-back, calming, very much audience-friendly and extremely funny. In one appearance — at the Ice House in Pasadena, I think — there were some folks in the crowd who'd come to see just him, not the headliner, and had brought along Martin Mull albums to get them signed.

That was the first time I knew he'd done record albums and I rushed out and bought them. They were very good and quite original. Someone had a real good idea when they cast him for the show Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and then brought him back to play his twin brother for Fernwood Tonight.

In 1997 when actor-announcer Bob Ridgely died, I attended what was easily the most hilarious memorial service I've ever been to. Mel Brooks spoke. Thom Sharp spoke. Chuck McCann spoke. A long list of hilarious people spoke. Martin Mull stole the event with the funniest speech I've ever heard at one of those events. If they have a memorial service for him, I hope one of his friends gets up there and plagiarizes that speech. I think he would have loved that.

This A.M., I awoke to the present challenge, which is how to get on with the work I must do and the problems I must solve without devoting too much of my energy and grey matter to a problem I cannot even vaguely affect. The news makes Armchair Advisers out of all of us. I have a friend who works at a plant back east that bottles energy drinks and he spends a lot of every day thinking about how to fix the situation in Gaza. Cynically, I'm not sure there is a solution and realistically, I don't think that if there is, he's going to be the person to formulate it and put it into place.

I can dope out what I'd do if I were Joe Biden or a close adviser to Joe Biden but all I can really do with any idea I have is post it here on my blog where, so far, I haven't even achieved the first step in the abolition of cole slaw. I can also remind myself that if I were Joe Biden or a close adviser to Joe Biden, I'd have a lot more information (tons of it) that might help me shape my thinking. For one thing, I'd have a good answer to the question, "How often is he like that?" If the answer to that question is "Most of the time, lately," it's a very different problem from if the answer is "Never. He was sharp as an X-Acto knife Wednesday evening."

I read a number of interesting articles this morning including this one by David Kurtz. Here's a piece of it that I thought I'd share with you…

For their part, many partisans tend to observe debates and campaigns like sports fans, rooting for outcomes over which they have little or no control. I don't recommend that approach for your mental health, but it also sucks up an enormous amount of human and emotional capital, like spending all day on the sofa watching sports on TV instead of getting out and exercising yourself. The partisan-as-sports-fan risks becoming more deeply invested in their preferred outcomes and the roller coaster of emotions along the way than in the underlying cause.

I've never been able to get into sports. Once upon a time, I cared if the Dodgers won but only because it made my father so happy. I (of course) noted how unhappy it made him when they didn't and it didn't strike me as a fair trade-off. Maybe if he'd had money on the games and got a big payoff when they won, okay. But I don't care who wins the World Series or the Super Bowl because I don't get anything — monetary or otherwise — out of it. I don't even get the satisfaction of pretending I had something to do with the victory.

Following politics is a little different — who wins can affect my life and the lives of others around me — but I still don't have anything meaningful to do with the victories. I vote…that's about it. In the 2020 Presidential Election, the Biden/Harris ticket got 81,282,632 votes. Without mine, they would have gotten 81,282,631. Maybe, giving myself way more credit than I deserve, I also did the cheerleading that helped get a dozen other folks to go out and vote. Don't get me wrong: I'm still going to do everything I can to prevent Donald Trump from getting a second term and turning the United States into a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Trump Organization, an American privately-owned conglomerate owned by Donald Trump who is, in turn, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the highest bidder.

But I think right now, the most meaningful contribution I can make aside from donating cash is to trust that Biden and the people around him will do the right thing. I dunno if that will involve Joe Biden stepping up or stepping down. But I do know I have things to do where I can make more of a difference. I think I'll go do one of them.

They're popping up all over. Here's one from PBS. Here's one from NBC. Here's one from CNN. Here's one from the Associated Press. Here's one from The New York Times. Here's one from ABC. Here's one from USA Today.

There's an awful lot of duplication in them.

Obviously not a good night for Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. He gave much aid 'n' comfort to those who want to argue that he's too old to have a second term and he failed to counter a flood of outright lies from his opponent. (Here's a quick, incomplete fact check.) It disappoints me that The Truth doesn't matter to so many people in this country. There were moments in what I watched where I wish they had a rule that Gavin Newsom could tag in for Biden.

Like everyone else who's projecting what this will mean for the actual election, I have no idea what this will mean for the actual election. I've floated before on this blog and with friends the notion that we may not see one or both of those guys on the November ballot. I've never thought it was likely…just possible. It seems a fraction more possible now.