Tales of Syzpense #28
Letters from Ditko, the Rain falls in Maine, and They Spin Horses, Don't They?
Last week would’ve been Spider-Man and Doctor Strange (and Blue Beetle and Squirrel Girl and Mr. A. and…) artist/co-creator Steve Ditko’s 96th birthday. As his work and legacy deserves, there were a number of tributes to Ditko and his many comic co-creations. As part of this, I shared a letter that Ditko once wrote me. Ditko was the second artist to draw Marvel’s Rom, Spaceknight series back in the day, so when we launched a Rom revival comic in 2016, I sent a copy his way along with a note of thanks for his work on the prior series.
In the decades since he stopped working for Marvel, Ditko was largely a recluse from the comic industry. He didn’t do conventions or talk to the press, he self-published his works, he generally had nothing to do with the industry at large.
But he did correspond with fans via letters, and whenever I called him over the years, he always picked up (without fail, on the second ring).
And as I liked to do throughout my time at IDW, one thing I tried to regularly was give work to creators whose work I liked as a kid. Ditko wanted no part of the assignments I ran by him, but he also never left me hanging for a reply.
In developing and co-writing our Rom comic, I reached out to him again, since I was trying to involve everyone I could who worked on the original series. The original artist Sal Buscema contributed, as did Al Milgrom, Pat Broderick, Michael Golden, Bob Layton, P. Craig Russell, and Joe Sinnott. Ditko remained elusive and uninterested.
I gave it one more shot after chatting with P. Craig Russell. Craig was one of many artists who stepped in to provide finishes over Ditko’s loose pencils back in the day. Craig’s inks have always brought a level of elegance to anyone’s pencils but I thought he did an especially nice job on Ditko’s Rom pages.
Craig said Ditko liked his inks back in the day and he said he’d love to have one more chance to ink Steve’s work. So we gave it one more shot, but got the same result. Ditko said he barely even remembered drawing the book the first time around, and felt there was no reason to change that.
When we had a finished first issue, I mailed a copy to Steve with a letter thanking him for his contributions on the original series.
His response letter is the one I posted last week:
Some people reacted negatively to Ditko’s response, feeling it abrupt or rude, but I never did. I never expected a reply in the first place, so it was nice that he took the time to send his thoughts.
Ditko did his best work in comics in the 1950s and ‘60s, so there was certainly no reason to think that storytelling and coloring techniques in 2016 would appeal to him. He’d been solely producing black and white comics, most notably his long-running series, Mr. A. So again, there was no reason he should care about modern coloring and all its effects. His letter was perfectly reasonable, and indeed, it made me smile then as it does now.
My one regret about the whole situation is that our Rom series came to an end before I could take inspiration from Ditko’s letter and introduce a character called the Anti-Mind. That’s just a great name for a villain.
That letter, as interesting as it is, wasn’t the only time Ditko wrote to me. He did so one other time.
Well, two other times, really.
See, prior to our Rom series becoming a reality, I’d chatted with Ditko here and there about assorted topics: the Wally Wood Artist’s Edition book we sent to him as a friend of Wally’s; the potential of doing a 50th anniversary collection of his Mr. A. series (I got close but it ultimately didn’t come to pass); and other such things.
In 2014, as I was making plans to attend the New York Comic-Con in October, I reached out to Ditko twice: once was in the form of a letter, appealing to him to consider a possible project. The other was a call, when I told him I was going to be in New York in a couple weeks, and would he be open to meeting up to say hello in person. He said you’re welcome to come by my studio but I can’t guarantee I’ll be there or that I’ll answer the door if I am there.
Fair enough. I had a free day before the show started, so I went to his building, which was near Times Square. The doorman asked who I was there to see, and after I told him, he laughed and said “good luck, man.”
It turned out the doorman was right, since Ditko didn’t answer his door. There would be no similar ending to this adventure as Neil Gaiman and Jonathan Ross had when they knocked on his door.
But there was still positive Ditko news that weekend anyway: my office called and told me, “You have a letter here from a Steve Dipko. Do you know who that is?”
I said yes, of course—you mean “Steve Ditko,” though, right?
“I guess so,” they said. They were disinterested, and had never heard of Ditko. But I was excited — in 2004, that was the first letter he’d sent to me. I was eager to get back and see what he had to say, good or bad. I asked them to leave the letter on my desk and keep my office locked, taking no chances with it.
The con ended, I flew back, and rushed to the office the next day. Pklenty of other mail on my desk but no Ditko letter.
I contacted the person who received the letter and called me about it, and asked where it was. I assumed they kept it in another equally safe spot.
They said they had no idea what I was talking about. I relayed the entire conversation from only a few days prior, but there was no look of recognition on their face. “No idea what happened to it. I might’ve accidentally tossed it, I don’t remember. Was it important?”
It was clear they weren’t messing with me. No Ditko letter was found anywhere in the office.
I was gutted. The first time the elusive, super-private Steve Ditko had ever written to me and it maybe “accidentally tossed.” I couldn’t imagine anything worse.
Except I found a way to make it worse. I had to know what that letter said.
So I wrote Ditko back. I laid out the situation, explaining that he wrote me a letter last week and I appreciate it but someone at the office mistakenly lost it and, well, would it be too massive an imposition to know what your letter said?
Aside: have you ever seen the movie Swingers? There’s a scene where Jon Favreau’s character, in the throes of a pathetic attempt to try to re-enter the dating world after a bad break-up, leaves increasingly cringe-y messages on the answering machine of someone he just met and seemingly clicked with. This felt like the “Dear Steve” equivalent of that. Surely no good would come from bothering Steve to relay the message he sent me prior. But maybe it was an affirmative reply? I had to know. I mailed the letter.
A week later, Ditko sent his reply:
I just had to laugh. It really was the perfect response, and a nice “get out of jail free card” kind of thing that should have dissuaded me from trying him again, like when the Rom series came about a couple years later. But I always think you gotta at least ask the question.
I was very amused by this letter, even while I was still horrified that his original letter, presumably a bit less taciturn of a reply, was so cavalierly lost or tossed.
When our Rom series got under way, after Ditko passed on doing a cover, I thought this letter itself would’ve been the perfect Ditko variant cover image. Not that I ever would’ve run the letter like that but I do feel pretty confident that if I had, it would’ve been the best-selling Rom cover we ever produced.
Anyway, happy birthday to the late, truly one-of-a-kind, Steve Ditko!
Taking Care of Business
A few weeks back, I was a guest on a Business of Creating panel held at Second Home in LA. The panel was put on by entertainment exec Michael Fisk and producer Jennifer Mangan, and featured Netflix production finance exec Xavier Byers and me. It was a great setting and we had a really engaging talk and now the entire panel and Q&A is available for viewing on YouTube. See, there is more good content on YouTube beyond The Rolling Giant! You can check out what we had to say here: The Business of Creating panel: Developing & Producing Projects: Pitching Your Project in a Large IP & Reboot World.
The Rain in Maine
In this recent article showcasing Stephen King's library at his place in Bangor Maine, the entire library looks great but I especially enjoyed this picture, since it showed that on his bookcase were copies of Locke & Key as well as Syzygy’s lead-off graphic novel, Rain:
If you too want to be like Stephen King and add a copy of Rain to your own bookshelf, drop me a line.
We still have copies of both the mass-market edition you see in the photo, as well as a deluxe, not-available-elsewhere limited edition, and an even more rare WhatNot-only edition, too:
They Spin Horses, Don’t They?
If asked, maybe the only thing most comic artists would like to avoid more than drawing crowd scenes is drawing horses. But you can really tell the caliber of an artist by how well they draw horses when asked, too. So this week’s spinner rack theme involves those 4-legged animals, although I do play a bit fast and loose with the definition of what makes a horse a horse (of course), since I also feature a pegasus or two, a centaur or three, a metallic horse, the legless underwater variety, and even a reptilian horse-surrogate for the Atom to ride during jungle-barbarian period. So here you are — enjoy the offerings in this week’s spinner rack theme at either a sprint or a gallop.
Finally, we at Syzygy Central are hard at work finalizing the fourth issue of Tales of Syzpense, releasing issue 2 of A Haunted Girl on November 15, and announcing our latest series later this month, too, so lots more to come next week and every week(ish).
That was a great panel - super inspiring stuff. And all the resources are super helpful too, especially for me - a self-published writer looking to explore both comics and screenwriting as mediums to tell my stories.
I think it is incredibly sweet that Stephen King has a shelf of his sons books.