I am just going to finally come out and say it, but I have always hated the work of comic Artist Steve Ditko.
Sure, some of his early work in Amazing Fantasy on Spider-Man was ok, but by the mid-1970 and throughout the 1980s he produced some of the most horrendously bad comic art I have ever seen.
Yes. I am a child of the late Bronze Age and Modern Age of comics, and artists like Michael Golden, George Pérez, Bill Sienkiewicz, Pat Broderick, Jerry Ordway, Keith Giffen, Steve Lightle, and even John Byrne defined my tastes in what I expected in super-hero comic art.
And yes, whenever someone would put Ditko on a book or story I would read, it was 70s/80s Ditko and I swear he was just doing things for a paycheck with no concern of the art and of itself.
Case in point, this issue of Man-Bat #1 released Jan 7, 1976.
You get a solid 70’s Jim Aparo cover to pull you in, and then inside, you get some below mediocre Ditko art. Not even Al Milgrom’s inks do anything to improve this, and I read a lot of stuff Milgrom worked on back then.
There are 19-year-old non-professional fan artists out there who put more care and effort into the quality of their work than anything Ditko did during this period. And these fan artists aren’t getting a page rate!
Ditko for me has always been an alert to stay clear of it, or that if his name appeared it was going to ruin it for me. (He ruined a Micronauts Annual and the complete end run of ROM: Spaceknight for me in later years.)
I know he has his fans, but I just don’t know anyone can defend his work during the 70s and 80s.
I try to avoid knocking things these days, but I got all excited to read Man-Bat #1 this morning and didn’t realize the who did the pencils until I opened it to read it.
There’s just nothing more disappointing and unreadable to me than Ditko. He’s like a a video essay that has the worst audio. In that case, it may have a great script and onscreen work/editing but the audio makes it all but impossible to watch.
Sorry.
I just had to get this off my chest.
It has been bothering me for years and I was reminded of it all this morning trying to read this book.