The Art of Eric Stanton: For the Man Who Knows His Place

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The studio was bare bones. “It was a room about ten feet by twenty,” said Stanton. “One side was all windows. Steve’s desk and mine faced each other next to the window.” Some instances that Seves cites are not quite so convincing: if Ditko did them, he did them by dutifully imitating his studio-mate’s mannerisms to the extent that his own disappear. Or so it seems to me, but I’m scarcely a Ditko expert. A romantic relationship eventually develops, with Parker proposing to her in issue #182 (July 1978), and being turned down an issue later.

When Lee later referred to himself in interviews as Spider-Man’s creator, Ditko objected. In Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, Lee recounted a conversation in which Ditko told him, “Having an idea is nothing, because until it becomes a physical thing, it’s just an idea.’” Lee responded by arguing that “the person who has the idea is the person who creates it.” Unless you believe that what made the first Spider-Man comics great was that they were about a kid who gets bitten by a radioactive spider and gains arachnid powers, then Ditko’s point seems valid. We readers didn’t fall in love with a synopsis; we were captivated by the way Lee and Ditko brought the idea to life. Spider-Man's secret identity is Peter Benjamin Parker, a teenage high school student and an orphan raised by his Aunt May and Uncle Ben in New York City after his parents Richard and Mary Parker died in a plane crash.Following the 2015 Secret Wars crossover event, a number of Spider-Man-related titles were either relaunched or created as part of the "All-New, All-Different Marvel" event. Among them, The Amazing Spider-Man was relaunched as well and primarily focuses on Peter Parker continuing to run Parker Industries and becoming a successful businessman who is operating worldwide. Almost at once Stanton recognized that art provided a unique satisfaction he did not experience in real life: not only access to a special fantasy world, but a sense of personal power: ‘I had control ... I could have the people I drew do anything I wanted’ he reflected in later years. ‘I was king of my world.’ Control and powerlessness—as mirrored in the secret subculture of the sexual fantasist–would become a major theme in his art. [...] We earnestly ask you to take each issue of EXOTIQUE home with you, read it carefully and let us know what you think of it. […] In her introduction to the '98 book, Dian Hanson writes about working at a sex magazine in the mid-'70s, and coming across Stanton's work for the first time. Initially, she took great pleasure in work she'd assumed was feminist in nature, but while the pleasure remained, she soon understood that this was not Stanton's objective - "sexual politics were the only kind that held his interest." And by 'sexual politics,' I take it to mean interpersonal dynamics. Look closely at the image above. Look at the son, screaming in agony. "FIGHT HER!" he cries, not his only dismayed exclamation in the story. If his father had dominated a woman before, it was merely to establish the status quo - a recognizable one, still in place today. The deviation, then -- the woman's dominance -- is the usurping of this criterion, and how traumatic it is! This kid sees his dad as not even a man, but a dog. The basis of his masculine pride, the way he lived his life - it's all an illusion. His parent can't be a role model anymore. He is alone and untethered in a chaotic world that cares for nobody - the crowd cheers Juanita as hard as they did her assailant. Their friendship,” she added, “was centered around creating art. Each of them contributed to the other's art as part of the friendship between two artists. While each was the driving force behind his own work, there was significant overlap. Steve contributed to the erotic stories my father worked on and my father contributed to Spider-Man and probably other stories. Neither one of them ever expected any recognition or money from the other.”

Something in Stanton’s psychological makeup dictated channeling and creating art as a means of attaining a proper balance and some measure of control in his life. The actual art he made—the artifact itself—was always less important than the process. [...] It was the process of making art that Stanton lived for; it was that process of exploration and discovery. Two issues later, Parker, now employed as a teacher at his old high school, meets the enigmatic Ezekiel, who possesses similar spider powers and suggests that Parker, having gained such abilities, might not have been a fluke—that Parker has a connection to a totemic spider spirit. When the primary series The Amazing Spider-Man reached issue #545 (Dec. 2007), Marvel dropped its spin-off ongoing series and instead began publishing The Amazing Spider-Man three times monthly, beginning with #546–548 (all January 2008). Working through his grief, Peter eventually develops tentative feelings toward Mary Jane, and the two "become confidants rather than lovers". Spider-Man fights his enemies including superpowered and non-superpowered supervillains - his arch-enemy and nemesis called the Green Goblin, and then Doctor Octopus, Sandman, Chameleon, Lizard, Vulture, Kraven the Hunter, Electro, and Mysterio, defeating them one by one - but Peter finds juggling his personal life and costumed adventures difficult.

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Interviewed in the documentary In Search of Steve Ditko, writer Alan Moore described the character of Rorschach in Watchmen: “Even if his politics are completely mad, he has this ferocious moral integrity … that was my take on Steve Ditko.” Moore, whose original proposal for Watchmen would have essentially killed off the Charlton superheroes, told interviewer Jon B. Cooke in Comic Book Artist #9, “I have to say I found Ayn Rand’s philosophy laughable. It was a ‘white supremacist dream of the master race’ burnt in an early 20th-century form. … I at least felt that, though Steve Ditko’s political agenda was very different to mine, Steve Ditko had a political agenda, and that in some ways set him above most of his contemporaries.” Over 200 original works by the pair are being exhibited together for the first time by TASCHEN Gallery, Los Angeles. Embrace Your Fantasies: Bizarre Life — The Art of Elmer Batters & Eric Stanton is running until 24 May. In 1962, with the success of the Fantastic Four, Marvel Comics editor and head writer Stan Lee was casting for a new superhero idea. He said the idea for Spider-Man arose from a surge in teenage demand for comic books and the desire to create a character with whom teens could identify. As with Fantastic Four, Lee saw Spider-Man as an opportunity to "get out of his system" what he felt was missing in comic books.

We had a great working relationship,” Stanton recalled in a 1988 interview. “We were the only guys who could have gotten along with each other.” Spider-Man is a superhero appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. Created by writer-editor Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko, he first appeared in the anthology comic book Amazing Fantasy #15 (August 1962) in the Silver Age of Comic Books. He has been featured in comic books, television shows, films, video games, novels, and plays. At that time Lee had to get only the consent of Marvel publisher Martin Goodman for the character's approval. In a 1986 interview, Lee described in detail his arguments to overcome Goodman's objections.In issue #537 (Dec. 2006), May is critically wounded by a sniper hired by Wilson Fisk and enters into a coma. Parker, desperate to save her, exhausts all possibilities and makes a pact with the demon-lord Mephisto, who saves May's life in exchange for Parker and Watson agreeing to have their marriage and all memory of it disappear.

STANTON’S DAUGHTER Amber wrote about her father’s contribution to Ditko’s creation of Spider-Man in an article, “A Tangled Web,” originally published in The Creativity of Steve Ditko (2012). She remembered watching with the family the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade on tv when she was nine years old. As a giant balloon of Spider-Man appeared on the screen, her father exclaimed: "Would you believe that— I never would have thought," she quotes her father saying with amusement. When it came to Doctor Strange, however, Lee attributed even the “idea” to Ditko. “’Twas Steve’s idea,” he wrote in a letter to The Comic Reader #16 in 1963. Strikingly different from other Marvel series of the time, the world of Doctor Strange is as far removed as possible from Peter Parker’s high-school life — and it is just as singular a vision. The sheer alien-ness of Ditko’s writhing inter-dimensional pathways, swirling ectoplasm and spells conjured as fizzing, flashing, arcing light shows threatens to disintegrate into unbounded abstraction, but the figure of Strange guides us through it all and Ditko’s sensitivity to the interaction of story and perspective maintains coherence. Strange is as straight-faced a hero as they come, but even in this title, Lee’s goofy necromantic wordplay (the Eye of Agamotto, the Seven Bands of Cyttorak) keep things from becoming too dour. It was easily the trippiest of Marvel’s titles and was affectionately embraced by the mind-exploring counterculture. Strange showed up on an early Pink Floyd album cover and was referenced in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test as Merry Prankster Ken Kesey’s favored reading material. An early concert series organized by the Jefferson Airplane was called A Tribute to Dr. Strange. Four years before the Beatles had their minds blown by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1968, Dr. Strange found his way to enlightenment and mystical powers after he journeyed to Tibet and studied at the feet of the Ancient One.Ditko claimed in a rare interview with Jonathan Ross that the costume was initially envisioned with an orange and purple color scheme rather than the more famous red and blue. The Green Goblin had switched the results of the clone test in an attempt to destroy Parker's life by making him believe himself to be the clone. Reilly is killed while saving Parker, in Peter Parker: Spider-Man #75 (Dec. 1996), and his body immediately crumbles into dust, confirming Reilly was the clone. Seves quotes Ditko about the full-face mask: “I did it because it hid [Peter Parker’s] obviously boyish face. It would also add mystery to the character and allow the reader/viewer the opportunity to visualize, to ‘draw,’ his own preferred expression Peter Parker’s face and, perhaps, become the personality behind the mask.”