A BIRTHDAY TRIBUTE: The idiosyncratic comics creator was born 98 years ago! By PAUL KUPPERBERG Steve Ditko — born 98 years ago, on November 2, 1927 — didn’t draw like anyone else. He had his influences, of course, some of them visible in his work (Jerry Robinson, Mort Meskin, Joe Kubert), others less obvious (Hal Foster, Will Eisner, Chester Gould), but however they all mixed together, they emerged from Ditko’s drawing hand onto paper in a unique synthesis that was totally his own. Everybody talks about his offbeat anatomy and, in particular, his expressive hands. Ditko hands, fingers wildly splayed or tightly curled, wrists bent at 90-degree angles, attached to figures that twist and stretch to reflect their physical, emotional, moral, or even metaphysical struggles. He rejected the explosive heroic action of contemporary comics and seemed to approach his characters from the inside out, giving them weight and substance, and defining them at a glance; even without the dialogue on the splash page of the Spider-Man origin story in Amazing Fantasy #15 telling us that Peter Parker is a “wallflower,” Ditko’s isolated, downcast figure in the background tells us everything we need to know about the character. I first became aware of Ditko in the early 1960s from his work on Amazing Spider-Man and the Doctor Strange strip in Strange Tales, and in fact the first issue of ASM I bought off the newsstand (as opposed to reading someone else’s copy) was #38 in 1966, Ditko’s last on the title. But I soon discovered that though the artist had disappeared from the pages of current Marvel Comics, he was all over the comics published by Charlton. And once I discovered back-issue bins, I stumbled onto the world of the pre-Marvel Atlas Comics monster mags, which were chockablock with Ditko-drawn science fiction, horror, and creature stories, the writing mostly credited to Stan Lee, including some of my favorite work of his in Amazing Adult Fantasy #7 – 14 and the anthology stories that filled out the rest of Amazing Fantasy #15 (December 1961 – August 1962) behind the Spidey origin story. Steve Ditko was born in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and later studied under Batman artist Jerry Robinson at the Cartoonists and Illustrators School in New York before getting into comics in the early 1950s. After a few jobs at Prize Comics,...