In the minds of most comic enthusiasts Ditko and Spiderman are bonded together as tight as her thighs on the night of your first ever date. It’s odd though that so few of us have actually ever read them, even I’ve not read ‘em for ages. They still resonate though, even for those who haven’t read them ever, that is certainly something remarkable. Why is this, well there’s a enormous effort expended perpetuating the Spiderman mythos through the media to support the truly staggering budgets the film industry requires to turn out their superhero related films but in the case of Spiderman, there is a little more to it. Reading those stories in my formative years I recall them being a unique experience. I was a bit too young to understand Peter Parker’s predicament at first, it took some advancement through my teens before the spider and I really connected. It’s a little odd that doing something so obvious like relating the drama of a comic book fantasy to your reader’s reality, should seem so remarkable but there’s never been anything to match those Ditko Spidermans.
The Comic Code was ascendant at the time, so portraying any corruption or malfeasance of authority was absolutely verboten, so how could any narrative media portray the petty tyrannies that plague that lives of their readers. The answer, J. Jonah Jameson and his malicious vendetta waged on Spiderman, teachers, politics and the police may have been off limits but it was open season on the press. Has there ever been any comic book villain to match Jameson for his malice and the misery he perpetrated. The thing about Jonah was, his evil might seem paltry, he didn’t have plans for world domination or ambitions to circumcise the entire male population, he just wanted to destroy one person’s life. That’s brilliant because it’s what the majority of young adult males face every day and what Ditko did, was put in a comic book in a form that resonated with that readership.
As far as I’m concerned no one did it before and it’s never been accomplished convincingly since. Like I mentioned, doing the obvious, it seems so simple but there is so much allied against you when you try it. Of course Ditko’s Spiderman isn’t perfect there’s a few too many wordy soliloquies expressing inner torment, when just the a picture would do but there’s always the option of skipping over the pap when you’re reading a comic.
