Gorgo – Steve Ditko’s Truly Fantastic Giant

Mike Gold

ComicMix's award-winning and spectacularly shy editor-in-chief Mike Gold also performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com and on iNetRadio, www.iNetRadio.com (search: Hit Oldies) every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week – check www.getthepointradio.com above for times and on-demand streaming information.

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3 Responses

  1. George Haberberger says:

    MIke,

    Ditko gets a percentage of these publications right? I certainly hope so. I don’t have any info about his economic status but he still maintains his midtown Manhattan office which cannot be bargain-priced.

    My wife and I were in Manhattan last month to see Scarlett Johansson in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and Emelia Clarke in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”. (But the best thing we saw was “Old Jews Telling Jokes”).

    Anyway, I found the building where he has his office. I won’t reveal how I knew where to look. It’s impressive yet nondescript. I took a picture of his door and posted this on my Facebook page:
    In an unassuming office building in midtown near Times Square, Steve Ditko has an office. Ditko was the original artist and co-creator of Spider-Man. He takes no money for the movies, although his name is in the credits. He hasn’t drawn Spider-Man since 1966 yet his influence on the character is pervasive. He does not go to conventions. He does not sell his art. He does not grant interviews and he does not want to meet fans. He in in his 80s yet still maintains an office and regular working schedule. His name is on the building’s directory as Stephen Ditko: 715. I stood outside in the hall and took this photo. I was not intrusive or presumptuous enough to knock even though he is hiding in plain site.

  2. Stephen Bissette has pursued this at his myrant blog, and states firmly that Ditko did not see a penny from the book. You’d think Yoe and/or IDW would at least throw in a freebie half-page advert directing readers to Ditko’s current comix via Snyder.

    Yoe and Goldstein may be “honorable” people, but they are not very virtuous in the traditional sense. Whether Ditko wants any compensation or not is beside the point. Others are making money off of his work, others who had nothing to do with the contracts Ditko had with Charlton way back.

  3. George Haberberger says:

    My understanding of the reason Ditko left Marvel, and of course this is from various articles that I’ve read, not first hand knowledge, is that he was upset about not receiving royalties from the almost-animated cartoons that appeared on Saturday mornings in the mid-sixties. If royalties were “part of the deal” he certainly would have received them so I presume they weren’t and he thought he deserved them nonetheless. Maybe his views have become more strident in the interim and he no longer believes that.

    These stories are not in the public domain so Yoe and Goldstein must be paying someone for the reprint rights.