Trivia / The Amazing Spider-Man (Lee & Ditko)

• Creative Differences: The original creative team eventually split after the comic's third year. While for years rumors insisted the falling-out was over disagreements over the identity of the Green Goblin (Spidey's arch-enemy caused his creators to split! It's almost too poetic), Ditko made a statement shortly before his death setting the record straight, that Osborn being the Goblin was one of the few things he and Stan agreed on. The split was due to the two men's very different attitudes, personalities, and politics, similar to Lee's contretemps with Jack Kirby. The first issue of Spider-Man with John Romita replacing Ditko as artist had a vague statement from Stan on the letters page simply stating that Ditko had left due to "personal reasons".
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: The reasons for Ditko's departure from the title have long been subject to legend and rumor, not helped by Ditko's Reclusive Artist tendencies.
  • One common theory entertained over the years is that Ditko's objectivist beliefs would not allow him to reveal Norman Osborn as being the Green Goblin since he didn't approve of businesspeople being bad guys^note Showing businesspeople as bad guys is something even Ayn Rand herself did and is not by itself antithetical to her ideas. As anyone who has read Ditko's run will note, while Norman Osborn isn't as depraved as he'd later be depicted, he certainly wasn't a good guy either. To the contrary, in the few issues he appeared in Ditko's run, he was consistently depicted as a sinister shady dude. In the issue that formally introduced him, it's explicitly stated that he had Mendel Stromm arrested on trumped-up charges of embezzlement. And in Ditko's final issue, he sicced a mob on Spider-Man while wearing a disguise. Indeed, in the original comics both Norman and Harry Osborn were shown as unsympathetic douchebags, with Harry Osborn in particular being a snob with no redeeming qualities. It was only in the Romita-Lee era that more sympathetic qualities were given to both characters and the split personality between Norman and Goblin was invented. In any case, as per the Marvel Method, Ditko was the one who designed and plotted the story, which means all the in-panel foreshadowing and villainous portrayal of Osborn was planted by Ditko, as he himself pointed out in one of the few times he discussed the matter:
    Steve Ditko: "Now digest this: I knew from Day One, from the first GG story, who the GG would be. I absolutely knew because I planted him in J. Jonah Jameson’s businessman's club...I planted them together in other stories where the GG would not appear in costume...I planted the GG’s son (same distinctive hair style) in the college issues for more dramatic involvement and storyline consequences. So how could there be any doubt, dispute, about who the GG had to turn out to be when unmasked?"
  • Another rumor claims he objected to the reveal for a different reason: supposedly, Ditko didn't like the idea of the villain being someone known to Peter, feeling it was too melodramatic and cliched, and that he wanted Green Goblin to be revealed as a stranger or Unknown Rival to Peter. But during his run on the comic, there were quite a few villains who Peter knew in both their civilian and villain identities. For example, the original Big Man turned out to be Frederick Foswell, one of Peter's coworkers at the Daily Bugle. More than that, at the time, Peter Parker had no interactions or meaningful connections to Norman at all, except via One Degree of Separation from J. Jonah Jameson (who was not exactly best pals with Peter in or out of costume). He met Harry Osborn when they were attending ESU and the two hated each other at the time, and it was Romita who codified their friendship, so in either case, Norman Osborn being revealed as Green Goblin would not really count as someone personally known to Peter.
  • There's also a rumor put forth in Jonathan Ross' documentary that Ditko disagreed with sending Peter off to college and that he wanted Spider-Man to stay in high school. The problem is that, as Stan Lee noted in The '60s, most of the issues in the tail-end of Ditko's run, especially the Master-Planner arc (where Pete finally went to college) were entirely plotted by Ditko in line with the Marvel Method. Furthermore, Marvel had averted Comic-Book Time in its early run and didn't embrace it until later, and the idea of keeping Peter in high-school while the Fantastic Four saw Reed and Sue get married and have a baby in the early years, and still exist in a Shared Universe would not have fit the editorial policy at the time.
  • Many fans and comics scholars have argued that Ditko and Lee parted ways because the former was trying to make Spider-Man into an objectivist mouthpiece, and that the latter performed Writer Revolt by going against Ditko's wishes and intentions via his dialogue and captions. The often cited example is issue #38 where Peter wanders through a student protest, that according to legend has Ditko drawing Peter as anti-protest but Lee writing Peter as being in their favor. Anyone who has read the comic can tell you there's no writer revolt, since the protest is basically a silly "marching against yesterday's protest" thing and the joke is about Flash and Harry (still enemies with Peter at this point) mistaking him for a protestor and then calling him a coward for not playing around. Furthermore, Ditko in his many (overly long) letters and pamphlets never once claimed that Lee was censoring his politics even when it would have been in his favor to say so. On the other side of things, Lee himself was actually fairly apolitical aside from his outspoken opposition to bigotry (for a couple of examples, he declined to offer an opinion on The Vietnam War when responding to a reader's letter, and later temporarily renamed Black Panther "Black Leopard" to avoid unintended associations with the Black Panther Party) and he never said anything to indicate that Ditko left over disagreements about politics; indeed, he stated in many interviews that he never really understood why Ditko ultimately left.
  • As an example of Writer Revolt from Lee's side, people often cite a scene where Spider-man swings by a protest by hippies. Ditko had intended Spider-Man to say disparaging remarks about them while Lee wrote in Spider-Man going "Right on! I'm on your side!" There is no such scene in any issue (that we know of). The closest example would be the scene from issue 38 mentioned above. People could also be misremembering the story where Spider-Man tries to protect a group of student housing protestors while battling the Kingpin, but that occurred in issue 68, long after Ditko's departure.
• Reality Subtext: Intentionally or not, Peter's job at the Daily Bugle and his working relationship with J. Jonah Jameson parallel Steve Ditko's job at Marvel and his working relationship with Stan Lee. Peter, a freelance photographer, takes pictures of Spider-Man. Ditko, whose affiliation with Marvel was equally mercenary, drew pictures of Spider-Man. Parker takes his developed photos to the Daily Bugle, chatting with friendly receptionist Betty Brant. Ditko took his finished drawings to Marvel's headquarters, chatting with friendly receptionist Flo Steinberg. Parker sells his photos to editor-in-chief Jameson at a price he believes is well beneath their value. Ditko sells his drawings to editor-in-chief Lee at a price he believes is well beneath their value. Jameson prints the photos, but writes the articles that accompany them, putting him in control of the exposition that surrounds the pictures and gives them context. Lee writes the dialogue and captions for Ditko's drawings, in line with the Marvel Method that was used at the time. To top it all off, Peter's appearance was based on one of Ditko's high school yearbook photos, and Jameson was created as a parody of Lee's public image at the time.
• Writer Revolt: Per the Marvel Method, Steve Ditko basically had a good enough amount of control over the plot to either give Stan Lee exactly what he wanted or twist it enough to still fall within his ideas. As told in deconstruction, Ditko basically sabotaged Lee's story about a team-up between Spidey and the Human Torch by making their constant bickering a monumental obstruction in their attempt to fight the Sandman.