Quote Originally Posted by Spidey_62 View Post
Heyo. I saw Erik Larsen tweeted today that nothing Spider-Man will ever top what Ditko and Lee did, not any idea anybody else has for a random story, and the replies were filled with people saying "but John Romita Sr perfected it! but we like your Spidey!" and he was like no.
Erik Larsen's opinion needs to be taken with a grain of salt. When comics professionals or writers praise "Stan and Steve" what they really mean is that because the original is great that means I have zero tolerance and respect for any writer/story/run that comes afterwards. It's not really about praising the originals or having an aesthetic argument it's a kind of one-upmanship. I am not saying Larsen doesn't mean what he says but he's also a professional so consciously or unconsciously, his opinion would be tinged with that.

I know Alan Moore is of the same opinion that the only Spider-Man is Ditko's.
Moore's perspective is different, and he's never been a fan of Spider-Man (not that he dislikes the character, he just leaves him cold), favoring Ditko's Doctor Strange work and his horror comics for Warren.

I think I can see where they're all coming from, because when Romita comes on he pretty's it up all around in short order whereas under Ditko it was something counter to the norm stylistically. For better or worse it was the prettied up Romita style Spider-Man that was mainstream marketed for decades after and is predominately what people saw. Not throwing shade at Romita or his contributions, just observations.
If you read Ditko's run, when Peter's going to college, in ASM#34 or 35 Ditko!Gwen sends a girl Sally to hit on Peter as part of her manipulative schemes, and Sally has this thought bubble that goes that Peter is really dreamy, and Ditko's college-era Peter is drawn to be better looking than high school Peter. So Ditko himself already started the process of gussying-up the titles. So I'd say Alan Moore is wrong when he says that Romita prettied up Ditko because Ditko himself was prettying things up.

The thing to understand is that Ditko always saw Spider-Man as a commercial gig and Doctor Strange was far more personal to him as an artist and storyteller. What that means is that Ditko didn't really have any hard-set opinions about how Spider-Man should be, all his actions bear that out. So the fact is that John Romita Sr. is different from Ditko's in a lot of respects but in a lot of essential ways he's consistent to the roadmap Ditko set out. Artistically and aesthetically, the Lee-Ditko run is one of the greatest stretches in any comic, superhero or otherwise, that real-time growth and progression (which yeah, Ditko was totally on-board for), the mix of action and humor, realism and fantasy. There's something in that which always feels fresh and which is so hard to boil down to a formula and you can see so many Marvel editors and writers/editors misread and misinterpret that.

Anyway, when people say that Ditko was the best Spider-Man has been, individually if you break it down:
-- Kraven's Last Hunt is better than any Ditko story aside from The Master-Planner Saga.
-- Some of the greatest fights and battle sequences -- The owl/octopus war, Nothing can stop the Juggernaut! -- happen in the '80s.
-- If you like teenage and high school Spider-Man, there's way more teenage and high-school Spider-Man in Busiek's UNTOLD TALES than in the original run (most of which takes place at the Daily Bugle featuring very little action in the high school setting that people think is oh-so essential to this era).
-- Some of the best stuff with the supporting cast, with Aunt May and Jameson happens several issues down the line.
-- The romance and love story is way better after this run than with it, even if Ditko set up Mary Jane to be the main love interest of the title in his run.
-- The later Spider-Man stories have more diversity in supporting-cast and stories -- Robbie Robertson comes in the L-R era for instance. The Ditko era is almost entirely white (aside from some background extras in Peter's graduation class). And of course Miles Morales is now at the center of the mythos.

My feeling is that Carl Barks being great at Donald Duck, doesn't mean that Don Rosa or Romano Scarpa or other artist-writers working in Disney comics afterwards are somehow posers and losers. Ditko being great doesn't mean stuff that came later is somehow inferior or lesser for being so.