The Art of Eric Stanton: For the Man Who Knows His Place

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His text is accompanied throughout by lots and lots of illustrations, many in color, and Seves gives the histories of several of Stanton’s serials and tells their stories. The book is virtually an extensively annotated bibliography of Stanton’s life work. But it’s more than that. It’s also a detailed biography, a sketchy history of “the bizarre,” and an exhibition of Stanton’s ladies. Reproduction throughout is high quality. The Green Goblin had switched the results of the clone test in an attempt to destroy Parker's life by making him believe himself to be the clone. Reilly is killed while saving Parker, in Peter Parker: Spider-Man #75 (Dec. 1996), and his body immediately crumbles into dust, confirming Reilly was the clone. While his career waned with the coming of relaxed censorship laws of the 1960s, his substance abuse worsened in the early 1970s.

Peter Parker originally used his powers for his own personal gain, but after his Uncle Ben was killed by a thief that Peter did not stop, he began to use his powers to fight crime by becoming the superhero known as Spider-Man. The new costume originated in the Secret Wars miniseries, on an alien planet where Spider-Man participates in a battle between Earth's major superheroes and supervillains. When it came to Doctor Strange, however, Lee attributed even the “idea” to Ditko. “’Twas Steve’s idea,” he wrote in a letter to The Comic Reader #16 in 1963. Strikingly different from other Marvel series of the time, the world of Doctor Strange is as far removed as possible from Peter Parker’s high-school life — and it is just as singular a vision. The sheer alien-ness of Ditko’s writhing inter-dimensional pathways, swirling ectoplasm and spells conjured as fizzing, flashing, arcing light shows threatens to disintegrate into unbounded abstraction, but the figure of Strange guides us through it all and Ditko’s sensitivity to the interaction of story and perspective maintains coherence. Strange is as straight-faced a hero as they come, but even in this title, Lee’s goofy necromantic wordplay (the Eye of Agamotto, the Seven Bands of Cyttorak) keep things from becoming too dour. It was easily the trippiest of Marvel’s titles and was affectionately embraced by the mind-exploring counterculture. Strange showed up on an early Pink Floyd album cover and was referenced in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test as Merry Prankster Ken Kesey’s favored reading material. An early concert series organized by the Jefferson Airplane was called A Tribute to Dr. Strange. Four years before the Beatles had their minds blown by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1968, Dr. Strange found his way to enlightenment and mystical powers after he journeyed to Tibet and studied at the feet of the Ancient One. At the same time, the original The Amazing Spider-Man was ended with issue #441 (Nov. 1998), and The Amazing Spider-Man was restarted with vol. 2, #1 (Jan. 1999). In 2003, Marvel reintroduced the original numbering for The Amazing Spider-Man and what would have been vol. 2, #59 became issue #500 (Dec. 2003).

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Whatever differences Ditko may have had with Martin Goodman and/or Stan Lee, he was willing to work on the Destructor start-up series edited by Lee’s brother Larry Lieber for Atlas/Seaboard, Goodman’s imitation-Marvel line. Ditko created the series with Archie Goodwin in 1975, and Wood again supplied the inking, but the title lasted only four issues, the Atlas line itself expiring within the year. In ‘Men Tamed to Submission by Tame-azons’, Nutrix 1960, Portia and Potentia are hired to subdue and vanquish Dan Marlo, a well-known star of television, who specializes in he-man roles. They spirit the drunken actor away from a party with the help of chloroform. While he is unconscious, the girls lace him up in a corset than gag and bind him. In his autobiography, Lee cites the non-superhuman pulp magazine crime fighter the Spider as a great influence, and in a multitude of print and video interviews, Lee stated he was further inspired by seeing a spider climb up a wall—adding in his autobiography that he has told that story so often he has become unsure of whether or not this is true. In the story, Peter Parker's friend Harry Osborn becomes addicted to pills. When Spider-Man fights the Green Goblin (Norman Osborn, Harry's father), Spider-Man defeats him by revealing Harry's drug addiction. While the story had a clear anti-drug message, the Comics Code Authority refused to issue its seal of approval.

Several miniseries, one-shot issues, and loosely related comics have also been published, and Spider-Man makes frequent cameos and guest appearances in other comic book series. In 1996, The Sensational Spider-Man was created to replace Web of Spider-Man. Steve Ditko, the comics artist whose vision brought Spider-Man and Doctor Strange to life, passed away at his New York City home on June 29th, 2018. Stan Lee, in his credits for The Amazing Spider-Man, called the artist “Swingin’ Steve Ditko” (issue #10) and later “Scowlin’ Steve Ditko” (issue #27), but if you had to choose one adjective to attach to Ditko’s name, it might be “Uncompromising.” Ditko in the studio he shared with Eric Stanton, 1959 And Ditko was completely accepting of Stanton: ‘He thought my stuff was funny. We’d laugh a lot,’ Stanton said, as he fondly remembered years later. ‘Every experience that I had with Steve was terrific, as far as I was concerned.’” Marvel has featured Spider-Man in several comic book series, the first and longest-lasting of which is The Amazing Spider-Man. He declined to cooperate with Blake Bell’s 2008 Ditko biography Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko, calling the book, sight unseen, a “poison sandwich,” and turned the biographer away from his door, as he had many journalists over the years.

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Book-length collections of Stanton comics have been translated into many foreign languages, including French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Dutch. Additionally, Stanton's art was reprinted in the 1990s in comic books from Fantagraphics Books' imprint Eros Comix: The Kinky Hook (1991), Sweeter Gwen (1992), Confidential TV (1994), and Tops and Bottoms # 1 – 4 (1997). Individual issues were subtitled "Bound Beauty" (# 1), "Lady in Charge" (# 2), "Broken Engagement" (# 3), "Broken Engagement 2" (# 4).

In 1963, Stanton did a few very clever drawings for the Selbee magazine, Female Mimics. These are from Female Mimics 1, Female Mimics 2 and Female Mimics 3.

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Pérez Seves, Richard (2018). Eric Stanton & the History of the Bizarre Underground. Atglen: Schiffer. pp.12–18. ISBN 9780764355424. The Stanton-Ditko studio lasted until 1968, when they both set out again on their own. That year, Stanton met Britt Stromsted, a Norwegian woman visiting the U.S. Unlike Grace, Britt was fascinated by Stanton’s artistry, and she even modeled in wrestling poses with Stanton, photos he’d use as references when drawing fighting femmes. Something in Stanton’s psychological makeup dictated channeling and creating art as a means of attaining a proper balance and some measure of control in his life. The actual art he made—the artifact itself—was always less important than the process. [...] It was the process of making art that Stanton lived for; it was that process of exploration and discovery. Working through his grief, Peter eventually develops tentative feelings toward Mary Jane, and the two "become confidants rather than lovers". Would it be fair to say from bizarre culture? Or, specifically, from Stanton since he had been creating hooded characters for almost as long as he had been a fetish artist?”