HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO STURDY STEVE DITKO

ITEM! It hardly seems possible that Steve Ditko, the man many consider the co-creator of Spider-Man and Doctor Strange, turned 81-years-young on November 2 — and this is my favorite time of year because of it! This is the time of year when for a month-and-a-half I’m only four years older than Steverino! Good ol' Steve. Even though we’ve been on the outs since my 1999 letter acknowledging his contributions to Spidey’s legend, we here in Soapboxland still wish that Randiest of Randians the happiest of birthdays. May the All-Seeing Eye of Agamotto shine brightly on you, may the Fabulous Flames of Faltine light your way, and may all your birthday presents come wrapped in the Crimson Bands of Cytorrak! ‘Nuff Said!

Excelsior!

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DITKO ON KIRBY'S SPIDER-MAN

ITEM! Look’s like Sturdy Steve Ditko, the man many consider the co-creator of Spder-Man, has finally updated his blog with a 2002 article relating his verifiable version of Spidey’s creation — with a focus on what contributions Jack Kirby made and didn’t make. It’s interesting reading, though in a rare burst of relatively reliable recall Yours Truly gave comprehensive coverage to the self same issue both here and here. To read about it from Steverino's point-of-view, clicketh thou here, and enjoy it for thyself!

Excelsior!

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ART DIRECTOR PAR EXCELLANCE

ITEM! While most folks mainly remember my 1945-1972 stint as Editor-in-Chief at Marvel Comics for my witty writing, dramatic dialogue, elegant editing, and peerless promotional propaganda, the fact is that I was also one helluva Art Director as well. Sure I had some great guys like Kirby, Ditko, Romita, Colan and others who were actually producing all of that art, but at the end of the day who was responsible for the overall look-and-feel of the whole furshlinger comic book line? If you said Sol Brodsky, go sit in the back of the class, pilgrim. Yours Truly was the final say on everything. Well... the final say except for Uncle Martin. And that’s my Uncle — Martin Goodman — not Bill Bixby’s. But I digress...

Much like late-great PBS art show host Bob Ross, who wanted everyone to paint “happy trees,” I was forever extolling the Bullpen to draw things “more like Kirby.” Say what you will, but it was art direction like that which got our sales up over Brand Ecch’s in the early 70s, and we've never looked back since. Still, not everyone was comfortable with my art directorial style. For example, see the over-the-top, over-done, over-alliterative cartoon below, submitted to the ol’ Sock It To Stan emailbox by MMMS member Rob Steibel. Your specially primed and armed Nuclear No-Prize is on it’s way to you, Rob. Who says your Uncle Stanley can’t take a little joke?

Excelsior!

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MR. A, THE MUSICAL

ITEM! Relax, Frantic Ones. Even though Broadway is indeed busy moving Heaven and Earth to try and make a musical out of everything from Spider-Man to Robocop, no one has yet decided to make a musical out of Sturdy Steve Ditko’s hero Mr. A. It’s just that every once in awhile my adopted great-grandson Irving Forbush III brings me these things and in spite all common sense and common-copyright-law I just have to post ‘em. This one takes the lyrics from a song by Alan Moore’s old band The Ice Cream Emperors and lets everyone’s favorite rascally Randian hero cut loose and belt one out! The results are, well... you better just take a gander at it for yourselves... (and as always, click on the image to embiggen it, natch!)

Excelsior!

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"A" IS FOR ALLITERATIVE

ITEM! You know, I’ve done my very best over the years to make Sturdy Steve Ditko happy... I really have. I’ve done everything from publishing a letter in the New York Times in which I stated plainly and for-the-record that I have always “considered” him the co-creator of Spider-Man, to voluntarily letting myself be grilled by that BBC-boob Jonathan Ross until some of my true feelings about the matter accidentally slipped past my normally glib and glamorous gab-hole (see video below). I’ve even made anonymous donations to anonymous libraries to try and straighten this creative-credit karma out. And what thanks do I get? I get to read blogs like this one by Matt Tauber.

Actually it’s a pretty good read, including a nice analysis of Ditko’s latest Avenging Mind comic/essay. You know, current efforts to properly credit my co-creators and keep my legendary literary legacy nice and shiny aside, your Uncle Stanley will have to redact himself from commenting on things written or said as long ago as 1974’s Origins of Marvel Comics. Was Yours Truly just grabbing any credit that wasn’t nailed down back then, or were Marvel’s entertainment attorneys breathing down my neck to ensure that a current work-for-hire employee was credited with creating everything? Who knows... I sure don’t. I have trouble remembering what I had for lunch yesterday, my-as-less what went on 30-40 years ago. And besides, if an 85-year-old man wants to think he mostly created (or co-created for Odin’s sake) the whole blamed Marvel Universe, why not let him? You’ll note that even after Steve and Jack left Marvel, the Smilin’ One went right on creating new characters. She-Hulk anyone? How ‘bout Stripperella?

Excelsior!

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CO-CREATORS, THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STORY

ITEM! Hi there, Heroes! One of the reasons I started this off-the-record, off-the-wall and off-the-hook li’l eye-opener of a blog was to set the record straight and make some amenable amends to some of my co-creators past and present. And how better to tell their sensible side of the story than to let them do it for themselves? Once upon a time in a Silver Age far, far away, their were two extra features included in our 72-page annuals that were actually plotted, drawn and mostly written by Jolly Jack Kirby and Sturdy Steve Ditko, each representing their own facetious feelings about their respective collaborations with Yours Truly!

First up in The Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1 (Nov. 1964, natch) was Ditko’s imaginatively titled “How Stan Lee and Steve Ditko Create Spider-Man” (see selected panels below). Even then, Stevey-Boy was complaining about my practice of signing my name on anything and everything that wasn’t nailed down!

Then the King gives us his version of the Lee-Kirby collaborative process in the perhaps sarcastically entitled “This Is A Plot?” from The Fantastic Four Annual #5 (Nov. 1967, and if yah don’t already own this one and the Spidey Annual above, what the heck are yah waiting for? Irving Forbush’s Birthday? Marvel only reprints these things in about a gazillion different trade paperbacks and books! Get thee to a local comic shop now, pilgrim!). Jack actually did a pretty good job of capturing the simultaneous creative joy our plotting sessions, as well as the near-total lack of us actually listening to what the other was saying (see panels below).

What can I say? As in all writing and art, no matter how fictitious or fanciful the story, our true experiences and personas usually shine right on through. If I’da been Carl Jung instead of the liltin’ literary lengend that I was, I might have picked up on some of these clues to the future falling-outs your Uncle Stanley was destined to have with Kirby and Ditko. Ah well, you know what they say... blindsight is 20/20.

Excelsior!

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WHO CREDITS THE CREATORS?

ITEM! No matter how many times Yours Truly rhapsodizes about the magic of Jolly Jack Kirby, some folks just don’t seem to feel that Jack gets enough creator credit around these parts. Well, today we’ll try and fix that li’l problem. Wouldja believe me if I said that in my own humble opinion Jack’s influence as a creator can be seen as far and as wide as in the just-released trailer for The Watchmen movie? No? Then follow along, pilgrim!

Let’s start all the way back in 1959, when Joe Simon and Jack Kirby created The Fly for an Arch rival of ours. As especially studious ones already know, The Fly was based on an earlier Simon creation called The Silver Spider (and in a still earlier draft “Spiderman” with no hyphen). In 1963, when Yours Truly was casting about for another colorful character to add to our rollicking roster at Marvel, Jack dusted off the old Spiderman concept and drew around eight pages on the project before I pulled it and gave it to Sturdy Steve Ditko to do over. Jack’s original Spider-Man design can be seen here and below in a mock-up of Amazing Fantasy #15 by John Bryne and a spot drawing done from memory by Steve Ditko himself! Everyone knows that Steve then redesigned the character using little-if-any of Jack’s desgn and the rest was history, right? Don’t you bet on it, sunshine!

After Steve jumped ship to Charlton in ’66, he was asked to come up with a new version of their Golden Age superhero the Blue Beetle (see illo below, click to enlarge). Notice anything familiar about Ditko’s Blue Beetle revamp? That’s right — it bears an uncanny resemblance to Jack’s original Spider-Man design, all the way down to the Sandman & Sandy hooded cowl, goggle lenses and holstered pistol! Coincidence? Me thinks not.

Turn the clock forward to 1986, when Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons released their seminal serialized sensation, Watchmen, on an unsuspecting reading public. As most of us know, The Watchmen were loosely based on the Charlton Comics stable of heroes, with the Nite-Owl being mostly modeled on Ditko’s Blue Beetle, down to the goggles, belt full of scientific gadgetry and flying fortress airship. In 2008, all of this has been translated into fantastic filmic fun by Watchmen director Zack Snyder and crew. Hopefully you’ve seen the amazing Watchmen trailer by this time. For a Brand Ecch movie, it's not too shabby. If not, go here and check it out now in all its High-Definition glory. We’'ll wait for yah right here.

Notice anything about the movie’s version of Nite-Owl? Looks pretty Kirbyesque doesn’t he? Just for kicks compare the movie’s version of Nite-Owl with the King’s version of what a Marvelized Batman would look like in a sketch he did in 1982. It’s okay... take a minute, then you can say it with me. Just do your best George Takei voice and say, “Oh my...” Here's how the whole peerless progression goes (click on the individual pieces of artwork to see larger views):

So what’s the lesson here, pilgrims? The lesson is that Jack Kirby was an elemental force of creative nature, and he was always out there ahead of us mere mortals and probably will be for years to come. It’s almost as if all things begin and end with Jack Kirby. How’s THAT for a creator credit? Thus endeth the lesson, Faithful Ones!

Excelsior!

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MISRENDER ON THE MASTERWORKS EXPRESS

ITEM! Holy Skrull-Cow! Where’s Miss Marble when yah need her? Yours Truly just discovered that the Mighty Marvel Original Art/Recreated Art Mystery runs a lot deeper than most of us probably suspected. Apparently my amazingly monolithic alma mater has been hiring artists to “recreate” covers, interior pages, and in some cases, entire issues of Marvel’s Silver Age classics for the Marvel Masterworks and Omnibus reprint books. And by recreate I mean trace. And by trace I mean forge. It seems that they’re doing this whenever stats or film of the original issues turns up missing. Let’s go over that again so it has chance to really sink in. Rather than scanning original print copies of the missing pages or books and print that (as was done in GTI Corp’s dramatic-but-now-nearly-departed DVD collections), they’ve elected to go to special recreation artists that would never otherwise be hired to draw a Marvel comic and have them make fastidious forgeries of classic Kirby and Ditko art. And if yah don’t believe the Smilin’ One, then see 20th Century Danny Boy’s excellent examination of this egregious exercise in ersatz engraving.

Far be it from your Uncle Stanley to cast the first stick at anyone for faking something, but there should at the very least be full disclosure in these books so that readers know exactly when and where they’re not really getting the genuine article. Here’s Danny Boy’s short list of known recreated art in these high-end reprints. Go read that and then come back here for more!

Back? Good! It’s not like we didn’t face this same problem back in my day. An entire issue of The Amazing Spider-Man went missing from our files way back in the late 60s — Spidey #29 to be exact. Never reprinted until Marvel Tales #168 (Oct. 1984), the Marvel production department had to reshoot the entire ish from a print copy and then clean up the resulting stats via knife, white-out and some re-lettering. But Marvel did two things back in’84 that kept it all on the up-an-up: 1.) They told readers what they had done to restore the Ditko art, and 2.) They restored the Ditko art from stats, they didn’t redraw it. That’s at least two ethical lines that have been crossed in the current reprints. Full disclosure, disclaimers and discourse is the way to go with these Masterworks and Omnibus reprints that contain recreated artwork. You hear that, Joltin’ Joe Quesada? Is it real or is it Memorex? True Believers want to know! 

P.S. Can you imagine the poor sap that gets sorely saddled someday with recreating Vince Colletta’s inks on classic issues of The Mighty Thor? Will Marvel supply the artist with his own whisk broom to ink with, or will he they have to buy their own? Yeesh! I just gave myself cold chills with that one, pilgrims. Now if someone wants to hire Mike Royer to re-ink Jack’s entire Thor run from his pencils stats, I’m sure that’s one recreation we could all get behind! Your Fearless Leader (Emeritus) hath spoken!

Excelsior!

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...AND ALONG CAME A SPIDER-FLY!

ITEM! Speaking of Jolly Jack Kirby, look-see what Yours Truly found while unpacking some old files down in The Crypt (my hermetically-seal comics vault deep beneath stately Lee Manor). I believe this is Jack’s original design for Spider-Man before I stuck a hyphen in the name and gave the project to Ditko to do over! I musta signed off on this one before Jack turned in his legendarily rejected pages (see this Sunny Soapbox Story for more on that). It’s interesting what 45-plus years of hindsight will do for your eyes, pilgrims. This doesn’t look all that bad to me these days, though of course I stand by my editorial decision to use Sturdy Steve’s design instead. Jack’s Spider-Man was a little bit of lots of prior Simon-Kirby heroes. I can see some Sandman and Sandy, a little Fighting American, and of course some Archie-comics-style Fly in this design. And as we all know, that’s Joe Simon’s logo work that Jack had hung onto all those years.

And if Jack’s version of Spidey also looks a little Ant-Man-like, that’s no accident either. I gave Ant-Man to Jack as a consolation prize for taking him off of Spider-Man, though he protested both decisions. Yah see, Ant-Man was one of my ideas (heck I was on a whole insect-themed run back in those days). Jack told me that a hero with the power to shrink and control ants was lamer-than-lame, but I didn’t listen to him... and as usual Jack was ultimately proven right. It wasn’t the first time nor the last. Any-hoo, enjoy this little piece of unearthed apocryphal arcana. Remember Frantic Ones, you can't get the goods anywhere but here at Ol' Uncle Stanley's Soapbox & Sundries! Tell 'em your Aunt Petunia sent yah!

Excelsior!

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THE FOUNTAINHEAD OF STEVE DITKO'S ART

ITEM! Welcome back to “Things You Must Buy At Your Local Comic Shop This Week, Part III.” Next up is the best up! Though not featuring Yours Truly per se, there’s lots to read about how ol’ Sturdy Steve and I collaborated, co-plotted and collided in Blake Bell’s scholarly study, Strange and Stranger: The Worlds of Steve Ditko!

This well-researched recount of the life and times of everyone’s favorite raconteur and randy Randian makes an ideal coffee table companion to Mark Evanier’s Kirby: King of Comics. And it’s in comparison to Madcap Mark’s Kirby book that Blake Bells’ work really shines! As much as I enjoyed Evanier’s Kirby book, it contained little that I hadn’t read, heard or seen before. Blake’s Ditko book is a much denser and more complete essay on its subject than Evanier’s. (That's review pull-out quote #42 in a series, by the way... collect 'em all! — Studious Stan) Bashful Blake really delivers the goods on Sterling Steve Ditko, including details of the Lee-Ditko collaboration that even Yours Truly had either forgotten or never knew. For example, I never knew that when Ditko quit Marvel he wrote Kirby a letter trying to get him to leave at the same time! Fascinating.

My only nits were the ones that you’d expect from an editor-type like moi. At one point in the story, Marvel apparently released a “title wave” of books onto the newsstands, which is either a typo or one really titanic pun! And speaking of titles, I kinda wish Sturdy Steve hadn’t thrown a fit and more-or-less forced Mr. Bell to change the title from his original “The Mysterious Traveler: The World of Steve Ditko.” Steve Ditko was a mysterious traveller, and Blake Bell’s doctoral dissection of the Ditko dichotomy is well worth your discretionary-income dollars! Go get this one pilgrims!

Excelsior!

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MARVELOUS MOTIVATIONAL MONOGRAPHS

ITEM! Honest Irv just showed me this great website called motivationalbuck.com and I decided to spruce up the ol’ POW! offices with some customized creative content today! It was either that, or start writing some of the two-dozen projects that my lawyers have signed me up for. Heck, I'm all writer-blocked on the sequel to Election Daze anyways... maybe I need to do a book of these instead! It just goes to show you — you never know when the Merry Marvel Muses are gonna strike next! You Frantic Ones and Fearless Front-Facers out there in Marveldom should really go to this site and have some fun with it. Your Uncle Stan sure did!

Excelsior!

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MARVELOUS ICONOGRAPHY

ITEM! Time for an art history lesson, True Believers. Before you yawn, yelp or yowl — relax. It’s a Merry Marvel art history lesson! Kick back, get out your MMMS stationary, and take notes, of you wish. Today’s subject: the unsung iconic art of Jack King Kirby and Sturdy Steve Ditko!

The Wikipedias define iconography as “the branch of art history which studies the identification, description, and the interpretation of the content of images. The word iconography literally means "image writing." Looking at all that Silver Age Marvel merchandise yesterday reminded me just how much of a debt we all owe Jolly Jack and Sturdy Steve. Those guys were amazing, and that’s no fantasy! In the normal everyday course of creating comic book art for page rates, these guys created symbolic representations of these characters that were so iconic they were used repeatedly in merchandising until the very images themselves became embedded in all of our collective consciousnesses! That’s quite an accomplishment, Tiger! Quick — what’s the last cover image from recent years that you can remember being used on a poster, t-shirt or toy package?

And as much credit as Yours Truly would like to take for my part in merchandising these characters, I would be remiss in not pointing out that the iconic nature of these images has absolutely nothing to do with wordsmithing — which let’s face it is my speciality. Kirby and Ditko were able to create these iconic images by taking, of all things, guys running around in capes and their PJ’s, and forging them into images that evoke raw power, pathos, and heroism with a single glance. Da Vinci and Michelangelo got nothing on these two.

Thus endeth the lesson, Frantic Ones. You may put your pencils down now!

Excelsior!

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ARACHNALOGOS

ITEM! Let’s talk logos, pilgrims and pilgrettes! How ‘bout more info on the history of the Spider-man logo than you can shake a web-shooter at? With a lot of help from Irving Forbush (and enough over-the-counter memory-enhancing pharmaceuticals to make monkeys recite Macbeth), I’ve assembled an action-packed arachna-anthology to appease even the most assuaged apocryphal appetite. 

In the beginning, there once was a little Spiderman (no hyphen) that tried to spin a little web under the creative auspices of legendary Kirby-collaborator Joltin’ Joe Simon. Circa 1953 or so, Joe came up with an idea for a new hero initially called Spiderman. Deciding later that there were too many “name-that-animal”-man characters on the market, Joe later changed the name to The Silver Spider — but not before creating a Spiderman logo (pictured above)... the self same logo that Jolly Jack Kirby would later drag into my office in 1962 along with “his” idea for a new long underwear character by the very same name!

Most Frantic Ones know the next bit of our story. I liked the idea, but my publisher uncle-in-law Martin Goodman didn’t. Jack liked his version of the character (more-than-a-little-loosely-based on both Simon’s original idea and the subsequent Simon & Kirby Fly character done for a competitor), but I didn’t. I gave it to Sturdy Steve Ditko to do over in a more original spider-vein, and decided to sneak it into the struggling Amazing Adult Fantasy book. We went through several logo iterations at this point. Check out Ditko’s never-before-seen original logo that’s sitting underneath it’s paste-up replacement on the first page of the Amazing Fantasy #15 original art (now residing snugly at the Library of Congress, natch)! Ditko’s first logo attempt (still without a hyphen, as was the case several times in that story’s dialogue) was interesting, but your Uncle Stanley thought it was too busy and a little too horsey. 

Sol Brodsky and Johnny Dee (né Jon D’Agostino) came up with a couple of alternatives that we ended up using. Ditko’s page-one logo was replaced with the fancier of the two, and we used that same logo on Ditko’s original cover art before I had Kirby redo the cover (we redid a lot of things back in those days, pilgrims — Taskmaster Stan). We finally ended up using Sol’s plainer, blockier Spider-man logo on the published cover of AF #15.

Sol’s logo was the official one for a brief period — you can see various versions of it at the top of most of the splash pages of Spidey stories commissioned for Amazing Fantasy (before it was cancelled) that ended up being published about a year later in The Amazing Spider-man #1 and #2. We tried to fancy it up with a Spidey-signal and some webs... but your Uncle Stanley still wasn’t satisfied. 

I wish I could tell yah exactly who it was that designed the final logo, but my daily dosage of St. John’s Wort has just about worn off and I’m drawing a big blank. I remember that we had it all cockeyed on Spidey #1 but got it nicely finalized on #2 as part of giving the whole Marvel Comics line a much-needed identity make-over. From then until now some version of that same logo has graced the cover of every ish of Spidey from the Lee-Ditko days all the way up to Dashin’ Danny Slot in 2008! That’s 559 issues of walloping webbed-up wonderment, Tiger! And now, as Paul Harvey says, “you know the nest of the story!”

Excelsior!

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IF A IS A, THEN DITKO IS DITKO

ITEM! Didja know that your Uncle Stanley is capable, when hard-pressed, of talking about something besides himself and his own projects? Shocking news... I know. But the fact of the matter is, there’s only one of me and a whole planet of Frantic Ones out there keeping the faith and Making Their’s Marvel each and every day. Well, the Smilin’ One is here to help. Today, let’s talk about Sturdy Steve Ditko and the dearth of diligently-done and delightfully-designed Ditko-designated publications coming soon to a davenport near you.

First up, from the man himself, is Ditko’s first new published work in 8 years, The Avenging Mind, available by mail-order only from longtime Ditko publisher Robyn Snyder. See Blake Bell’s excellent website Ditko Looked Up for details on how to order this puppy!

And speaking of Bashful Blake Bell, his own 216-page hard cover opus Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko (see cover shot above) is due out in stores in just a few more weeks! A wonderful companion book to Madcap Mark Evanier’s Kirby: King of Comics, Strange and Stranger is sure to be about as exacting an examination of everyone’s favorite Randy Randian as you’re going to find in this lifetime. And of course Sturdy Steve gave this book his usual ringing personal endorsement: he made ‘em change the title!

But wait! There’s more! Longtime Ditko devotee Rascally Rob Imes has brought back Big Bill Hall’s 80s-90s fanzine publication, Ditkomania! Keeping the original numbering, ish #64 is now available! Go to your local comic book shop and demand they order your copy today, pussycats!

Finally, it looks like Sturdy Steve has tentatively tipped his toes back into the World Wide Webs with the Steve Ditko Blog. Predictably, the Publicity-Shy One has nothing on the site to let Ditko addicts everywhere know that it looks like 2008 is shaping up to be the Year of Steve Ditko! But that’s what old carnival barkers like Yours Truly are here for! Well, that and to keep the lawyers employed.

Excelsior!

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SPIDER-MAN, SPIDER-MAN, DOES WHATEVER A LIBRARIAN CAN!

ITEM! Okay hysterical historians and lubricious librarians, it’s time to go get your swingin’ library cards validated so that you can go see the original art to Amazing Fantasy #15 up close and personal! 'Course, you’re also gonna need to take a little drive to Washington D.C... but every true-blooded American should do that at least once in their patriotic lives anyway. Cap would be proud!

It brings a tear to my eye to see the scans and pics already put online by some of the library staff. That one lady reminds me of Sol Brodsky, and not because there’s too little of her to love, if you know what I mean. But it really takes me back down nostalgia road, only bigger and better than it ever was. Back in 1963, we were just trying to get the damn books out the door and keep our jobs. Few were the times we ever slowed down enough to sit down and really appreciate the precious paneled pen-and-inked wonders that Kirby and Ditko were delivering to us on an almost daily basis. Just look at the scan above. Gaze in wonderment at the details of Sturdy Steve’s delicate pen lines that were later mostly mauled by the crude mechanical reproduction processes of the day. The wonder! The majesty!

I often wonder what we could do with Stevey’s art in these days of computers and lasers and photoshops. I wondered until Irving Forbush showed me. I gotta say, as much as I love the over-complicated pen lines of these modern comic book artists (heck, Marvel pays me to like ‘em, so why not?), there’s some real artistry going on in Ditko’s simple strokes and design... an artistry that’s all but gone from today’s comics.

Anyways, before I get too mawkishly maudlin, here’s one of those linky things that’ll take you to an officially unoffical Library of Congress librarian’s own boisterous blog. You can read all about when, where and how you can go see these twice-up treasures for yourselves. That’s your tax dollars at work, pilgrims!

Excelsior!

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ORIGINAL COVER ART NOT INCLUDED

ITEM! Sometimes the news eternal just can’t be denied. Despite the best efforts of all involved, I guess it was bound to get out. An “anonymous” donor has given the Library of Congress all of the original art for Amazing Fantasy #15 (Sturdy Steve Ditko’s unused cover art shown at right). If you don’t already know, and it’s time to turn in your MMMS membership card if you don’t, that comic is the first appearance of every one’s favorite wallcrawler — Spider-Man. See the story that broke the news here.

Everyone seems to be preoccupied and puzzled over why anyone in possession of such a priceless prize, which includes not only the 11-page Spidey story but the entirety of the other stories published in that same ish, would give it to the Library of Congress when they could sell it on ebay for thousands, if not millions of dollars. Well Frantic Ones, as much as it pains me to say this, there are some things more important than money. Especially if you already have slightly less than Scrooge McDuck. After a certain age, if you’ve been succeedingly successful in this life, you may find yourself in a position where you can’t live long enough to spend all of the money that you have. Then all you have left to motivate you each morning, as you get up and have your eight cups of coffee and enough St. John’s Wort to launch the space shuttle, is working on your legacy. How will you be remembered after you’re gone? As a show-stopping carnival barker and media whore who stole any credit that wasn’t nailed down? As the primary architect of a soulless entertainment empire so vast it has trouble seeing over it’s own ledger sheet? As the guy who who never met a run-on sentence that he didn’t like?

We should all probably just let this story rest and not try to find out who the anonymous donor was. What if he or she is an individual who’s trying to work off some kind of karma debt, like that My Name is Earl guy? Maybe the individual was promised a section of the Library of Congress named for him after he’s gone. Who knows? I'm just sayin'. Probably best to let sleeping dogs lie like dogs. Besides, Ditko said it was okay to do it!

Excelsior!

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