Comics legend Steve Ditko has died.
According The Hollywood Reporter, the Spider-Man and Doctor Strange co-creator was found dead in his New York City apartment on June 29, but is believed to have pass away two days earlier. He was 90 years old.
Perhaps best known for his work on Marvel’s Spider-Man and Doctor Strange in the 1960s, Ditko helped to create several of the characters’ rogues galleries, including the wall-crawler’s foes Sandman, Green Goblin and The Lizard, while of course imagining the psychedelic Dormammu in Strange Tales. Ditko’s run on his most famous co-creation ended in 1966 with The Amazing Spider-Man #38, six years after the character’s introduction in Amazing Fantasy #15.
Ditko left Marvel due to a fight with collaborator, and editor, Stan Lee that was never publicly explained, but the most common theory is that he was frustrated by Lee’s oversight. Ditko went on to work at Charlton and DC Comics, although he did return to Marvel in the 1990s. Among his most popular post-Bronze Age co-creations are Speedball and Squirrel Girl.
At DC, Ditko created The Question, The Creeper, Shade, the Changing Man, and Hawk & Dove; the latter two will be featured in the upcoming Titans live-action series. The Question in particular mirrored Ditko’s own growing fascination with Randian Objectivist philosophy, which he continued to entertain into his elder years. At Charleston, his major contributions were Blue Beetle and Captain Atom, later acquired with the rest of the publisher’s superheroes by DC.
Ditko continued to publish comics, independently, until his death.