Creator Ed Quinby on his wondrous webcomic...

In November 1961 Stan Lee and a bullpen of talented artists and writers launched the Marvel Age of Comics, one month later, I was nine years old. It was definitely a good time to be a fan. Over the ensuing months and years I had all the 4-color excitement my preadolescent mind could handle. Jack Kirby was obviously the artistic workhorse at Marvel in those days. Kirby was the fan's choice for art chores on every character he tried his hand at from the Hulk, to Two-Gun Kid, to Iron Man, to Sgt. Fury. There was only one other artist that put such an immutable stamp on his characters that even the King could never again lay claim to them. Steve Ditko's vision is so unique and eccentric that it is impossible to imagine the characters of Dr. Strange and Spider-Man as having been designed by anyone else.

While Kirby brought unequalled power and intensity to the drawing table, when you opened a Ditko book, you didn't know what you might see, just that it was likely something you'd never seen before. At that impressionable age, Ditko's methods seemed always obscure, indefinable and mysterious. His artwork embraced opposites. It was dark, yet lively, grounded in realism, yet drenched in the surreal and while Kirby had his Krackle, just what arcane energies those spells of Dr. Strange were composed of, nobody knew! I was hooked and I liked it,and so,to revisit a place that was both a safe haven and port of perilous adventure in my younger days, I wrote and drew this vignette, Mystic Interlude. Yes, you'll see a few Kirby riffs in this story and some other influences as well, but it's meant as a sincere fannish tribute to Steve Ditko. The legacy of Sturdy Steve, as he was most often called in those early days lives on in a legion of inimitable distinctive characters and an artistic standard the rest of us can strive for. It's his depiction of Spider-Man, possibly the most recognizable comics icon of all, that is so indelibly marked on the public perception that when viewing the cgi movie Spider-man for the first time 'thwipping' his way through downtown New York City, I could only feel deja-vu. I'd seen it before, in Steve Ditko's artwork and my youthful dreams.

Below are other drawings by Excited Ed Quinby!