This was not something Steve Ditko did, but I saw the sense in it and immediately started using it when I drew Spider-Man.

This morning, for purely nostalgic reasons, I was flipping thru the ESSENTIAL volume of Spider-Man’s first adventures, and I noticed something for the first time. In the first story Ditko had drawn the webbing on Spider-Man’s face and costume curving the opposite direction to how he would later draw it. I don’t know how I had missed this before. I checked to see how long this persisted and found that in the second story the webbing on the mask was in a more familiar configuration. It still remained backwards on the body of the costume. Then in the third story, that reversed too.

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That would pretty much defeat the point of my post, no?

The first time was for CHARLTON BULLSEYE, inking an unpublished Captain Atom story. Since it was something Ditko had originally planned to ink himself the pencils were pretty open, so I did what I could to add weight and texture.

Next up, an Avengers annual, pretty much breakdowns, where Mark Gruenwald, the editor, instructed me to r draw the characters so they looked more as they did in their home titles.

Finally, an issue of ROM where Keith Williams helped out on the backgrounds. With a credit!