On Annie Hunter Eriksen and Lee Gatlin's marvelous comic creator biographies With Great Power and Along Came a Radioactive Spider

In 2021 and 2023, writer Annie Hunter Eriksen and artist Lee Gatlin released a pair of children's picture books through Page Street Kids, both unauthorized biographies of two of the three primary comics professionals who created what we now think of as the Marvel Universe, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko (the third, Jack Kirby, appears in both men's stories, but doesn't didn't get his own book...at least not yet).

Attracted both by Gatlin's highly idiosyncratic, cartoonistly work, which I was familiar with from his posting on social media (where he posts great drawings of The Thing and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), as well as curiosity about how a writer might go about reducing such men's complex careers into something short and simple enough for a picture book, I recently brought them both home from the library. 

As a grown-up and a long-time comics reader, I liked them both well enough, and I would certainly recommend them to anyone in that same demographic. As far as the intended audience of children goes, well, I'm afraid I can't really imagine how these would go over, as it's hard to imagine anyone young enough to be read to really being too terribly interested in Stan Lee or Steve Ditko. They do seem to be serviceable first biographies on the men, though.

The first, With Great Power: The Marvelous Stan Lee, tackles the most famous figure American comics history has ever produced, whether rightly or wrongly. With just 30 pages to work with, most of which could only support a sentence or two in addition to the images that will dominate them, Eriksen would zero in on Lee's career as a would-be novelist who stumbled into the writings of comics and then hit the big time when he wrote some heroes who were extremely popular in the 1960s, heroes who would eventually become movie stars in the 21st century.

In fact, there's a jump in time from mid-1960s to the turn in century, with an image depicting Lee walking down a red carpet, leading Spider-Man and the Avengers characters, most of whom are drawn wearing sunglasses (Except for Black Panther, whose all-black garb  wouldn't look right with them, and a tiny, too-small-for-them Ant-Man, shown running to keep up with the long strides of the regularly-sized heroes). 

The focus is mostly on Stan Lee as a youngster (appropriately enough, given the target audience), and his time working for Timely/Atlas/Marvel, until he co-created The Fantastic Four and Spider-Man, at which point Stan Lee really becomes the Stan Lee we now imagine when we think of him (For a significant portion of the book, he will be balding, his face looking naked without his signature glasses and mustache).

It's not a bad way to frame Lee's career, really, and certainly focuses on what is perhaps most significant to the broader, mainstream world beyond the comics shop.

The opening, thesis-like two-page spread is pretty great. Eriksen writes:

Stan Lee didn't have hulking strength.

Or fantastic flexibility.

Or catlike reflexes.

His superpower was creating heroes who did.

Each of these sentences is illustrated by an image of Lee as we usually imagine him now, with the shaded glasses, mustache and full head of gray hair, exhibiting one of these powers. 

So there's an image of a huge Stan Lee holding a coffee mug pinched between the fingers of a massive hand, the other one pinching the knob of a door that he's accidentally torn from its hinges. And then one of his left arm stretching into loops before returning to write on the yellow pad of paper he held in his other hand, as Mister Fantastic might be able to. And then one of him dressed in Black Panther's costume, complete with cute cat ears, the cowl open to reveal his familiar, grandfatherly face. And, finally, an image of him with his feet up on a desk, a lightbulb appearing over his head, while he raises a finger in a "Eureka!" like pose.

From there, Eriksen rewinds to his childhood: "But back when he was Stanley Lieber, a kid growing up in New York City, he didn't feel super." After a few pages on his childhood, the young protagonist lands a job in publishing: 

Luckily, a magazine called Timely Comics was hiring. With this gig Stanley could get his foot in the door in the world of writing. But for now, he would be Stanley Lieber: Errand Boy!

Eriksen doesn't mention a fact that tempers that "Luckily"; Lee's cousin was married to publisher Martin Goodman, a relationship which likely had something to do not only with his hiring as an errand boy, but also with his becoming an editor while still a teenager, after the famed comic book team Joe Simon and Jack Kirby quit Timely. 

She does detail Lee's work on that team's most famous creation, Captain America, which is when Stanley first became "Stan Lee," writing a filler story for the superhero under the pseudonym, wanting to save "Stanley Lieber" for his future great American novel. (Unfortunately, the story isn't clear that Captain America was Simon and Kirby's creation; the character just sort of exists here and is a steppingstone in Lee's transition from errand boy to writer.)

Gatlin's illustrations for the momentous occasion are pretty cool, though, with one page showing a cartoonish Captain America—none of the many Marvel heroes depicted within the book have the big, muscular, dynamic figures one would expect to see in an actual Marvel comic book—standing before a Hollywood-like chair labeled "Cap" and holding a script, saying, "Line? Line?...This is blank" in comic book dialogue balloons.

On the facing page, we see Cap and Bucky in action, battling the Red Skull and his men, while a young Stanley picks at a typewriter in the foreground.

That's soon followed by a scene in which Stan's wife Joan suggests he "finally sneak in a story he'd always wanted to tell," resulting in his "teaming up with Jack Kirby" and creating the Fantastic Four.  And then, "Stan furiously drafted while artist 'Sturdy' Steve Ditko drew the perfect design until a new face peered back at them: Peter Parker... The Amazing Spider-Man!"

After that second hit, his publisher's ask Stan, "What other superheroes do you have up your sleeves?" 

And this then leads to an image of a smug-looking Stan pulling at one of his sleeves, from which emanates a gusher of colorful stars, lightning, and Marvel ephemera (Mjolnir, pumpkin bombs, ants, Doctor Strange's cloak and so on). It's followed by a two-page spread featuring The Hulk, Thor, Silver Surfer, Iron Man and Doctor Strange. 

The contributions of Kirby and Ditko (and Don Heck and Larry Lieber) aren't mentioned here.

It's a certainty a version of the creation of Marvel's most famous characters and the creation of the Marvel Universe that Stan Lee himself would have like! 

Granted, the creation and development of these characters has been something that the men who made them and the fans who loved them have contested and debated endlessly over the years and have long since been the source of high-stakes controversy. While Eriksen and Gatlin obviously include Kirby and Ditko as collaborators (at least on the FF and Spidey), reading this book, it does seem to suggest that Lee did the heavy lifting in the process. 

I don't think this is necessarily a sin on the part of the book's creators. I mean, how nuanced can we expect a book intended for a pre-literate audience to be, after all? And how much controversy should there be in a book serving as a first introduction to Lee's career? Still, adult readers (like me), are sure to notice these aspects, and to raise an eyebrow here and there. 

After the story ends—not with Lee's sad last years, nor his death, but with him standing in a crowd of cosplaying fans and declaring "'NUFF SAID!"—there's a two-page spread of mostly prose, followed by a bibiliography of sources (Not included? Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon's 2003 Stan Lee and The Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book from Chicago Review Press, which I'd personally recommend over some of those cited instead). 

There are three short sections across this spread, one on Stan Lee's cameos in Marvel movies, another on his collaborations with other creators and one on his "Stan's Soapbox" column. That second section, which appears under the heading "Friendly Neighborhood Bullpen", does mention Kirby, Ditko, Heck, Lieber and Bill Everet ("Like any good hero, Stan teamed up," Eriksen writes). 

This section also briefly details "The Marvel Method" of making comics (as opposed to the assembly line way they were mostly created previously), which allowed for greater collaboration between writer and artist...but, as an unfortunate side effect, likely contributed to the historical disagreements over who deserves credit for what (As I've understood it, artists working in "The Marvel Method" like Kirby and Ditko did with Lee are more properly understood as co-writers and artists, not just artists). 

Eriksen and Gatlin's next book, the wonderfully titled Along Came a Radioactive Spider: Strange Steve Ditko and the Creation of Spider-Man, seems to have been born, at least in part, by Eriksen's own dissatisfaction in the limited role Lee's collaborators played in the first book.

In fact, her bio on the back cover flap, begins with the fact that she 

realized while writing With Great Power: The Marvelous Stan Lee...that she, like most people, was overlooking Steve Ditko's role in the Spidey origin story, which inspired her to create the biography he deserves (even if he would totally hate the attention).

It's true that Ditko doesn't get the credit Stan Lee does for creating Spider-Man, but then, much of that is likely due to the two men's very natures. Stan Lee craved the spotlight and spent much of his career in pursuing it and then nurturing the fame his comics work brought him (I think it's safe to say that the various producers and directors didn't have to twist Stan's arm too hard to do all those movie cameos he's now so well known for). 

Ditko, on the other hand, was Lee's polar opposite. He eschewed the fame his creation brought him (as Eriksen's bio alludes to) and eventually gained a reputation for being something of a recluse.

So yeah, the late Ditko likely wouldn't have wanted to see this biography about him, as flattering as it is. That said, it's a good one, and I enjoyed it more than the Stan Lee one that it followed, probably because, unlike Lee, I've never read an actual biography of Ditko, and, in fact, couldn't tell you anything about him other than maybe rattling off a list of comics characters he created, and what I've seen of his work.

The word the Eriksen and Gatlin team attach to Ditko is the one in the sub-title, "strange," and which, given the name of his second most famous Marvel hero, naturally has something of a double meaning. 

"There was absolutely nothing strange about comic book artists Steve Ditko," Eriksen writes in the book's opening, the format of which is an identical, four-part two-page spread to that which opened With Great Power. "His life was an open book!" 

This ironic statement comes above Gatlin's drawing of an annoyed looking Ditko shouting "No comment!" and trying to close his front door while a grinning, generic-looking reporter leers around it, and various arms holding cameras, microphones and notepads are seen on the other side. 

This continues into two more similar situations, in which the prose narration contrasts with Gatlin's cartoon-like illustrations (It's worth noting that this book is a much funnier one than the first), culminating in Eriksen relenting over an image of a smiling Ditko holding a pencil and seated at a drawing table, an image of Spider-Man in one of the panels on the big piece of paper before him.

Okay...so Steve Ditko wasn't really like the rest of the artists at Marvel Comics, but the same could be said about his—yes, Steve's!—most famous creation: Spider-Man. 

The next two-page spread details the strangeness of Spider-Man, and how greatly he differed from the typical superhero, a strangeness accentuated by Gatlin's particularly thin, angular and, well, spidery version of Marvel's flagship hero which, despite adopting a variety of famous poses, looks more weird and alien than ever (Honestly? After reading this, I think Gatlin's is one of my favorite portrayals of the hero; it's easy to see how civilians would be creeped out by this Spider-Man, and how J. Jonah Jameson would viscerally recoil from the strange figure Gatlin draws here).

From there, we get a fairly linear version of Ditko's story, just as we did Lee's before. Ditko also grew up poor in the Great Depression, and he was also attracted to the fantastic, which, for him, meant comics. 

There's a great spread devoted to his work at Marvel and the difference between him and editor Stan Lee, and his reaction to a new character that Lee and Jack Kirby were cooking up (Gatlin draws a great Kirby; his sole appearance in this book looking somewhat bored as he works, a cigar clamped in his jaws). 

It wasn't strange when Stan and The King teamed up yet again for their new story: a boy, a magic ring, and a transformation into the grown-up hero named "Spiderman."

Ditko's job was to illustrated the new comic, but "Spiderman was just another repetitive brave and brawny hero!...Steve itched to break the mold in the best way he knew how—by making Spiderman strange."

We see just how wide the gulf in the two Spidermen was through Gatlin's drawing of Kirby's version, a large, muscular figure sporting a more classic costume and wielding a web gun, and Ditko's version, which we are now all familiar with (Even if the artists that followed Ditko, starting with John Romita Jr., pretty quickly transitioned the hero into a bigger, better-looking, more heroic and, well, less strange figure). 

In this book, Eriksen has Ditko do the heavy-lifting with the development of the character, not just coming up with the desigsn and elements of the secret identity, but creating the book himself: "Suddenly, Steve found himself writing and drawing Spider-Man—a comic book history first."

The book concludes with a passage in which we see Ditko retreating from his own fame, dodging young fans and, in one great illustration, questions, as Gatlin draws Ditko, a pencil behind his ear, in a leaping pose, while a half-dozen dialog balloons, each containing a single question mark, go flying and bouncing all around him. 

The final spread shows a happy Ditko at a drawing board, surrounded by a colorful collage, and a dramatically posing new but familiar character. "So he did what he did best: got to work," Eriksen writes, concluding of his latest work, "The comic was out of this world...and his most fitting work yet! Steve named him DOCTOR STRANGE."

Throughout the book—which gives a shorter, more streamlined version of Spidey that sidesteps some of the questions regarding contributions from Lee, Kirby and possible influences from past characters—Gatlin draws not only the aforementioned comics creators, but also Peter Parker, Spider-Man and some of the hero's foes (The Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, Mysterio, The Sandman and The Scorpion) but, somewhat surprisingly, Captain Marvel and Batman (as well as obscure Simon and Kirby creation Captain 3-D, and Captain Battle, who I didn't recognize*). 

As with With Great Power, this book ends with a short prose section and bibliography.  Here, that section offers a more detailed biography of Ditko, including dates and reference to some of the controversies that wouldn't really fit in a picture book, including aspects of Spider-Man's creation and Ditko's departure from the comic. 

"Steve Ditko Would Hate This Book," reads a headline-like label to one part of this feature, which briefly notes his post-Marvel career (namedropping The Question and Mr. A) and just how media-shy he was, including how few photos there are of Ditko (which did make me curious as to how Gatlin went about developing his Steve, which must have been much harder than drawing Stan Lee, whose look has at this point become almost as iconic as that of some superheroes), his dislike of the "poison sandwich" biography Blake Bell wrote of him and the "rule" imposed by Ditko upon those meeting him: You don't talk about it.

Regardless of what Ditko might think of the book, though, I liked it, and I wouldn't mind reading similar biographies from this particular pair of Kirby, Simon or other famous and influential comics creators in the future.

*Thanks to Anthony Strand for identifying him on Bluesky for me!