| |
|
Answering, cluttering up a couple of messages here.
The Aquarian does indeed look like the famous white brown-haired and bearded hippie Jesus we all know -- I remember his entry in the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe but I never read any actual stories with him in them.
The Aquarian was Steve Gerber's version of "Superman", and he used the character as a bit of a jab at how DC was using the character at the time. When Gerber left, he became "generic naive alien" and went from looking like a hippy Superman to a white tunic hippy.
One man's "integrity" is another man's right-wing nutjob idiocy. Ditko wanted the Goblin to be just some random criminal, on moral grounds - the idea that it was Peter Parker's best mate's dad was just too upsetting for him. Does anyone really think it would have been better the Ditko way?
The biggest problem Stan had with it was they had spent so much time building up who the Green Goblin could be, he thought readers would feel cheated if it was just a random guy...and also, Ditko had used that device before, and Stan didn't like the idea of them repeating the same "twist" so soon.
Dikto left for a number of other reasons, though, and to say that he left because of that isn't quite right. Ditko and Stan frequently butted heads of the books, and if you read the early Spider-Man strips, you'll see that Ditko is credited as "plotter", mostly because he was no longer talking to Stan. The story is that he would do an issue, bring it in to the office for Stan to script, leaving Stan notes on what the story was.
The series changed a LOT when Ditko left...the "bitchiness" of the women softened considerably(just read the difference in Gwen Stacy once Ditko left...it's not even remotely the same character), villains became more mundane (Kingpin, Silvermane, Prowler and Rhino, for example), Jameson became more of a comic foil than a threat, and the biggest change in my mind, was that Stan softened the stance of the book toward its audience of teens and college students. Ditko always portrayed protesters as an evil that must be stopped, a sign that society was spinning out of control while Stan showed them in a positive light.
While Ditko was a better artist than Romita on the book, I much prefer Stan's plotting to Ditko's. |
|
|
), in fact propably worse . So any skilled strong guy in his strenght class (Gladiator, Thor) Should really just knock the seven bells out of him .