The Art of Eric Stanton: For the Man Who Knows His Place

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Over the years, the Peter Parker character developed from a shy, nerdy New York City high school student to a troubled but outgoing college student, to a married high school teacher to, in the late 2000s, a single freelance photographer. In the 2000s, he joins the Avengers. He explained that since Spider-Man was so famous, it might draw attention to him as an artist if people knew he contributed to the creation of the character,” Amber wrote. “My brother and I were children and in school, and he feared that it could negatively effect our lives if people knew he was an erotic fetish artist.”

And Ditko was completely accepting of Stanton: ‘He thought my stuff was funny. We’d laugh a lot,’ Stanton said, as he fondly remembered years later. ‘Every experience that I had with Steve was terrific, as far as I was concerned.’” Ditko claimed in a rare interview with Jonathan Ross that the costume was initially envisioned with an orange and purple color scheme rather than the more famous red and blue. This speech makes me smile each time I read it. Can you imagine anyone actually taking like this? How about her statement that feminine attire denotes low stature? Doesn’t that seem inconsistent with ‘his inferior body’? Wouldn’t looking like a woman cause him to gain stature in the eyes of the ‘Tame-azons’?The book’s only scholarly flaw is Seves’ failure to caption the illustrations; they are usually explained in the adjacent text, but you have to look hard for it. A photograph of an attractive middle-aged woman we determine is Stanton’s mother only because the text nearby is about her. Ditko’s work on Spider-Man with Lee was less a collaboration than a dialectical collision. According to Marvel writer/editor Roy Thomas, Lee and Ditko disagreed on just about everything, from aesthetics to politics. But it was a collision that made possible a uniquely affecting comic book. Lee conceived the teenage, high-school milieu but Ditko protected that world from Lee’s more fanciful, cosmic ideas, arguing that Spidey’s villains should be rooted in the streets of New York. The Amazing Spider-Man combined Ditko’s story pacing, character design and wiry movements with Lee’s self-aware dialogue, Ditko’s interiorized existential dilemmas with Lee’s trademark tension between the ordinary and the extraordinary.

As depicted in Amazing Fantasy #15 (Aug. 1962), he is bitten by a radioactive spider (erroneously classified as an insect in the panel) at a science exhibit and "acquires the agility and proportionate strength of an arachnid". Says Seves: “One could only imagine how gratifying Ditko’s presence must have been to Stanton after his time with Grace; from being around someone who was repulsed by art to being around someone whose very waking moment was consumed by it. ‘There were times Steve would spend twenty hours straight doing a comic,’ Stanton remembered. Ditko’s material showed a total unawareness of sex while Stanton’s material conveyed a kooky preoccupation with it. Yet both shared the same ambition of make it as artists; and both, one might say, were earnest and obsessed.” When prominent novelist Jonathan Lethem asked to include a Ditko story in the 2015 volume of The Best American Comics, Ditko turned him down. Pérez Seves, Richard (2018). Eric Stanton & the History of the Bizarre Underground. Atglen: Schiffer. pp.12–18. ISBN 9780764355424.You should know better than to bring a weak and puny man into my presence without fitting female clothes on his inferior body! Take those torn clothes away from him and place feminine attire on him to denote his lowly present stature."

In her introduction to the '98 book, Dian Hanson writes about working at a sex magazine in the mid-'70s, and coming across Stanton's work for the first time. Initially, she took great pleasure in work she'd assumed was feminist in nature, but while the pleasure remained, she soon understood that this was not Stanton's objective - "sexual politics were the only kind that held his interest." And by 'sexual politics,' I take it to mean interpersonal dynamics. Look closely at the image above. Look at the son, screaming in agony. "FIGHT HER!" he cries, not his only dismayed exclamation in the story. If his father had dominated a woman before, it was merely to establish the status quo - a recognizable one, still in place today. The deviation, then -- the woman's dominance -- is the usurping of this criterion, and how traumatic it is! This kid sees his dad as not even a man, but a dog. The basis of his masculine pride, the way he lived his life - it's all an illusion. His parent can't be a role model anymore. He is alone and untethered in a chaotic world that cares for nobody - the crowd cheers Juanita as hard as they did her assailant. This is the peril of freighting sexual entertainment with revolutionary expectations. You cannot tame the bear. You cannot always direct desire in a socially fruitful direction, because eros is fueled, often, by transgression, and what is transgression is what is personal, and one person's image of power can be another's delight in aberration. Even polemics can be perverted - quite easily, though Stanton only wielded polemic as a means of better vivifying the sex dreams of his clientele. You can, of course, control your own space. To look across the studio is to see Ditko, whispering that you can conduct your own affairs in a way that is ethical. You can enter into exchanges with anyone you want, and allow them their liberty. You can observe, as did Eric Stanton, rationally inhabiting the erotic space of his admirers, and calculating their best avenue to climax. Shortly afterward, in The Amazing Spider-Man (vol. 2) #13 (#454, Jan. 2000), Watson is apparently killed in an airplane explosion. She turns up alive and well in (vol. 2) #28 (#469, April 2001), but she and Peter become separated in the following issue.Peter gets hired as a freelance photographer by Mr. Jameson to take pictures of Spider-Man, but Jameson is unaware that Spider-Man is Peter Parker. It was at this point that the nature of the strip changed. "Out went the magic ring, adult Spider-Man and whatever legend ideas that Spider-Man story would have contained." The new costume originated in the Secret Wars miniseries, on an alien planet where Spider-Man participates in a battle between Earth's major superheroes and supervillains. Booker, M. Keith, ed. (2010). "Underground and Adult Comics". Encyclopedia of Comic Books and Graphic Novels. Greenwood. p. 648. ISBN 9780313357473. In live-action films, Spider-Man has been portrayed by actors Tobey Maguire in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy, by Andrew Garfield in two films directed by Marc Webb, and in the Marvel Cinematic Universe by Tom Holland. Reeve Carney starred originally as Spider-Man in the 2010 Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.