DC promoted the event of a popular artist moving into their stable with "Steve Ditko Strikes Again!" I suppose that would be a strike in the baseball sense, as like Jack Kirby, none off Ditko's DC creations ever caught fire like the Marvel ones. In fact, I'd say the Charlton heroes DC bought about fifteen years later have profited them far more than the Creeper, Stalker or Hawk & Dove... although the Vertigoized Shade the Changing Man had a longer run than any of them.
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You know, its probably blasphemy to say this, but with the exception of Spider-Man and Dr. Strange, I never Ditko was really all that. Everything he did after he left Marvel the first time was pretty underwhelming in my opinion.
I'll go you one better by pointing out that I grew up when it was in vogue to trash both Ditko and Kirby. Then Jack passed in the early nineties and everybody ate their hat. When I was a kid, I just wasn't that into either, and I had a weird relationship with Gil Kane as well. Nowadays, I adore Kane, and I generally like Ditko, but I'm still really not that into Kirby.
Heretically, I prefer the King inked by Vinnie Colletta on Thor, and find all that bombastic stuff with Sinnott to be the ancestor of Rob Liefeld. It works on ridiculous stuff like the New Gods, but I still can't bring myself to read Black Panther or the '70s Captain America. Do not want.
With Ditko, I'm cool with Amazing Spider-Man, but his masterpiece was the Dr. Strange strip. I also enjoyed his first run on Captain Atom, some of his horror stuff, and how he looked inked by Wally Wood on Stalker. Ditko was even worse than Kirby at scripting, which ruined interesting properties like the Question. By the '80s, Ditko was just not getting it done on either front.
Kane, though, just got better with age. I used to have trouble with the up-nose shots, contorted poses and random energy blasts, but he could make any story exciting. He took the best gimmicks of Ditko and Kirby and turned them into something really spectacular.
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