Chapter 12. 3-D Ditko: Substance & The Daughters of Time

In 1989, I attended the San Diego ComicCon. At that time, I was working for a trade magazine publisher and writing comic books and children’s books as a freelancer. One of the publications I was editing for the trade company was a magazine devoted to the licensing industry. It featured sections on both gaming and comic books. For these reasons, my publisher sent me off to Southern California as a representative for the company. While there, I thought I would pitch an idea Steve Ditko and I had been developing.

I had spent a lot of time in Steve’s studio. He had set up his working space in a building about a half-block off Times Square. It was up on the fifth or sixth floor, near the back of the building. When I first visited, the structure was showing its age, but not too long after I had started to drop by, the whole place was renovated and ended up looking quite nice.

What I remember of Steve’s studio is that it was simple, but functional for what he needed. There was a single window overlooking the city where one could easily spot a few of the water towers Steve used to draw in just about every one of his Spider-Man stories. There were shelves lining the walls of the studio stuffed with movie stills from every genre, which Steve used for reference. There was a little black-&-white, rabbit-eared portable television set and a draftsman table. Whenever I saw Steve drawing, he’d have a drawing board on his lap, with the top edge resting on the draftsman table. It was on this lap-supported drawing board that all of Steve’s penciled art was created. I never actually saw him use the draftsman table for drawing. Perhaps he only used it when he was inking.

95 3-D Ditko: Substance & the Daughters of Time props, as they were, legally, the creative property of his corrupt former employer.

Upon David Smith’s death, his son Justin, now an assistant district attorney, inherited his father’s inventions and discovered their true potential. The younger Smith decided to use his father’s equipment (including a device which rendered its user invisible) to battle injustice in the guise of Substance—the Spirit of Justice; Substance, the antithesis of shadow.

Armed with this character concept, and two pages of Ditko art, I headed out to the San Diego Comic-Con to pitch the idea to various independent publishers. Back then, the San Diego Comic-Con was still primarily focused on comic books. I got as far as the booth and display of Ray Zone. Ray was a film historian, artist, author, and publisher with a particular interest in stereoscopic images. He was quite a character himself, with a head of white hair, often adorned in a Hawaiian shirt, and a pair of red/blue 3-D glasses!

Long before holograms, the red/blue stereoscopic system was the method used to produce 3-D comic books. Black-&-white rendered images would be printed on either red or blue printing plates. Wearing glasses with red and blue cellophane lenses (red on the left, blue on the right), a reader viewing the pages would see the images recede or advance depending on the registration of the plates; the farther apart the red and blue images were, the deeper the images would appear. Ray Zone was the absolute master of this early 3-D technique.

Back in the early 1950s, 3-D comics had enjoyed a brief craze, with just about every comic book publisher printing at least a few red/blue 3-D books. This was when young Ray Zone had discovered them and it had become his life’s mission to revive the technique. As a publisher, he had given a number of reprinted publications a brand new look using his own red/blue 3-D technique. In later years, he did 3-D work for DC Comics and other major comic book publishers.

When I showed Ray Steve’s two-page presentation drawings of Substance, Spirit of Justice, we said simultaneously, “An invisible man in 3-D! What a concept!”

Right then and there, we struck up a relationship with the goal of publishing 3-D Substance, billed as “The First 3-D Hero of the ’90s”! As soon as I returned home, I worked on a 10-page script, introducing Justin Smith and Substance to the world. I put a whole supporting cast together including Arc City Detective Allison Cobb (a potential romantic interest), reporter Phil Trap (a potential rival), Detective Alan Evan (an ally), Commissioner Aldon (a tribute to Will Eisner’s Spirit character Commissioner Dolan), and Middeton Rhoad (a very Ditko-inspired critic).

Steve really embraced Substance and added a few great ideas to the overall concept. One of Steve’s ideas was that, along with the character’s invisibility, Justin Smith also had a device that misdirected his voice, projecting it away from where he was actually standing. Steve played around with the word balloon placement to get this point across. Ken Feduniewicz, a graduate of the Joe Kubert School of Cartooning Art, who lived near me, lettered the story, and followed Steve’s balloon placement (dare I say it?) to the letter.

Meanwhile, Ray Zone was hard at work acquiring the rights to some vintage Ditko stories from the 50s, which he was going to run as backups, re-rendered in his brand new red/green 3-D technique. Steve drew a cover (which I, myself colored, badly) and one of his original presentation drawings became the inside back cover. The other original presentation page became a onepage wrap-up of the lead story. Steve’s cover was reproduced as a 3-D centerspread. The back cover