- [Scott] I wanna get weird
and talk about hands for a second.
You ever notice that Spider-Man and Doctor Strange
make similar hand gestures when using their powers?
Spidey activates his web-shooters by doing this iconic move,
and Doctor Strange casts spells
with a nearly identical gesture.
Even if you've never noticed it,
the characters themselves sure have.
The mini-series Spider-Man: Fever from 2010
is a bizarre, supernatural romp with the two characters,
ending in this exchange.
- [Peter] Hey, Doc, that thing you do
with your fingers, when you zap the magic spells.
Yeah, that's it.
I kinda do that too, when I spray my webbing.
Strange, huh?
- [Stephen] Yes, it is strange.
- Now, those of you who are especially clever
may have already figured out that the answer
probably has to do with the fact that Spider-Man
and Doctor Strange share a similar lineage.
Spidey was co-created by Steve Ditko
whereas Doctor Strange was wholly created by Steve Ditko.
Ditko was such an incredibly talented
and influential comic book artist
that I've been struggling for months to try
and make a video that encapsulates everything
I want to say about his style and legacy.
I'm working on it!
But at the very least, I think it would be fun
to go on a little tangent about the interesting
and genuinely brilliant way that Steve Ditko drew hands.
I'm sure people will like that.
(electronic beeping)
(bubble popping)
Oh, right, yeah, no that makes sense.
(pencil scratching)
So I wanna start by asking a simple question.
Why are hands so freaking hard to draw?
Seriously, hands are one of the most challenging
things to draw convincingly.
I was just talking to an artist friend of mine
the other day who was lamenting the pains
of drawing these dumb things.
Hands are incredibly intricate with the vast number
of movements and gestures that they're capable of.
- [Peter] Go, go, go web, go!
- [Scott] This one tiny appendage is a complicated system
of dozens of moving parts that don't
even look like they make sense together.
Compared to the rest of the average human body
which is made up of these big, chunky,
fairly rigid pieces, hands are an elaborate nightmare,
and there's two of them, typically.
Plus, your hands are probably the part of your body
you see most often in everyday life,
not counting your nose,
which your brain just kinda filters out,
until just now, when I mentioned it.
We're so familiar with our hands that we literally
describe how familiar other things are
by comparing them to--
- Just stick with me kid, I know this town
like the back of my hand.
Hey, that's new.
(metal creaking)
- You get it.
All of that to say, hands are complicated
and we know them so well that we can recognize
instantly when they don't look right in a drawing.
So, it makes sense that for a lot of superhero
action comics, artists would default into drawing
fists or simply keeping the hands small
and out of the way most of the time.
Jack Kirby, for example, was able to effectively
communicate the emotion of a scene through the use
of other tactics like dramatic camera angles,
exaggerated body language,
and energetic facial expressions.
On the other hand Steve Ditko knew
that hands had an untapped potential
in the visual language of comics.
- [Kevin] Ditko brought his characters to life
with his carefully observed drawings of hands.
His hands express an actor's sense of gesture
missing in even the greatest of superhero artists,
serving just as much to render his characters'
emotions as their eyes and mouths.
Bill Randall, The Comics Journal.
- The hands Steve Ditko drew were incredibly expressive.
They were in your face, and often
in characters' faces as well.
He loved drawing close-up shots stuffed
with his thoughtfully crafted hands
that would crowd out the faces in the panel.
Hell, sometimes he didn't even use faces at all
and solely relied on hands
to tell the whole story of a scene.
But I'd argue that even when he did
draw characters reacting with dynamic facial expressions,
the hands that accompanied them
sold the emotion of the moment even better.
Without these shaking hands in this panel
from the story Why Won't They Save Me?,
this man here looks more bored than nervous.
These wild, expressive fingers
from The Last Man on Earth emphasize that this guy
isn't just alert, but panicked.
Or take this panel from the story Journey's End.
This guy here is a murderer on the run
who's about to be recognized by a passerby.
His facial expression is fine, but it's his hand
that really sells the tension for me.
He goes from reasonably relaxed in the previous panel
to having his fingers rigidly jut out in a tense panic,
like he's frozen and trying to decide on his next move,
which of course is to violently punch the guy.
By the way, these are just three
minuscule examples from one single comic.
So yeah, there's a whole sea of Ditko hands out there
for you to explore, and I encourage you to do so.
J. Jonah Jameson, for example, is a dynamic character
whose angry, demanding, prideful,
conniving personality can be read
entirely through his hand gestures alone.
Honestly, I love this guy.
But for the sake of this discussion
it might be more helpful to talk about a character
who takes up a small, supporting role
in a comic that was otherwise clearly centered
around the life and times of J. Jonah Jameson.
So, let's talk about Spider-Man, I guess.
(paper rustling)
When Spider-Man was introduced in Amazing Fantasy #15,
Peter Parker was, of course, bitten on his hand
by a radioactive spider that gave him superpowers.
The first power he discovered was his ability
to cling to walls shown visually by highlighting
his fingertips, imagery that Ditko loved to repeat
throughout the wall-crawler's adventures.
But a spider needs a web, so Peter developed
wrist-mounted web-shooters that activate
with a two-finger tap to the palm, like so!
(video crackling)
Sorry about that.
You know, these web-shooters for Spider-Man
are kind of awkwardly designed.
Like, why did Steve Ditko force Spider-Man
to do this hand gesture?
There's nothing about that that's inherent to spiders.
No, I think he just kinda decided on it by accident.
In Ditko's early Spider-Man stories,
he only sometimes drew the hero using
that iconic hand gesture to activate his web-shooters.
In most shots, however, Ditko drew Spidey
only sticking out his thumb and pointer finger.
But when you look through enough of Ditko's bibliography,
like I have, you'll start to see an interesting phenomenon
in the way that he drew pinkies.
The more he draws, the farther characters'
pinky fingers start to stick out.
It begins subtly, but points out more and more.
We're so close.
We're almost there.
And then suddenly, boom!
That pinky's out in the open for the world to see!
This pinky out pattern appears
everywhere in Steve Ditko's artwork.
It's like a hidden signature.
A little detail of his art that says,
Steve Ditko left his mark here.
Here's a scientist doing it for no reason.
Here's a businessman grabbing money like this.
Here's just some guy knocked on the ground
doing Spidey hands.
Heck, you can even see it pop up in Spider-Man's
origin story before he gets his powers.
Oh, and one of Ditko's more political creations
called Mr. A, who was an obnoxious character
that saw every person and every action in the world
as good or evil with no moral gray area,
would often strike that finger pose
when he dealt out his judgment
or threw his calling card at people.
Oh, do you get, his calling card,
it's just black and white.
It's so clever.
And like, was that intentional?
Mr. A dealing out his calling card
by striking a finger pose that was basically
Steve Ditko's calling card?
Did you do this on purpose, Steve?
So Spider-Man going from this to this
could've just been an unintended byproduct
of Steve Ditko's artistic pinky quirk.
But I don't think the same can be said
about Doctor Strange, whose every movement
drawn by Ditko was incredibly precise and deliberate.
Steve Ditko's arts in early Doctor Strange stories
obsessed over hands about as much
as Stephen Strange himself did.
Strange's backstory was as a brilliant but egotistical
and wealth-obsessed surgeon who relied
on the use of his steady, skillful hands.
But after a car crash damaged the nerves
in his hands beyond repair, Strange gets the news
that he'll never be able to perform an operation again.
Not content to be any less than the perfect being
he saw himself as before the accident,
Strange turns to the mystic arts to heal him,
but quickly finds a new purpose in life,
defending the earth from magical threats.
Now, okay, the first few stories had Doctor Strange
mostly fighting using astral projection
or some other kind of magic that didn't involve him
moving around too much, but after his origin story
was told a few issues later and involved
that theme of Strange's whole world
revolving around his hands,
Ditko made the brilliant decision to,
from that point forward, draw spell casting
as requiring precise hand choreography.
Although, these magical movements that Ditko drew
seemed to require a lot more finger guns
than the Doctor Strange movie incorporated.
All the film did was hire an incredibly talented dancer
in a stroke of genius to teach Benedict Cumberbatch
intricate finger-tutting maneuvers.
But that's not good enough!
Sign my petition to add more finger guns
to the Doctor Strange sequel!
I won't rest until Steve Ditko's dream is realized!
In reality, though, Ditko would often
furnish Doctor Strange's adventures
with mystical elements inspired by real cultures
that he'd research to make sure the world of magic
seemed more fleshed out.
I'm by no means an expert on the subject,
but a follower on Twitter sent me information
about mudras which are spiritual
hand and finger gestures used in Hinduism and Buddhism.
Specifically, it seems the Spider-Man-like pose
that Doctor Strange strikes resembles the karana mudra,
which is said to expel demons
and remove obstacles like illness.
Wait, hold on, expel demons and remove illness?
That's starting to sound a lot like...
(electronic whooshing)
So, we're ending where we started.
With this little-known comic, called Spider-Man: Fever.
This three-issue story involves Spidey getting sprayed
with insecticide and succumbing to, you guessed it,
a fever while deliriously stumbling into a bathtub.
But it's not just any bathtub,
it's Doctor Strange's bathtub,
and he accidentally unleashed a bunch of demons recently
who then steal Spider-Man's soul as he lies there
helplessly recovering from getting sprayed with bug spray.
God, I love it when comics escalate
into madness immediately.
Also, I could be wrong, but this is the only comic
I'm aware of where Spider-Man and Doctor Strange
comment on how their hand gestures are similar,
and it's a story blatantly about Doctor Strange
warding off demons and curing Spider-Man of illness,
two things that the karana mudra is used for.
That's clever writing on the part of the series author,
Brendan McCarthy, who also illustrated the story.
You can tell that he was tapping into Ditko's
trippy, psychedelic artwork of abstract
otherworldly dimensions too.
The visuals in this comic were meant
to evoke Ditko's surreal art,
which were massively influential
for countless comics creators.
Which brings us back to this panel.
The final panel of the series where Spider-Man
and Doctor Strange compare their similar hand gestures.
The image in the background of this panel
is a classic visual from Strange Tales #138.
While Ditko's entire run on Doctor Strange
was immeasurably influential, this image,
in particular, left such an impact on readers
that the MCU even recreated it for the movie
as a little Easter egg.
Putting this iconic Ditko imagery in the background
of the panel is meant to showcase the link
between Spider-Man and Doctor Strange.
Hands that are similar by coincidence,
but still represent a connected past
tracing back to the hands that created them.
We can even see what looks to be the backs
of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko
as onlookers a few panels earlier.
Stan's hand on Ditko's shoulder
with his pinky slightly out,
as if to pay tribute
to the hands of a legendary artist.
- [Peter] Hey Doc, that thing you do with your fingers
when you zap the magic spells.
Yeah, that's it.
I kinda do that too, when I spray my webbing.
Strange, huh?
- [Stephen] Yes, it is strange.
- Also, it's worth noting that Steve Ditko worked in,
just like, terrible political and moral beliefs
into his comic books and I'm making
a video about it, I promise.
It's just, you know, look,
I disagree with the guy on everything,
pretty much, but he drew good hands and,
I don't know, I feel like it's worth talkin' about.
Without idolizing him.
Hey, so this is the weirdest video I've ever made.
Sorry it took so long.
Also, apologies for this really bad audio
in the outro here, some of you know this,
I moved recently and I don't have everything set up
so I'm just recording this on my phone
in a very echoey room, enjoy!
If you really like what I do,
consider supporting me monthly on Patreon,
or you can make a one-time donation through PayPal.
I could've made a joke about lending a hand,
but I didn't, you're welcome.
Thanks to all who already support me,
especially Cristoffer Lange, Lori Thames,
Billy Bombs, Everett Parrott, Havelock Smiggles,
Jack Bushnell, Jonathan and Megan Pierson,
Jonathan Lonowski, Sonali Manka
and the rest of the wonderful nerds
who support me over at Patreon.com/NerdSync.
Click or tap right here to see a video
about the real origin of J. Jonah Jameson.
I think that's a fun one.
Once again, my name is Scott, reminding you to read
between the panels and grow smarter through comics.
See ya!
(upbeat music)
Tony Stark's identity's at risk.
Yours could be too.