- [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.
