Re: This was in the Onion today
Yeah, Ditko never went in for the mustache-twirling type - his villains tended to be a bit more human. He might have been trying to tone down those aspects of his work. I heard that a friend of his once, as a joke, said something along the lines of 'hey, Steve, you do know that your artwork on Dr. Strange has been cited as a major influence on psychedelic artwork in the hippy era?' He took it at face value, and was absolutely HORRIFIED. I mean, as in 'what have I DONE?!' hair-tearing horrified. So it may have been that he was trying to de-emphasize that sort of thing in later artwork, so as not to feed the hippies.