Why Did Steve Ditko Leave Marvel In The 1960s?

I got hooked on old Marvel back-issue racks as a teenager, and once I tracked down a run of early 'Spider-Man' issues the tiny print crediting "Lee & Ditko" felt like a clue in a mystery. The simple truth people usually point to is that Ditko left Marvel in the mid-1960s because of creative and personal conflicts — but when you live with those comics long enough you see how many threads were pulling him away. There was the whole control-and-credit thing: Ditko wanted clear creative ownership and hated the idea of his work being mass-marketed in a way that erased the artist's intent. At the same time, the Marvel production style (the so-called Marvel Method) gave writers and editors a lot of final say, which clashed with Ditko's precise storytelling instincts.
Another big factor was philosophical. Ditko had been moving toward a very stark moral view — you can see it in his later independent work like 'Mr. A' — and that sharpened what he wanted from characters and plots. He didn't warm to the more humanized, soap-opera tendencies that 'Spider-Man' picked up under Stan Lee: the humorous banter, the sympathetic doubt, the ongoing interpersonal messiness. Those tonal choices made Ditko uncomfortable; he preferred a kind of moral clarity that didn't always fit the direction Marvel was becoming famous for. Mix that with the public personality of Stan Lee — the rising face of Marvel — and Ditko's private, perfectionist nature, and you end up with a combustible situation.
I like to imagine Ditko packing up his boards around 1966 (roughly the era of his last regular 'Spider-Man' issues) and deciding it was better to walk than to fight for compromises he'd never accept. He moved on to other publishers and to characters and strips where he could exercise tighter control and express those uncompromising themes. For me, his leaving is a reminder that comics are made by real people with real convictions; sometimes those convictions lead to brilliant but abrupt splits, and they change the look and feel of the medium forever. If you want to see both sides of that break, read the early 'Doctor Strange' and 'Spider-Man' material back-to-back — Ditko's fingerprints are loud and clear, and so are the choices that eventually pushed him away.

I like to keep things simple when I explain why Steve Ditko left Marvel: it was mostly about creative control, credit, and serious philosophical differences. Ditko was famously private and principled, and he didn't enjoy the 'star' culture that built up around Stan Lee, nor did he want his artistic decisions to be overridden by editorial trends or the Marvel punchy-humor tone. By the mid-1960s those tensions reached a point where Ditko chose to walk away from 'Spider-Man' (around 1966) and pursue projects where he had full say — that's where you start seeing his very strict moral stance in characters like 'Mr. A'.
There were practical things too: creators back then had little ownership or control over their characters and Ditko wanted more creative integrity than the system offered. He also disliked compromises that softened the ideas he cared about. The result was a quiet but definitive split, and while he stayed out of the limelight afterward, his influence on early 'Spider-Man' and 'Doctor Strange' is unmistakeable whenever I flip through those old issues.