This I am surprised I never knew. Spidey wasn't meant to be red and blue 0

[bluechip]

All these years a Spidey fan and not once did I hear this hinted at.  

 

https://bleedingcool.com/comics/steve-ditko-wanted-spider-man-to-be-orange-and-purple/

 

Edited September 1, 2020 by bluechip

[pemart1966]

Interesting.  I'm not a fan of the shades of either colour chosen in the article.  Neither of those shades works IMO.

There are a number of different tones for both colours.  Some tech savys should experiment with those tones and see if there's something that looks as if it could have worked...

Ditko was the artist after all so he must have known what he was doing.  I wonder how much of an argument there was when he made his initial proposal?   

Edited September 3, 2020 by pemart1966

[Math Teacher]

I always thought that Spider-Man was intended to be red and black.

[bluechip]

On 9/1/2020 at 2:03 PM, Joe Ankenbauer said:

I always thought that Spider-Man was intended to be red and black.

I'd heard that too and the first few stories do look almost as if the blue sections were drawn to be black with blue highlights before they made it all blue. 

But if Ditko says he had envisioned the costume orange and purple there's no arguing with what his intent was.  

Interesting for several reasons.  There were Spiderman Halloween costumes as early as 1954 with many similarities to Ditko's drawings 8 years later.  And those costumes were orange and black (or yellow and black, depending on which version you find).  

[valiantman]

He was Yellow-and-Black when Spider Man was created in 1954 for Halloween.

[bob jr]

Interesting thread ... the orange & purple looks ATROCIOUS 

[Sauce Dog]

That 'mock up' image in the article is certainly not a good representation of what was intended (it looks to be a recolor of a digital page, so it wasn't following SA color specs). It looks more like they are using magenta, and not a proper purple mix (R B) like below.

Orange would have just been Y R2 (below) or maybe Y R3, which would offer a good contrast against the purple.

[Sauce Dog]

Mockup, with proper non-neon bonkers colors (cause Ditko wasn't a fool, if he said orange and purple he was talking proper SA colors)

So yeah, not that far off visually what we got and see him as - but striking enough to separate him from the iconic Superman color scheme going around. This could have 100% worked, and had it been the case and became the norm we would just be joking how unoriginal he would have been had they went with blue/red over this.

Edited August 20, 2021 by Sauce Dog