Famously reclusive and unwilling to do interviews, Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko has nonetheless long shared his side of the story concerning the creation of Marvel's friendly-neighborhood wall-crawler in a series of essays appeared in small-press comics and zines. His latest, "The Silent Self-Deceivers," has just been released, asking what exactly Stan Lee brought to the table.The Ditko Comics blog points to news of the release of the latest issue of Robin Snyder's The Comics, in which Ditko's latest essay debuts. In the introduction to the page-and-a-half piece the blog shares, Ditko hints at some bombshells he might be preparing to drop:

Which Marvel insiders saw, know about, Jack Kirby's 5 penciled Spider-Man pages?



Who saw them and yet won't say, tell, what is actually on those 5 Kirby S-M pages?



What kind of actual story line indications of supporting characters, dialogue bits, type of hero costume, action, is shown, revealed, in that S-M "creative" idea?



What are the actual Stan Lee S-M "ideas"?

Kirby, according to legend, penciled five pages of a Spider-Man origin before his work was rejected as "too heroic" by Stan Lee, with Ditko coming in to rework the material into the character and story we're all familiar with today.

"The Silent Self-Deceivers" is the second in a new cycle of Ditko essays, following on from "The Knowers & The Barkers," which appeared in Ditko's comic book, #17: Seventeen, earlier this year. The essays are described by Ditko and publisher Snyder as being "for those interested in Steve Ditko, who he is, what has he done, why he does it, and what he has been thinking."

This isn't the first time Ditko has attempted to set the record straight on Spider-Man's history; earlier essays - summarized, somewhat, by Steve Bissette here - have appeared across various publications and been collected in the 2008 zine The Avenging Mind.