Everybody thinks that Stan Lee was the sole creator of Spider-Man, but what they fail to realize is that the genesis of Spidey was a duo affair.

Lee thought of the idea, and Steve Ditko fleshed it out by conceptualizing the costume. He later worked with Lee, drawing 53 issues before quitting the series. Nobody knew why he suddenly up and left. The Spider-Man comic books were very popular thanks to Lee's storytelling and Ditko's idiosyncratic art style.

You could ask Ditko about it, but good luck doing that. He hasn't given an interview since the '60s. All we know about Ditko is that he's a follower of Ayn Rand's philosophy of objectivism. Other than that he's a riddle wrapped in an enigma. He hasn't made a public appearance, and to further emphasise how seriously the man takes his privacy, only four or five photos of him are known to have existed.

He said it rather succinctly: "When I do a job, it's not my personality that I'm offering the readers but my artwork. It's not what I'm like that counts; it's what I did and how well it was done … I produce a product, a comic art story. Steve Ditko is the brand name."

The man has a point. These days, we send out the hounds with their flashing cameras and their probing microphones to bring you "breaking news coverage" of every Hollywood star going about their daily lives outside of work.

Extra, extra! McConaughey shops for skim milk. Hold the presses! Paris returns to being a waste of space. So what's new?

It's an unwritten contract. They produce good work, they lay it out for public scrutiny, and they return back to their lives. That's it. That's where the relationship betwixt creator and consumer ends. J.D. Salinger wrote "The Catcher in the Rye," and if he wants to retreat to obscurity, the least we could do is honor the man's wishes.

But I suppose it can't be helped. It's hard to separate the person and the work. After we hear a piece of music or finish a book, curiosity gnaws at you like ticks on an unwashed cur - what is this person like in real life? What do they eat? What's their favorite color?

And for someone who cuts off contact from the rest of the world, the aura of mystique becomes more enhanced. Now it's like searching for sunken galleons, the quest for Shangri-La, the pursuit for Eden.

Finding Ditko isn't hard. He works in an office in New York. His name is even displayed prominently on the front of his door like a bull's-eye, but he's seldom bothered and that's the key - respectability. His artwork made an impression on so many people that they respect him too much to impugn upon his wishes.

Cheong is a screenwriting graduate student.

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