Comic Book Questions Answered – where I answer whatever questions you folks might have about comic books (feel free to e-mail questions to me at brianc@cbr.com).

This is a bit of a cheat, as one of my Facebook friends, Martin P., asked this the other day and before I could answer, someone responded to him with the same answer I was going to give, but you know what, it's an interesting enough question that I am going to answer it here anyways.

As we all know, Steve Ditko was famous for how he drew the hands of characters. He always drew sort of elongated fingers that were doing lots of different things. Comic book artists, in general, tend to sort of bunch the fingers together in fists and stuff like that. It's just easier to draw, ya know?

Ditko, though, really made a point to draw each darn finger and make them LONG!

However, beyond that, Ditko also had a specific way to draw Spider-Man's fingers when Spidey used his webshooters. Here it is in the first issue of the Amazing Spider-Man series...

In the Amazing Spider-Man Annual, Ditko and Stan Lee explained why Spider-Man had to contort his fingers in that specific fashion...

Well, Steve Ditko then also invented a magician character named Doctor Strange...

Strange also contorted his fingers when he cast spells, like here from Strange Tales #135...

As you might have noticed, the way that they move their hands are pretty darn similar looking, right?

So, did that ever come up in a story?

Steve Ditko was a big believer that superheroes really shouldn't team-up very often, because if a superhero needed another superhero's help to stop a bad guy, then why, exactly, would we care enough about the first superhero in the first place? He felt that they should be able to handle their own problems without help from other heroes unless it was a very special occasion.

One of those very special occasions for Ditko was when it came to annuals. He felt that those were meant to be big deals, so in the second Amazing Spider-Man Annual, Ditko had Spider-Man meet Doctor Strange for the first time, as Spider-Man has to help the good Doctor from getting back the all-powerful Wand of Watoomb after a bad guy stole it...

As you can see, the two heroes really did not have time to chat all that much about anything, let alone "Hey, what's the deal with the fact that our hand gestures are so similar?"

Luckily, this is comics, and pretty much everything that ever occurred to someone as being interesting is eventually addressed in a comic book, so, too, did this get addressed...

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I honestly don't know if it got addressed in any other comics, but the one instance that I remembered offhand when Martin asked the question was in the awesomely bizarre miniseries Spider-Man: Fever, by Brandon McCarthy, which saw Spider-Man's soul stolen and Doctor Strange having to help get it back.

Once the adventure is over, Spider-Man actually point blank asks Doctor Strange about their similar hand gestures...

They both just note that it is simply a strange coincidence. Still, very cool stuff.

Thanks to Martin for the question!

If anyone else has a question, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!