The Amazing Steve Ditko

Friday, June 3rd, 2005

The Amazing Steve Ditko shares some things about the co-creator of Spiderman and Dr. Strange that I really should have known:

Sixties hipsters thought that Ditko’s urban realism and trippy visions meant that he was one of them. They couldn’t have been much more wrong. Around the time that Ditko fell out with Marvel Comics in 1966, he became fascinated with Ayn Rand and objectivism, and his work started to take on a severe and increasingly strident right-wing tone. He spent a few years working for the small company Charlton Comics, where his most significant creation was the Question: a hero in a suit, hat and tie, with no face — just a blank pink blot — and a ruthless contempt for moral relativism. At a subsequent stint with DC Comics, he created the Hawk and the Dove (a pair of superhero brothers, whose personalities were exactly what you’d guess) and the Creeper (a yellow-skinned, green-haired, red-maned, screeching maniac).

And then, by the end of the ’60s, Ditko retreated into the world of the small press — fanzines and self-published comics — where he could write and draw whatever he pleased. Comics like ‘Mr. A’ and ‘Avenging World’ became his venue to rant semi-intelligibly about objectivism, how there’s no middle ground or gray area in morality, and so on. He spent most of the next 30 years creating Rand-inspired comics that are beautifully designed and composed but almost unreadable; they’re explicitly didactic, but so heavy-handed that it’s impossible to imagine them swaying anyone’s opinions. (Ditko continued to draw hundreds of pages a year through the ’90s but hasn’t published any new work since 2000.)

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