Steve Ditko is old enough and has done enough for his chosen art form that he owes us nothing. On the other hand, although as a comix geek back in the 1970s I’d read about the acrimonious Ditko / Stan Lee creative breakup, I don’t remember hearing that Ditko was a full-metal Objectivist. Writers, as Joan Didion reminds us, are always selling someone out… so make your own judgement as to Abraham Reisman’s conclusions in his NYMag story. But Mr. Ditko does come off as a tragic example of the warning attributed to that Nietzsche fella about staring into the abyss:
For a recluse, Steve Ditko is surprisingly easy to locate. You won’t see him in public: Despite being one of the most important figures in comics history, the most recent published photograph of the 89-year-old was taken about 50 years ago. And though his name appears prominently as “co-creator” in the credits of Marvel Studios’ Doctor Strange — which has already grossed more than $490 million worldwide — he has never been on a red carpet, or appeared on TV or radio. But if you ask within the comics community, you can readily find the location and phone number of his Manhattan studio. The man’s around. It’s putting that contact information to good use that’s difficult.
Ditko hasn’t done an interview with a journalist since 1968, two years after he shocked comics fandom by leaving Marvel in a move for which he offered no explanation — even to his boss, Stan Lee, with whom he created Doctor Strange and Spider-Man, among other classic characters. What followed has been an idiosyncratic crusade that has consumed Ditko’s capacious imagination: the creation of spite-filled, didactic, and often baffling comics and essays that evangelize the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Ditko has long been principled in a way few popular artists are, and he changed the comics medium twice: first with his elegant, kinetic, at times psychedelic artwork; then by being the first high-profile creator to inject serious philosophical arguments into superhero comics. His influence is staggering, but his personal story is almost totally hidden. He remains one of pop culture’s most enigmatic figures…
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Lee was both EIC and writer for nearly all of his company’s titles, and over time he came up with an innovative technique for crafting comics, something that came to be known as the Marvel method: He would give an artist a synopsis of a story; the artist would flesh it out by devising a plot and drawing its pages; Lee would get the pages and, sometimes incorporating suggestions from the artist, write the dialogue and narration. If an artist was as gifted a storyteller as Ditko or Kirby, the method allowed them to tailor narratives to their strengths, unleashing comics of remarkable power. Even so, the credits pages only listed them as artists.
It was through that workflow that Lee and Ditko co-created Spider-Man in 1962, just a few months after Lee and Kirby had reignited interest in superheroes by co-creating the Fantastic Four. Historians generally agree that the idea for Spidey originated with Lee, who has variously claimed that he was inspired by seeing a spider on a wall or remembering a pulp hero called the Spider. He also thought it would be interesting to have this new character be a teenager, an age group previously reserved for sidekick roles. Kirby drew five pages of a Spider-Man story that historians believe depicted a kid who used a magic ring to become a spider-themed hero, though the whereabouts of those sketches are unknown. Lee decided Kirby’s hero looked too beefy and conventional, and opted to give the project over to Ditko…
“Steve’s Doctor Strange material demonstrated what was, at the time, an absolutely unique ability to visualize worlds that had no apparent laws of physics yet seemed to have internal consistency,” says comics historian Paul Levitz. College students and psychonauts loved Strange — in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe revealed that Ken Kesey and his cohort were obsessed with the character. Ironically, Ditko could not have been more unlike those sorts of readers. By all accounts, he had no interest in countercultural movements or altered states. Instead, fans of Ditko’s work on The Amazing Spider-Man and Strange Tales might have been shocked to learn that he had become a student of one of the 20th century’s most polarizing, conservative ideologies: Objectivism…
Ditko and Lee had always held differing views on what made Spider-Man great. For Lee, it was Peter’s vulnerability, his buoyant sense of humor, and his goodwill toward people; for Ditko, it was his journey toward becoming a Randian Übermensch. As the story went on, their differences became more pronounced and their relationship frayed. Ditko pushed to have the flashy, exaggeration-prone Lee give him more control over Spider-Man plots; after that was granted, Lee bashed one of the new stories in his own letters pages, writing, “A lot of readers are sure to hate it, so if you want to know what all the criticism is about, be sure to buy a copy!” Ditko demanded plotting credit in the title pages for Spider-Man and Strange Tales; Lee gave it to him, then derisively told a reporter, “Ditko thinks he’s the genius of the world.”…
If Ditko were a different sort of man, he could have easily turned his 1966 Marvel walkout into a cause célèbre. He might have framed his departure as a stand for the rights of fellow artists who were similarly disrespected by their employers; it could have been a pursuit of, indeed, justice. But Ditko wasn’t interested. “He only railed for himself — not for anyone else, because that would be un-Randian,” says comics publisher Gary Groth, who had his own rocky partnership with Ditko in the late ’90s. “A lot of artists thought the arrangement of the comics business as it existed then was fundamentally unfair. He didn’t. He stood up for himself when he thought he was being unfairly treated.”
Instead, Ditko retreated into his own work and philosophical soapboxing. A year after his departure from Marvel, he debuted two vigilante crime-fighters who were, more or less, Randian wet dreams. One was Charlton Comics’ the Question, a suit-and-tie-wearing bruiser whose head was adorned with a fedora and an eerie mask that made it look as though he had no face. (The Question later served as the inspiration for the character of Rorschach in Alan Moore’s Watchmen.) He patrolled the streets for ne’er-do-wells, spouting Objectivist rhetoric at them or, if they got violent, just beating the shit out of them.
The other character, who first appeared in an indie magazine called witzend, was even closer to Ditko’s heart: Mr. A. His name came from a passage in Atlas Shrugged about “the formula defining the concept of existence and the rule of all knowledge: A is A.” It’s an idea about the binary nature of everything in existence. Something is always something, and it is never another thing. Red is red, red is never blue. Heroism is heroism, heroism is never villainy. If you lose sight of the fact that A is A, you become poisoned by unreason — there is no gray area. Mr. A preaches that philosophy with his words and his fists, wearing a metal mask while remorselessly murdering those who violate Objectivist ethics. “To have any sympathy for a killer is an insult to their victims,” Mr. A says after overseeing the death of a teenage hoodlum in his 1967 debut. “I don’t abuse my emotions!” That kind of brutal morality was revolutionary for comics, a purer expression of philosophy than anything published before…
As time went on, Ditko became increasingly volatile, even on work where he had creative control. Groth formed a decades-long friendship with Ditko and launched a series featuring his stories in 1997, but when the cover of one of the issues wasn’t colored to Ditko’s specifications, the artist became furious. Groth apologized and asked what he could do to make it up to him. “He said, ‘You can’t do anything. You’ve already made the mistake,’” Groth recalls. “Nothing could make him happy, because it was a transgression and there was no making up for it. I had crossed a Ditkovian line.” A few years later, when Groth agreed to publish Bell’s biography, Ditko told Groth over the phone that he was a “parasite” and ceased all communications…
