Ditko Redux

So my review of Blake Bell's Strange & Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko appears in this week's issue of EYE WEEKLY here, but it had to be somewhat shortened for space - the final version contains less specific criticisms of Mr. Bell's book to accommodate the necessary work of informing a general audience who the hell Steve Ditko is. Thanks to the internet, however, I can ape repackaged, inappropriately-named superhero comics and offer...a director's cut!

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He co-created one of the most recognizable and lucrative characters on the planet, but today Steve Ditko lives off meagre pensions, still virtually anonymous outside of comics. That’s partly by design. A profoundly shy and private man, the cartoonist has forsworn photographs and interviews for 40 years, not long after abandoning his most famous creation: Spider-man. Now, with Strange & Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko (Fantagraphics, 217 pages, $39), Ditko expert Blake Bell offers an overdue appreciation. Part oversized art book, part biographical sketch and part career retrospective, the text teases few revelations about its subject’s secret identity; its real strength is Bell as critic, passionately celebrating the artist’s work.

Ditko was raised by working-class immigrants in depression-era Pennsylvania. "He preferred the company of his immediate family,” Bell writes, “and was uncomfortable with outsiders, even his cousins, in the home. His bedroom never changed, remaining the same as it was before he entered the Army.” There are occasional revealing anecdotes like that one, but the author can only spin a limp web from Ditko’s unavoidably patchy biographical details.

However, once Ditko embarks on his career (drawing everything from Westerns to romance for ad-hoc publisher Charlton, who only printed comics because “it was less expensive to keep their presses running than turn them off and on”) Bell’s nimble, unadorned prose seems to find its purpose. In the late 1950s Ditko started working for Marvel Comics in tandem with huckster/editor Stan Lee. It was the beginning of his creative prime, and the chapters devoted to this period – monster stories, Doctor Strange, Amazing Spider-man – are packed with insights that arrive almost off-handedly. Many, many writers bang on about how the “Spider-man Shrugged” sequence from ASM #33 (five pages of Peter Parker struggling then finally succeeding to dislodge a crushing pile of machinery and save Aunt May) is a formal masterpiece and incredibly influential and so on, but Bell circles back to the end of the previous issue, explaining how Ditko used an innovative deep-focus angle to magnify the hopeless enormity of his hero’s plight.

The critic fruitfully compares Ditko to fellow Marvel legend Jack Kirby: where the latter’s stories focus on majestic battles and trippy cosmic grandeur (his final major series was about warring planets populated by literal gods), Ditko dwelt on scrawny angst and street-level realism. Peter Parker was “the first person whose life actually got worse after becoming a superhero,” a wallflower whose new powers exacerbated his problems. He and his foes were rendered freakish in an ordinary way, distinct from the grotesque glamour of a Joker. Bell gets a perfect quote from one younger cartoonist: "I acknowledge that Kirby is the King, but when you draw Ben Grimm reaching for the salt with the same intensity as you draw Armageddon, it lacks the impact Ditko could create." Although Ditko and Kirby would both leave Marvel over its greedy denial of their artistic control and creators’ rights, the former’s adoption of Objectivism spurred him to walk away first.

Ditko's increasingly Manichean adherence to Ayn Rand’s altruism-scorning philosophy only makes this story more tragic. Bell is obviously sympathetic to the moral conviction that inspired his subject to create ideological mouthpieces like The Question -whose very mask, a blank face, elides all ambiguity and nuance - but at the same time he uses exacting reproductions to exhaustively document Objectivism’s debilitating effect on the comics. Drifting towards the margins of a disreputable medium, Ditko subsisted on vague hackwork for mainstream publishers (reduced to illustrating a Transformers colouring book in 1985, the pathologically humble master shrugged that “Work is work”) while self-publishing didactic Randian tracts.

The latter are often brilliantly designed, experimental and independent before those adjectives became cartooning movements, but they’re also maddening to read. At his book’s recent Toronto launch, Bell related a ruefully funny anecdote about his apologetic pilgrimage to Ditko’s NYC studio, having upset the old man by publishing an imaginary tale that involved him. Displaying the same easygoing sense of humour that once moved him to draft a six-page memo explaining why The Question would never use sarcasm, subject informed biographer that “historical fiction is an oxymoron.” Ditko has become an inverted Vertov, rejecting characterization and even drama itself to broadcast his Truth. It’s sadly ironic: Bell’s rousing critique shows that the recluse created his greatest strips in collaboration.