DRAWN & QUARTERED
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Steve Ditko’s Strange World
There's a nagging feeling that arises when reading Blake Bell's fascinating biography "Strange and Stranger - The World of Steve Ditko" (Fantagraphics Books, 220 pgs., $39.99) about the groundbreaking comic artist who, apparently afflicted with philosophical idealism and plain orneriness, walked away from Marvel Comics at the height of his powers and spent the next half-century frittering away his talents. You wonder, is Steve Ditko nuts?
The decades since have been one long battle for Ditko, who absorbed Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy to such a degree that he is a drone on the subject, injecting her me-first concepts into superhero comics and horror stories, alienating all who try to work with him, firing off bitter screeds and paranoid ramblings attempting to alter history. They say crazy people are those who do the same thing over and over, expecting different results.
On the other hand, Ditko has his own set of standards, and the world must meet them. He will not negotiate or compromise. In a Randian universe, that is the very definition of a hero, and Ditko lives it to this day.
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It must have been tough assembling this book. Ditko insists that his work is his public profile and it speaks for itself, even the most personal and didactic of his stories, while at the same time Ditko is most zealous at explaining it to others. Actually, Ditko is quick to respond to, but not to supply, personal information. The man is 80 years old and in all that time there have been only a half-dozen photographs ever published of him, nor is anything known of his home life or interests. For someone whose world view informs every line he draws and every word he writes, Ditko keeps his motivations tightly bottled. He's the Thomas Pynchon of comic books.
It matters, because there's simply no one like Ditko. Simply one of the best storytellers in the field when he's at the top of his game, his pages reverberated with a homely stylishness that was always slightly hallucinatory, equal doses of billboard blandness and crawling dread, each exacerbating the other.
There has always been a tussle over who gets credit for creating Spider-Man, with Stan Lee - the Marvel frontman - generally getting a lot of it, but it was Ditko's astounding feel for the subject in the first issues in the early 1960s that put it over the top. The tropes of alienation in a Dobie Gillis high-school world were limned by Ditko with restraint, while Spider-Man's double-jointed body-English sold the character's "super" powers - and both Lee and Ditko made comics history when Spidey's powers turned out to be more curse than blessing.
Ditko's space-and-time bending in "Dr. Strange" of that same "Silver Age" era were equally revelatory, and readers influenced by his art simply looked at the world in a different way. Between them, Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby had as much influence on pop culture as the Beatles.
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FLASH FORWARD a couple of decades, and Ditko is drawing Squirrel Girl for Marvel, in between low-paying gigs doing giveaway comics for Big Boy restaurants. But - and this is a big "but" - Ditko's "fall" is not only self-inflicted, it's self-directed. He wants it this way. Although his drawing powers are undiminished, his Objectivist mindset scuttles any effort to collaborate with others.
Bell provides plenty of samples of Ditko's artwork, and it's frankly mindblowing and well-presented. There's a bit of discussion about Ditko's simplistic pencils in later years, leaving too much work for inkers to fill in, but even these pencil renderings are amazing - crisp, assured, precisely composed, no tentative noodling. Ditko clearly visualizes the scene already rendered in his mind; he's just tracing the outlines for us.
As a kid, I hung out at my cousins' place reading comics, and was particularly enthralled with the Spider-Man storyline in which Peter Parker questioned his very existance whilst trapped beneath a pile of machinery as water filled the room. This is the way "The Amazing Spider-Man" number 32 ended. My family moved, and I didn't see number 33 until several years later, when I found out what happened. Such was the power of Lee and Ditko's modern fable that I was able to pick up exactly where I left off, and I still remember it today. Now, that's storytelling.
I now find, in Bell's biography of Ditko, that that story was not only a seminal moment in comics history, but a pure marriage of pop culture and philosophical musings that has rarely been equalled. Really, huh?
Today, Ditko is still drawing comics in his tiny New York studio, but they aren't being published. He draws them, he sets them aside. He uses priceless original Marvel art as throwaway cutting boards. He has enough money to do what he loves, and he does it the way he wants. That's all he wants. Steve Ditko is apparently happy. Maybe that's crazy, maybe not. But, still, we miss him.