The best writing on the web about Steve Ditko’s Mr. A are here, here, and here. If you have no idea who the hell Steve Ditko is, or what Mr. A is, these posts are the place to start. They’re worth it.
A month ago, I downloaded a torrent of the two 70s issues of Mr. A. Re-reading these books (I own physical copies of both, but god knows where), I was struck by how perfectly Ditko’s content matches his form. His 60s work was always jittery, over-textured and really dense, but the pages from Mr. A are something else.
The above is a sixteen-panel page. It’s lively, incredibly paranoid and entirely of itself. Despite their failures at story-telling and entertainment, there’s never a doubt that every page and panel of Mr. A brings us into a unique world. I consider this an achievement of some kind. But I’m not sure of what.
Much has been written about Alan Moore basing the character of Rorschach in Watchmen on both Mr. A and The Question, a pre-Mr. A creation of Ditko. In its own way, Watchmen has a political agenda as extreme as Mr. A– the difference is that Moore’s politics are better disguised and on the side of pinko liberal righteousness, while Ditko is unafraid of seeming nuts. The narrative functions of Rorschach and Mr. A couldn’t be further from one another– Mr. A is a walking cipher, a morality tale that will mortally wound if he encounters a violation of his complex, yet painfully convoluted, code of justice.
To Ditko’s immense credit, there is never, ever a sense of wish-fulfillment in Mr. A.’s brutality. Rorschach, on the other hand, is the Dark Antihero at its most fully realized– the fascist vigilante appealing to the reader on a gutter level, inviting us to take a pleasure in the directness of his methods. I find that Rorschach destabilizes Watchmen– either you have a pinkboy liberal fantasy, or you write a gritty revenge comic. You can’t do both without compromising the moral purpose of your book. To any who would argue, I say: let us not forget the identity of the One True Soul in Watchmen, nor his noble reward.
Ditko’s concerns are entirely different– not crime, not man’s inhumanity to man, but the violation of a Randian Moral Code. Even if his beliefs strike me as an insane, I’m willing to take Mr. A at face value, and acknowledge that Ditko’s motivation, and its philosophical underpinnings, differentiate his work from the revenge fantasies of the decades that followed.
I’ve long believed that the 1980s rise of the Dark Antihero had more to do with the drug & crime epidemic of US Society than any real trends within the comics industry other than a disproportionate number of creators living in NYC, the epicenter. Is it any surprise that Giuliani Time killed the beast? Despite Ditko’s residence in Nuevo Gomorrah, his work clearly rests on a different foundation than the impotent rage of writers, artists and readers beset by a crime epidemic that they can not affect.
Last summer, when I attended the San Diego Comic Con, I was struck by its blankness– there was literally nothing that required photography and nothing, after the cease of the spectacle, that was worth remembering. My sum total of purchases was $3 for a grotty bottle of Vitamin Water.
This year gave me hardcore deja-vu, but I was prepared by the previous engagement– I managed about twenty photographs and achieved the holy grail of commodity fetishism: the acquisition of a relatively unique object in unrepeatable circumstances. Along with my toilet photograph, this triumph indicates, I believe, that I had a good experience– two Unique Moments in what is, after all, an event dedicated to specific conformity of product.
It’s been many moons since I last read Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and my memory of it is terrible– but I believe that much of its central conceit revolves around the idea of the mass media providing a perverted mirror of actual human relations which then cheapens and destroys the human relations that it mirrors, thus making its own reflection increasingly perverted.
It’s hard to attend an event dedicated to the replacement of personalities with corporate products and not feel a little bit like a freaked-out Left Bank intellectual. The best way to think about the culture of comics fandom, or any fandom, really– and establishing a way of weeding out enemy from friend– is this: are people reacting to the product as a thing crafted and created by individuals and engaging with the communication implicit within that creation, or is the consumer’s interest in the surface aspects like “plot”, “characters” and “story”?
This is what makes the hoopla-hoo about the recent-released The Dark Knight completely repellent; Heath Ledger’s performance requires that the audience care (or pretend to care) about the Joker, a one-dimensional construct with no implicit or explicit meaning beyond its reflection of pulp tropes from the 1940s and an ability to sell related merchandise for the parent owner, Time Warner.
Ledger’s turn is an empty thing– imagine Popeye learning how to method act and channeling Marlon Brando from One-Eyed Jacks– but it could never be anything else. The Joker, in every incarnation, is what the lowest brow entertainment of its origin period had to tell us about criminality and madness: barely anything at all.
We live in the first society in which media narratives are an embedded industry: sheer statistics demand and enforce a hierarchy of consumption. Just as there will always be a certain number of cars sold each season, so too will there always be certain kinds of films achieving varying levels of success. Some will be blockbusters, some will be sleepers. Others will bomb.
The products themselves, being delivery mechanisms for the intake and release of capital, contain surface level narratives that are essentially meaningless and variations on tired themes: this is why the same people who watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer are now watching Battlestar Galactica. The analogue with the auto industry again becomes useful: just as young people buy “edgy” cars and mature individuals buy “solid” cars, reasonably above-average nerds watch “smart” television, but avoid “dumb” shows like Enterprise. It’s an interface of marketing and demographics, and, in the case of Dark Knight, Time Warner’s exceptional good luck that its actor sacrificed himself upon Mammon’s Altar of High Marketing.
The lead-in for 2007’s installment– Transformers– was nostalgia for enormous fucking robots that turned into cars; this year it was the actor who went too far into the Darkness of the Joker and Never Came Back. But, really, let’s be honest: there’s about as much depth and darkness in the Joker as there is in the infinitely repeating cliche of the Hollywood OD. These same empty cultural tropes have been recycled forever; and if you don’t believe me, ask Lupe Velez.
The real purpose of Ledger’s performance appears to be a granting of permission for a certain kind of man to smear his face with makeup. You know these people: they had a real hey-hey-hey-day after 1994’s The Crow, another comics property with a lead actor bearing an oddly similar resemblance to Ledger in Dark Knight, who also died tragically before his film’s release. (Memo to Hollywood males: properly apply your eye and lip liners.)
These people, the cosplayers and the costumed, are the blank ciphers on which the spectacle is writ.
And that brings us right back to the San Diego Comic Con, 2008, ground zero of the masquerade, where the most common costume was the Joker. Cosplay and costuming are pretty abstractly interesting– if you think about them hard enough, you start wondering about the basic nature of free will. Each cosplayer makes a specific choice to dress up as a media property, but what if that’s an inversion of the actuality? What if the media property itself– the platonic form of the commodity– is making that choice on a spectral plane of existence? What if some people are genuinely so blank and empty that their souls and their bodies are nothing more than a canvas on which the idea of the Green Lantern is writing itself? And if that’s the case, then what, really, is the Green Lantern trying to tell those of us that see it?
The masquerade is like everything else at the Comic Con– a practical reassurance for all parties, those in costume and those not, that the Hobbies and Interests of the attendees are safe, unchallenging things. There’s a faux-surprise with each outrageous costume; can you believe that chick is half-naked? Can you believe that the fat dude is dressed as Kazaar? But these are rhetorical questions and the shock is faked, another false emotion amidst five days of lucre hiding behind camaraderie. The freak parade is a giant advertisement disguised as a hug.
This year, I attended the Con with elly, my old chum and romantic interest, and weeks before, she had asked me about cosplay; somewhere in our discussion, I suggested that we attend dressed as characters from Art Spiegelman’s Maus. I’d go as one of the death camp mice and she’d go as a Nazi guard. After all, by the logic of the costumed, Maus is a pretty good property: well-drawn anthropomorphic animals. But for certain reasons– taste and laziness– this plan was abandoned. Instead we hit the floor and were awash in seventy years worth of filth and debris.
The only reprieve from the sea of flesh was our attendance of a panel in celebration of Blake Bell’s recently released book on Steve Ditko. Around these quarters, Ditko is a long-term idee fixe– the only comic artist whose work I actively collect. I have my thoughts on the man, some of which are poorly expressed here.
I have a lot of trouble with panels– they conflict with my inability to sit still for more than thirty minutes and my complete unwillingness to shut up– but I always attend at least one of the more obscure. These sequestered, fluorescently lit cells are clusters of ultra-hardcore interests; the panelists and attendees are professionals and specialists in the totally arcane, and generally far removed from creeping product. Last year, I attended one on Disney strike-busting that bored my companion to tears; I was fascinated not only by the topic but by the audience. How was it possible to be in a room of thirty people who cared about attempts to unionize animators in the 1940s? But there it was.
Later, I discovered that the line-up of the Ditko panel as originally announced was Bell, the phenomenal Kim Deitch, Gary Groth, Jim Starlin, Carl Potts and Dean Mullaney. Mullaney– who had published Ditko under the Eclipse Comics banner– did not attend; his replacement was a younger woman Liana K., a Canadian who appears to be “known” for talking to a sock puppet and attending conventions half-naked, but, in the moment, we possessed zero knowledge of her background, nor of Mullaney’s absence, and assumed, in light of the seasoning of the other panelists, that she had been included as a misguided representation of the Female Perspective.
The panel had highlights. Bell projected a nice selection of Ditko art, and Kim Deitch discussed at some length the interest of his brother and collaborator Simon in Ditko; he also dissed on poor John Romita Sr. Sera sera, sez I. But, as all discussions of Ditko must do, the whole thing broke into contention around the topic of the Randian-influenced Objectivist comics, and in particular, Mr. A. (Viewers of the Jonathan Ross documentary might recall Mr. A as the point where Neil Gaiman, a man possessing no small experience with 20th Century American belief systems, started talking about “American barking madness.”)
It was Liana K. who brought the pain– discussing her discomfort with Mr. A and taking, I think, exception to the political didacticism in the work. These concerns fell into a well-honed tradition: most comics cognoscenti lean Left, and Leftism’s enduring problem is its condescension to those of opposing viewpoints. In short, while folks on the Right think that people on the Left are deranged, hell-bound sodomities, folks on the Left appear to believe that people on the Right are stupid.
It seems almost impossible to discuss Ditko’s Mr. A work without giving up a lament that the work “suffered” due to Ditko’s loading it with his politics. The person discussing the work will most often find these politics repellent and thus, indirectly, discuss Ditko as though he were stupid or somehow mistaken. (Not everyone, though: Jim Starlin was just fine.) But what this line of commentary really drives at is the same problem encountered in Ditko’s Hawk and Dove: the rigidity of the superhero genre as a storytelling device, and the limitations of a readership raised on genre expectations.
Ditko’s Mr. A stories only seem like “bad comics” if one expects genre exercises– if, however, one assumes that the works appear as their creator intended, they exist much more comfortably. They’re only “bad” if one’s definition of comics is limited to one genre & its one story, and if one assumes that there is only one potential audience being addressed.
Namely oneself.
(The strange thing about people constantly trying to wedge the Mr. A comics into the superhero genre is that both Dr. Strange and Spider-Man under Ditko were quite far from the genre; Peter Parker was the perpetually unfulfilled female lead of a Romance Comic, and Dr. Strange touristed through a successive series of monster/horror comics.)
Which is a long-winded way of suggesting that the worst possible place in the world to be raising the most obvious and hackneyed objections to Ditko’s Objectivist work has got to be a panel at the San Diego Comic Con. For the record, I also don’t recommend quoting scripture and verse to Christians.
It was not soon after Liana K. had called Mr. A something like “bad comics,” that a man in the audience called out with the most difficult possible question: “What would you have done differently?”
At the time, what stood out was the unfortunate undertone of (perhaps not so) latent sexism; who was this girl on a panel amongst industry veterans, and why was she prattling on about Ditko in such an ill-informed manner? Clearly, such assertions could not go unchallenged! About five to ten minutes of argument and floundering occurred– all of it painful and disagreeable to the eyewitness.
I was of two minds: I had a partial sympathy, knowing how incredibly awful it must be as a woman amongst nerds, but even without my later acquired knowledge, I couldn’t help wondering why anyone with such a surface level understanding of Ditko would sit on a panel of individuals that had published the man, or had hung out in his studio, or had edited him, or, you know, had written a book on the man’s life and art. We each have our interests, but interest alone does not make us an expert.
Coming home and discovering that the individual in question’s major credentials appear to be squeezing into a Batgirl costume and conversing with a sock puppet only made me wonder what in god’s name panel organizer Blake Bell was thinking; why would you ever invite this person? Isn’t it bad enough that the Comic Con is one enormous headsqueeze– must I witness parochial sexism against the ill-informed and often half-clothed?
With the distance of a few days, I have begun to see this moment as emblematic of the entire Comic Con; a collision between the cosplaying media personality, an almost living avatar of the convention’s current direction, and the ultra-nerd contingent, the kind of obsessive old school freak that was once its heart-and-soul.
Much as my basic sympathies fall with the latter camp, it’s also clear that these people are dinosaurs– the comics industry has become raw meat for the grinder of film & television, and there’s an awful day of reckoning not far from now, when the vast majority of youngish comic book fans have come up reading their funnybooks from right to left. Even the outcasts and the arty will be pushing books based on conventions and ideas that have no connection whatsoever– none at all– to that great mass of readers. And then, kids, it’s done.
For someone with an interest in the work of writer and artist Steve Ditko, the last year has been a bonanza of material, culminating in Blake Bell’s Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko and a new publication released by the Ditko/Snyder team. Initially, I wasn’t interested in Bell’s book– career retrospectives tend to be good introductions for the general reader and frustrating for the conversant– but having attended Bell’s panel at the San Diego Comic Con, I came away with the feeling that, whatever else, the art in Strange and Stranger had been selected with enormous care and taste, and this alone made the book worth acquiring.
To my surprise, the text, admirably, never transgresses into the tawdry. Speculation about Ditko’s life has been a staple of the comics industry for almost forty years, so Bell should be applauded for keeping out as much as possible. I wouldn’t presume for a moment to know whether or not Ditko himself approves of Bell’s approach, and, really, why should I? Why should anyone presume, before having any direct evidence, that they know or understand what another individual is thinking?
And yet assumptions of this nature abound through nearly all critical writing about Ditko, and, sad to say, when Bell reaches the Randian-influenced period, there is a bit of the same. This is particularly galling when one considers the direct and unabashedly didactic nature of Ditko’s creator-owned work; one of the obvious themes of this material is an insistence by the creator that the work not be read biographically, or as part of a continuum, but rather as individual statements of the same ideas. A = A requires no a priori knowledge. If the reader is incapable of reading the work in a vacuum, after it has become clear that the vacuum itself is part of the work, then I would argue that this is a failure of the reader and not of the artist. For decades, Ditko has been demanding that his work be read ahistorically; isn’t it time to start considering this insistence at face value?
The last chapter of Bell’s book, in particular, left me deeply unhappy. With its dismissals of Ditko’s later Randian-influenced work and questions about the methods employed– the reduction of characters to outlines, the amount of text, the seeming adherence to the superhero story– I was reminded of a passage in Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth, in which the narrator-artist Gully Jimson, now in his elder years, forges a drawing from his earlier period. In the novel, Jimson has entered a phase not unfamiliar to many, if not most, artists with long careers: his latter work has become something entirely different than the earlier work, and the earlier work is judged superior. The passage in question:
Thank God it wasn’t Sunday. And before four o’clock the next afternoon I had the prettiest early Jimson you ever saw. Sketch for the Bath. Or rather, from the Bath, but bearing on its face all those indubitable marks which as the crickets say, testify to that early freshness of vision and bravura of execution which can never be imitated by a hand which in acquiring a mature decision of purpose, has lost, nevertheless, that je ne sais quoi, without which perhaps no work of art is entitled to the name of genius.
The Horse’s Mouth is copyright 1944. Let’s compare and contrast with the final paragraph of Bell’s book:
Ditko failed to acknowledge that while many of his fans may not have appreciated being force-fed right from wrong, almost all of them recognized the decline his increasingly didactic material had wrought on his storytelling and art. Had Ditko been able to maintain the same approach to graphic narrative that informs his best work, his status as a true visionary in the art of visual storytelling would be afforded its due, confirming his place alongside the medium’s serious practitioners who are leading the charge into the new millennium.
(Let me note: I am not likening Ditko to Jimson. Merely pointing out an echo.)
The frustration elicited by Bell’s final chapter is a familiar one. I’ve been feeling it from the first days of my interest in Ditko’s work, dating back to about 1999. I have become royally tired of hearing the Randian-influenced work dismissed and I am royally tired of hearing Ditko discussed as though he were an idiot savant who had a few good years and then disappeared in a fog of reactionary thinking. Thus I am now going to science and knowledge out my thoughts on this matter and be done with it.
Not Siegel and Shuster. Not Jack Kirby. No one.
How badly has the comics industry ripped off Steve Ditko? Last year, Spider-Man 3, a property which Ditko co-created and on which he was promised a royalty share that never materialized, grossed about $900M globally. This year, Iron Man, featuring a visual look based on Ditko’s redesign of the character, has grossed about $560M. Next year, Watchmen is on track to earn at least $300M domestically. (This is a deeply conservative estimate.) The trailer of the film has been well received enough that DC has printed about a million copies of the graphic novel, a work so indebted to Ditko that he might as well have been listed as a co-creator. (This is not to take away anything from either Alan Moore or, especially, Dave Gibbons or John Higgins. But I was looking at Ditko’s issues of Blue Beetle and it hit me. They are Watchmen. Beyond inspiration. It’s all there.)
After 2009, there will have been three solid years of major, headline grabbing films that are by-products of Ditko’s creative work. As much as Kirby was the King of Komics, it’s been Ditko’s aesthetic, primarily, that has translated outside of the medium. This makes a certain amount of sense: although at the center of the Silver Age, Ditko was somehow on its periphery. The easy translation of his aesthetic to a billion dollar industry– and the relative failure of Kirby’s (c.f. Fantastic Four films)– is perfectly logical if you consider that the received wisdom of what makes “good” superhero art is utterly disconnected from the visual values of the rest of the world.
Meanwhile, Ditko’s reward has been scraps from the tables of companies that he personally enriched and forty years of incessant second-guessing by his so-called fans, by other professionals, by his editors and by his critics. How could he leave Spider-man? Why are these new comics so preachy? Why doesn’t he sell his original artwork? Why doesn’t he want to meet his public?
And that last question contains a barb of its own: no comics professional in the 1950s could have envisioned that the industry would spawn a knock-off showbiz stuffed with quasi-celebrity. Creators from later eras who’ve been cagey on the point of their own weak fame should be considered, at best, disingenuous. No one who entered the industry after, say, 1980 can reasonably or honestly say that they didn’t expect what they got. But with Ditko’s generation, and generations previous, this sentiment is completely true. Most of these men viewed themselves, I’m sure, as artists or at least artisans, but none signed a Faustian bargain with the American fame machine.
We should be ashamed that it is considered, amongst some, legitimate to criticize Ditko’s reluctance to engage with his quote-fans-unquote. In an era where celebrity has become a coin as common as pennies, only a depraved jackal would want to see Ditko transformed into another drooling mummy wrapped in wisps of pseudo-celebrity and wheeled out beneath the fluorescent lighting of the Jarvis Center.
The comics industry has always acted as a mortar-and-pestle towards creators who deviate from its central value of lucre acquired regardless of spiritual or intellectual cost. Nothing confuses most mainstream comics creators, or their fans, more than one of the Brethren opting out of easy money. Thus, there is something right and fitting about the current round of disrespect over Alan Moore’s handling of the Watchmen adaptation. You wanted to play with Ditko’s toys, Mister Big Hairy Magician Man, well, watch out, you’ve now become indistinguishable from Mr. A, only another uncompromising creator suffering Ditko’s fate, and washed over by the rage and disgust of sports fans towards a player who refuses the rules of the game.
What I would have liked very much to see in Bell’s book is an analysis of how the comics industry itself may have played a heavy role in shaping Ditko’s beliefs about both business and money. I’ve read enough of Rand’s writing to have a sense of the Objectivist worldview, and while it is one for which I have a certain amount of abstract sympathy, I find that in many ways it engages in a series of self-supporting rhetorical fallacies with little connection to my day-to-day existence. There’s a very distinct reason for this: I haven’t spent my entire life being screwed over by the people for whom I’ve worked.
The comics industy of the 1940s, 50s and 60s– and to a certain extent, as demonstrated by Moore’s endless issues with DC, continuing into the present day– must be one of the very few places in which Randian principles are demonstrably, and consistently, present. Comics were, and are, ground zero for unethical and unconscionable business practices designed to strip Producers of their rewards. Superman’s acquisition by National may have been the industry’s original sin, but it was, and remains, the working template for the intake of intellectual properties.
As the most talented creator of the Silver Age, Ditko suffered its worst indignities. I can only imagine– and this may be wrong– that seeing his work harvested amidst endless broken promises, did to the man what life does to us all: left him in search of an ethical system of thought that could explain his experiences. It’s inconceivable that any individual with a working knowledge of the last seventy years of broken promises, lies and outright theft should then blanch at a creator rejecting the cores values of the companies that produced these abuses.
The recycled canard offered in defense of the Big Two is thus: the creators signed the contracts. This has been demolished a million times over, but I think it’s unnecessary in the case of Ditko, who did what the Apologists are always suggesting was an alternative: he walked away. And was promptly second-guessed for the next four decades.
One of the strengths of Strange and Stranger is in documenting Ditko’s mistreatment not only at the hands of the Big Boys, but also the fan press and some of the smaller companies. This is, unfortunately, off-set by too much hand-wringing about Missed Opportunities in the later years. I understand the impulse to bemoan choices that appear Questionable, but in light of Ditko’s consistent mistreatment by everyone other than Charlton, it isn’t clear that anyone should sit in judgment on which subsequent choices were or were not appropriate.
Bell’s final chapter proceeds from the assumption that because Ditko’s techniques no longer adhere to the standards of the mainstream comics industry, they are somehow lesser or less-skilled than the previous decades of work. This is true only if one presumes that Ditko in any way cares about the collective assumptions about what does and does not make a “good” comic. This presumption is an historical bias based on Ditko’s earlier work and the audience’s unwillingness to allow an artist’s development off established paths. With any creative mind, some of these paths will be terrible and some will be good, but most will be ignored by the Afficinado, who craves nostalgic reminders of Earlier Days like a three-toothed junky longs for her junk. My guess would be that if Ditko’s creator-owned work were being judged independent of What Came Before, it wouldn’t be spoken of as a Decline, but rather in the same way that we have begun to discuss an outsider artist like Rory Hayes. (Note: not likening Ditko’s work to that of Hayes.)
Sometimes it feels like I’m the only person alive of whom this is true, but I enjoy, genuinely, the didactic Randian-influenced work. I’ve own copies of nearly all the Snyder/Ditko publications, and I plan to acquire the new one. I like their look, and I like the direction in which Ditko has gone. I don’t agree with their philosophical underpinnings, but that’s okay. I’m not interested in being reassured of my own rightness, nor am I affronted by the expression of a political and ethical system that is not my own. I’m an adult.
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UPDATE, LATER: Steven Grant attacks this piece. I respond.
