[A BIG THREE-PART NOVEL IN ONE PULSE-POUNDING PACKAGE]
Just a few months prior to these assuredly reality-quaking events, like a preliminary peal of thunder, Steve Ditko, age 80, a critical contributor to the lucrative spandex sprawl that remains the majority corpus of the Marvel/DC media identity, released a new publication, his first since 2002. It was titled The Avenging Mind, and prominently featured an essay called Toyland, initially presented in the pages of The Comics!, a newsletter facilitated by Robin Snyder, Ditko’s longtime editor, occasional dialogue writer and co-publisher of items since 1988. It was their twentieth year. Toyland, a reflection upon the ‘breaking’ of superhero ‘toys,’ would briefly become A Thing on the internet in 2009 when artist Batton Lash temporarily posted it, with permission, to the entertainment commentary website Big Hollywood.
By then, Ditko had moved on. While the Invasions and Crises had roared to life in the Direct Market mainstream, the man who once drew several of the crucial participants on both sides — sometimes first — began putting out completely new comic books, starring new superheroes. They were black and white, including the covers, carried no ads, and were not carried by arch-distributor Diamond. An entire wave of them were nearly out by the time online Toy-talk had begun, and plans had presumably been made for a more solidified Steve Ditko: The Series, death of the alternative comic book be damned. It would continue. It does continue.
Structurally, the series lines up with a prior b&w Ditko comic book line, the D series or Ditko Series that began with the 1973 publication of Mr. A by writer-on-comics Joe Brancatelli — perhaps best remembered for his 1976-80 criticism/commentary column The Comic Books in the Warren magazines, a well-remembered ’66-’67 Ditko account — who eventually sold off the remains of the print run to vintage comics dealer Bruce Hershenson. In turn, Hershenson published three more Ditko comics: Avenging World (’73); ..Wha..!? (’75); and a new Mr. A (’75), at times confusingly designated Mr. A #4, being fourth in the overall series, although only two of them are issues of Mr. A. To augment the new line of comics, perhaps in recognition of what’s gone before, Snyder & Ditko have reprinted the ’73 Mr. A and ..Wha..!? in the same format; Avenging World had already been republished in a massively augmented state in 2002, piling 240 pages of comics and essays spanning over 30 years into a Cerebus-style phonebook. The aforementioned The Avenging Mind was its sequel.
I trust you can see the continuity now, and are maybe even anticipating a reprint of the ’75 Mr. A, which would have to come after the imminent Act 7 Seven (yes, I typed it right), because 320 pages of new work in under three years isn’t enough for Ditko; this level of prolificacy places him at the front of his living peers, among them John Severin and early influence Joe Kubert, although both of those artists frequently work at established comic book publishers such as Dark Horse, Marvel or DC. A more analogous example is Jack T. Chick, longtime independent artist and publisher of evangelical Christian comics, similarly active today in producing new and uncompromising material.
But Ditko does not release his work for free as webcomics, nor do his admirers leave hard copies at cafeterias or bus stops. You can purchase them online, or maybe find a comics store or online service that has somehow obtained them from the publishers. Such distributional circumstances — not unique to any back-of-Previews publisher focusing on bends-when-placed-over-the-edge-of-a-table-style comic books from one artist — coupled with the ferocity of vision evident on any given page of any given issue, has no doubt limited the audience for this new and large body of work from a revered talent, an architect of the contemporary mainstream – a fact that hasn’t escaped Ditko himself. Look again at the cover above, at the audience present for Ditko Presents. I count six people in addition to myself (yourself), in addition to the hovering, cackling outline, about whom more will be said later. “Yes! We’re all there are.”
Here’s the back cover:
I do think perspective is necessary. Let me show you something.
This is so well known, so first-sentence-of-the-obituary recognized — draped so heavily over Ditko’s body of work I can’t help but wonder if the whole ‘theatrical presentation’ angle of the second wave of his new comics isn’t a wry nod toward a certain long-in-production/still-in-previews Broadway extravaganza — it’s easy to forget that what you’re seeing is the teary eruption of conflicting traditions smashing together.
The crux of the Marvel revolution, you’ll recall, was its revitalization of the superhero concept through modification, and occasional generic cross-breeding. Ditko had worked primarily in pre-Comics Code horror comics and post-Code sci-fi and suspense shorts; as luck would have it, Spider-Man was not so much a product of the superhero tradition, as it had developed following WWII into the Silver Age, but a child of the EC tradition, the cruel twist aesthetic that presided over the pre-Code horror scene and informed much of the trajectory of Amazing [Adult] Fantasy. The ol’ Parker luck, in its earliest incarnation, is distinctly moral, honing in on the objective lapse of Spider-Man’s assent to the burglar’s escape, resulting in the look of agony Ditko so famously captures above.
And it’s not just the look on Parker’s face that will reprise, over and over, hundreds of times on hundreds of Ditko pages, including several of his 320 newest, but the tenor of the universe itself, soon to be freed from Stan Lee’s diluting perspective, and thereby made hyper-capable of isolating objective instances of Good and Bad, Right and Wrong, and doling out suffering to all those who venture into the black zone from the white, while asserting that no, it’s okay to let the thief go, I’m busy, there’s shades of gray. No no no no no no no. Never mind that Flash Thompson, in some guise, was a bully at Steve Ditko’s high school, or that Aunt May, supposedly, wore her hair like Steve Ditko’s mother – it’s that Spider-Man was born into the Avenging World. The likes of Captain Atom predated him among the artist’s published superhero works, but Parker was fully and firstly a Ditkovian superhero.
That’s what Ditko continues to create — superheroes, of a rather specific vintage — although there are no scriptwriters to fill in the dialogue anymore, nor is there a Comics Code to restrict the content, nor indeed are there the studio artists and machine lettering utilized by one Jack T. Chick in his never ending battle for you to accept Jesus Christ as your personal Savior.
Here, now, everything is individual.
***
(A: form)
As you can immediately see, there is little in the way of detail or abstraction evident on these pages; even compared to the artist’s second-newest body of original work, the 1999-2000 Steve Ditko’s Package line of books, this is honed-down stuff. Some of the Hero’s adventures aren’t even multi-panel comics, but presented as a narrative series of full-page images, showcasing his mighty clashes (or sometimes just pin-up scenes excerpted from multiple clashes) against a series of unsubtly metaphorical threats.
Specifically, the military getup is an indictment of the collectivist governmental state, your classic ‘dictator’ image; Ditko is not attacking the potential collectivism of wearing a uniform in the Army, in that responding force is justified against such an anti-life enormity. Therefore, a standing military is worthwhile as a response to Force in the same way the maintenance of a police force is a rational response to crime, i.e. the Forceful or Fraudulent interruption of one’s individual rights. Indeed — as Ditko notes in his 1969 essay Violence, the Phoney Issue, revised in 2002 for the Avenging World expansion — because a dictator rises to power through the initiation of Force, the failure of an outside government to reply with condemnation legitimizes the rule of Force and breeds violence, fear and a hateful view of humankind, especially in the young, hence the Boy and Girl team.
Likewise, the B.G.T.I.C.V.T.S.T.D., while indistinctly drawn — which to my mind makes the guy on the right holding that huge batch of dynamite all the funnier — are clearly of a hippie/primitive type, generally indicative throughout the Ditko catalog of collective action, violent protest, terror of scientific and technological progress, unthinking opposition to capitalism, mystic beliefs, ecological mania and general mob imbecility. They are just a big, smelly mass of the irrational, in one story (The Screamer, 1974) explicitly linked to modern cavemen, although they are also a species of the Public, a fundamental Ditko threat usually depicted as a horde of angry citizens jeering and throwing things at a Hero, or even the Hero. Or a natural opponent:
Now, this is all specialist knowledge, and strictly elective. Part of the beauty of these new comics is how the membrane is stripped from Ditko’s style, so that his work bleeds from ‘story’ comics into a type of editorial cartooning, thereby ensuring that the lines and symbols that fill his pages can signify meaning as efficiently as a donkey or an elephant, forgive my false dichotomy.
It’s like a code. MAN’S GREATNESS is built from smooth, angular lines, depicting straight towers and an upright human figure. The lettering is tidy, and white space is employed whenever dots radiating from the clear head of the human figure isn’t indicating illumination. MAN’S DEPRAVITY is wobbly all over, with a slinking, muddy form becoming saturated with the unsteady lines that fill the background. Labels are thicker but haphazard, and the only visible environment behind the figure is a thatch of grass that crosses and clashes with all the other lines – in the parlance, it is undeveloped, untouched by man, and therefore indicative of the absence of progress. Even the central observing figure’s ANTI-HERO paper is filthy, no doubt with bad ideas. Critically, the image’s central line is wavy too, suggesting that adopting a centrist position in this conflict is just as good as plunging headfirst into the muck.
Now compare all of that with the uniform of the Hero. It is entirely composed of clean, neat lines representing zones of black and white, crossing one another in an as orderly manner as Spider-Man’s webs. This design stands apart from the chaos evident on General Destruction’s uniform, the mess of the Villain’s costume flowing from his central collectivist V (two streams meeting at or breaking from a common source), or the absolute bedlam that is the EVIL entity in the uppermost image, tellingly identifying COMPROMISE as among its wicked tendrils. There are no Warren magazine ink washes in this allegorical war of pen strokes; as a result, disorderly patches of crossed lines, squiggles, hatches or whatever-the-hell come to represent the value of ‘gray,’ identical then to white stained by black, which Hero-Philosopher Mr. A reminds us is all gray ever really is: a corruption.
In a way, this display makes for good storytelling: the hero is easily distinguishable from his horde of attackers, with his mighty blows emphasized by zones of white space demarcated by little dot clouds. At the same time, these fundamental storytelling qualities are charged with specific meaning to Ditko, so that the clearer, nary-a-wasted-hatch design of the Hero is emphasized as not just a visual figure but a philosophical ideal, innately superior to the jangle of opposing forms, which are duly obliterated bit by bit by the illumination of his lined fists connecting with their agonized faces – appropriately, the only uncluttered area on their bodies, so as to better communicate the suffering of the unjust.
Mind you, these visual properties are not hard and fast – Ditko’s style these days is limited enough that these devices must also function in a diegetic manner, indicating the in-panel presence of actual light, shadow, etc., so that a superhero might dramatically emerge from the shadows or, as seen above, a villain might be seen clearly under harsh light. Yet there is almost always some usage of the revelatory iconographic values Ditko attributes to the fundamental elements of his craft — lines, dots, marks — so that meaning is readily ascertainable apart from the usage of text or the sequential build of meaning across series of panels, or even the positioning of characters in-panel.
Such is the basis of Ditko’s approach to his new comics, although certain aspects are visible in far earlier comics; take this Blue Beetle confrontation from 1967, in which a beatnik-like collective of villains discovers the none-too-subtly metaphorical and blindingly literal functions of Ted Kord’s gun. Watch for the surrounding dots:
And if his adventures never really function as anything other than inevitable victories over barely-defined foes — most of them are just barely stories at all — we much recognize their central, gravitational position, and know that the the ‘H’ down the tights of the title character is just as good as prison bars holding the howling guilty.
Right now, look at the text. If there’s one thing almost everybody will pick up on immediately in these comics — aside from ‘not a lot of spotted blacks, huh?’ — it’s that almost nobody speaks in complete sentences. To some, this can be taken as a departure from the stereotype of Ditko’s characters standing around all the time, possibly crunched down toward the bottom of the panel, coughing out sentence after dense sentence of declarative philosophy. However, the ‘abridged’ technique dates back to at least the early ’70s, running parallel (if not quite at identical length) with Ditko’s textier works. Its primacy here can be taken as an additional honing of the artist’s style, in which the character and positioning of the lettering is granted the same atomic meaning as everything else constructed from Ditko’s lines.
Believe it or not, this reminds me of one of the galumphing superhero Event comics I cited back at the top: the Grant Morrison-written Final Crisis. It’s a deeply flawed work, redolent with compromises — not the least of which would be a lineup of fill-in artists deployed to keep the machine running in time to set all the other books of line onto proper money-making, crowd-pleasing schedules — which would have sent Ditko running for the parking lot, possibly through a window and down the fire escape. Yet in its massively compressed later issues it touches a sort of manic beauty, vacillating between dull genre punch-outs and fractured panel-by-panel scene shifts, vivid enough that I wondered if Morrison shouldn’t consider a type of superhero Lettrism, breaking dialogue down to the basic elements of visual symbols.
The Wishers is not, however, so classically an operatic work; perhaps it is Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk: a total work of art. Ditko now uses words as integrated elements of his visual, concrete images, essentially coloring our perception of his lines — as always, charged up with the meanings discussed above — with surrounding, complimentary wisps of concept. Only the dead basic amount of verbiage necessary is used, much in the way Ditko’s art seems to consist of outlines; adventurous characters speak often of “a long shot,” simpering cowards whine about “rights,” and the good detective just above paces and paces so that his words surround him, tiny asterisks and starbursts indicating cusses, which the Individual reader is left to fill in, along with each sentences’ completion.
But what of the total meaning? Go back and look at both pages; they’re not exactly mirrors, but they do serve to depict alternate Bad and Good, Black and White versions of Combat Wishing. Surrounded by mad, scrawled lines, ghostly faces and all manner of visual noise, the killer arrives at his rather stupid plan through irrational, emotional means. The Hero, the police detective, is no less intense, but his space is clearer, filled with concepts, words, which in a unified display bespeaks his rationality. This, on the page, is why he triumphs.
The plot, as it is, likewise obliterates the distinction between generic masks; it’s slightly closer to one of Ditko’s myriad Charlton thrillers — the heart of pre-Code horror beating hard in a less favorable climate — than a superhero comic. Nonetheless, it operates on the same basis as all of Ditko’s new comics: a man is agitated that his outdated ideas are unpopular at the office, so he buys a devil-may-care P Mask from a grinning mystery woman’s shadow boutique. He becomes the hit of the company, but hubris demands he refuse to make full payment on the merchandise. Suddenly, his skills become weak.
It seems almost dreamlike from evaporating the plot content from a bad-man-gets-his supernatural scenario, but it can be understood in much the same way as The Wishers above; to deprive one of property, including his life, is to assure your downfall via a more Rational being. What Ditko does here is remove the human element altogether and have the Bad character defeated by the very mechanisms of the Avenging World, which assures us that man in fundamentally a Rational being, and that deviations from this state will be dealt with in due time. It also explains why an avowedly anti-supernatural personality such as Ditko would work so much in horror comics – because the mechanisms of some horror comics, the ironic reversals and spectacular feats of vengeance sprung from the dirt of their graves, are metaphors for the half-visible activities of Ditko’s own comics, promising the victory of Good.
It sounds a bit… superheroic.
***
(A: content)
A lot has been said about Mr. A, not just because he’s the most visible of Ditko’s philosophical superhero creations, but because for a while he was the walking, talking, two-fisted summary of the artist’s point of view, now dispersed over hundreds of pages of Ditko comics. If the Hero is the core of Ditko’s newest work, Mr. A is its living history. But there’s more history present than is often explored; what’s typically forgotten about Ditko is that he’s of the first generation of comic book professionals who grew up reading comic books. He loved Will Eisner’s work on the Spirit — which would have launched as a newspaper insert when Ditko was 12 — and specifically sought out Jerry Robinson’s tutelage at the Cartoonists and Illustrators School in NYC because he admired his work on Batman. While many artists entered comics as a means of getting a foothold in illustration or industrial art or newspaper stripping — not unlike how some of today’s graphic novels seem specially presented to attract the eye of movie studios — Ditko by all available accounts went into comics to make comics. To use contemporary superhero terms, he was a fan-turned-pro.
And while thoughts of fans-turned-pro in superhero comics typically raise thoughts of tangled, anal continuity spiraling like rotten DNA unto eternity, Ditko approached the superhero genre as primarily a means of self-expression. Keep in mind, Mr. A debuted the year after Ditko left The Amazing Spider-Man, instantly re-mapping the superhero genre as a means of incarnating the ideals cherished by the artist into a wise, brawling avatar of the Avenging World, a metaphoric guarantee that Reason would always triumph over Force and Fraud, clad in film noir threads to turn Denny Colt green. Why noir? Why such a downbeat source? I don’t know – why horror? Why not set the Hero up as a shining beacon in a world that only seems doomed, dominated by high-contrast shadow black against glorious blinding white.
That Mr. A first appeared in issue #3 of witzend, a Wally Wood-founded independent comics anthology premised on giving working professional cartoonists a forum for personal expression, says less to me than the character’s many additional ’60s and ’70s appearances in fanzines, a means of Ditko-the-fan to interface with an increasingly organized comics fandom in pursuit of the superhero ideal. It would turn antagonistic, of course, but that is an inevitability in the comics too.
It is not difficult to criticize this content. Mr. A and all of Ditko’s Heroes — some would say all superheroes, fundamentally — are at-heart reactionary, in that they only oppose cognizable, committed criminal acts. Laws only seem to exist at all in Ditko’s comics as either a means of disposing of criminals that aren’t killed or a target for anti-Individual/Identity/Life dismissal. The political process is never acknowledged, although seemingly any organized dissent to the status quo is branded Collectivism and implied to be at-heart Force, inferior to the fact-gathering Reason of the Individual, who presumably has to reach some agreement with other Individuals to function in society, mostly off-panel in Ditko’s comics. It almost goes without saying that the proper function of a newsman like Rex Graine is through unyielding activist journalism, in that ‘neutral’ reportage with the pretense of delivering both sides of an issue regarding Force or Fraud is automatically supportive of Force or Fraud in failing to rebuke it, white corrupted with black, etc.
Today the Question is a vastly different character — continuity’s price — but he occasionally provides interested artists with a means of ‘doing’ Ditko’s philosophy in the context of a popular superhero book, in that the Question is barely a step away from Mr. A, who is the great icon of the Ditkovian superhero. Frank Miller did it in Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again, and Grant Morrison will presumably do it in his upcoming Multiversity, although such an effort will surely be taken as a response to the genre’s big Ditko-influenced work:
Moreover, in visual terms, the name Rorschach signifies a blend of white and black into a blot that can only be subjectively read – there is no place for Reason in that, much like how Rorschach’s mask constantly, inexplicably shifts in its blend of white and black, an unsteadiness more becoming of a Ditko villain, especially the new ones we’ve seen here.
Granted, Rorschach is right about a lot of things going on in Watchmen, and he’s eventually dignified with a climactic glittering death, wiped from existence by Dr. Manhattan, the analogue to Captain Atom, Ditko’s very first superhero – the metaphor needs no major unpacking. Ditko, who contributed greatly to four of six primary Watchmen characters, would sink into the background as the superhero concepts he worked on adopted lives reactive to their societal context – ongoing adventures, which do tend to supplicate the Individual before the Collective that is continuity. How then, could a compassionate fellow like Moore not feel a little for Ditko? How could a now-decried iconoclast not admire that stick-to-your-guns steel that Ditko has lived, and that Rorschach/the Question/Mr. A embodies?
We don’t need him anymore, really. There are many like him here. We can be him.
If this doesn’t sound like a great idea for a rich and varied continuing series, bear in mind that Ditko isn’t always interested in continuance. His prized form of superhero comics is short and simple, with the good guys winning – it’s like pre-Code, pre-WWII superhero comics, anthology format and possibly lethal violence and all. Interestingly, several of the continuing characters in the second, present wave of the new comics — the ‘staged’ comics — are given specific settings in different fictional cities of the 1930s. This gives Ditko license to draw as many hats and jackets as he wants to, yes, but it also hearkens back to the historical birthplace of comic books, the place Ditko knew first-hand – like here toward the end of the artist’s road there’s another chance to get it right.
Anyway, Miss Eerie appears in Ditko Presents and A Ditko Act 3, although her best story is in the new-new Act 6. A string of robberies of shady types has broken out, and nobody has a clue. Meanwhile, May runs into a guy she used to know. You can tell where this is going.
Of course, May’s potential lover is the masked man, who’s been ripping off the men who cheated his father, a silent partner in their scams, a classic gray actor among black villains. The philosophical considerations are delicate here, for the tragic Ditko reader, because it could be argued that the son is only acting with “retaliatory force” – wait, no, Ditko makes sure that the ripped-off man insists he’s clean now. Reform is possible, there was a cooling period. Then, is he like the !?, swiping criminals’ property as a means of attacking their community? Ah, but Ditko throws in a shooting, elusively indicated without much detail. To take life would require beating back a mighty Force, and the boy was the initiator there. A judge, Ditko, might have to consider his ruling, but Miss Eerie is instantaneous.
She could look to Mr. A, who in a 1969 story, The Community U.N., faced a nearly comprehensive rebuke for his actions. You can’t say Ditko lacks in self-awareness. Retained by leading citizens to study the problem of crime in the city, Rex Graine elects to dig deep into legitimate men with connections to criminal figures. The citizens are aghast, but Graine knows that A is A, and legitimacy cannot mask corruption. He is publicly and privately accosted, and causes citywide outrage at the brutal beating he hands an attacking thug. Like in a proper Chick tract, all of the real-world criticisms lodged against the work are incorporated into it as insults slung at the hero, who brushes it off as the chattering of bugs, because he can guess the ending. His own newspaper denounces him. He has no visible friends, and certainly no wife or lover. It doesn’t matter. He is called evil and inhuman. It doesn’t matter. The story doesn’t even tell us about his recovery in social status; maybe it doesn’t happen.
But the ‘realistic’ scenery of Ditko’s story does fade away on the last page, leaving Mr. A and an especially nervous citizen teetering on opposite sides of the white and black card, one of them bound to fall. And what do you fall into, when you’re not at your best?
III. A Short Review of Blue Beetle Vol. 1 No. 5, Published by Charlton Comics, Nov. 1968
In contrast, 1968 was an ‘in between’ year for Ditko’s artistic development, coming the year after Mr. A debuted in witzend, and the year before he began to author the first incarnation of The Avenging World in that same forum. Yet the cover of Blue Beetle #5 is a classic Ditko split image, profoundly familiar to readers of his fanzine/underground/self-published works, setting opposing forces against one another. Kord’s side of the conflict is golden with towering spires behind clean glass, representational art and the finely-detailed human figure. Against him is all the negative signals we’ve seen in Ditko’s recent work – the color gray, jagged edges, spindly lines. Careful excerpting of the man’s panels notwithstanding, it does appear that non-representational (‘abstract’) art is firmly on the black end of the card, properly tossed to the floor on the bottom right rather than cluttering some perfectly good wall with its bullshit.
There’s more though. Temporally, this is a very specific comic, and something of a self-contained crossover issue, in which Vic Sage participates as a character in the main story, a subplot from which continues and resolves itself in the Question’s backup feature. Ditko is only credited with the art in the Beetle story, with the script attributed to D.C. Glanzman, but it was typical of Ditko at that time to ask a dialogue credit be given to Glanzman on Question stories Ditko had actually written entirely on his own; from my reading of Ditko’s work, it seems likely that he also wrote the Beetle story in this issue, with Glanzman’s participation probably limited to polishing the dialogue without changing the meaning, all of which is extremely specific to Ditko.
“You’ll be a super hero with no legs but I’ll give you super powers so you won’t need them and everyone will feel sorry for you!”
“That’s stupid! Why wreck me if you can give me powers?”
The story is somewhat reminiscent of one of Kirby’s own works, issues #5-6 of his 2001: A Space Odyssey, as much an individual transformation of a preexisting work as Ditko’s Blue Beetle, and doubly so a cry of agony against the superhero comics scene, depicting a dissatisfied superhero fan of 2040 getting off his ass and discovering a world of real conflict, ending with his growing out of such genre trappings and evolving into something else. Ditko likewise isn’t pleased with superheroes in his story, but unlike Kirby his idea of evolution isn’t transcending any damn thing but purifying the nature of superheroism, driving out the stain to leave only pure, just white. This is an unpopular move, he knows, and so rocks and bullets are launched at Kord from the public, just as the public hated Spider-Man, and just, it must be said, how Ditko depicts fandom as opposed to him in his recent comics. He is Ted Kord, Peter Parker, Vic Sage, Mr. A – it’s all him.
And you may ask yourself, “wait a second, Ditko doesn’t legally own Spider-Man or the Blue Beetle or the Question, so isn’t their owning entities, Marvel and DC, merely exercising their individual discretion on how to make use of their property?”
It looks very familiar, broken down into visual elements. The “unified, integrated whole” is perfectly smooth, separated (individual) lines forming a bullseye, not unlike the logo Charlton began using in the early ’70s. The “disintegrated, fragmented, corrupted, mindless effort is a manic jumble of lines with a ‘core’ (as it is) of Ditko’s gray matter. Inherent then, to the gray, so prominent in the artist’s newest comics, is the black soul of compromise, of objective wrongs; the chaos of the Villain is Marvel challenging Ditko’s ideas, of breaking the toys. You have to understand, in this concept of art, of life, there are objective underlying values, and art that does not serve those rational values — “to portray man, his human potential, at its highest level, of man the hero, a man of justice, to self-create all that he can possibly be – in a non-contradictory manner,” is, in the words of the rational actor, Vic Sage, “trash to me.”
Consistently, this is not a truth reflected in his work or his life. Populism, frankly, is a species of collectivism, and the values Ditko cherishes stand plainly apart from economic success. It goes deeper. Elsewhere in The Avenging World is an adventure comic from 1973, A View of Justice! It was reprinted previously in Fantagraphics’ The Ditko Collection vol. 1, at which time editor Robin Snyder deemed it “a powerful, moving story with a sentimental and uplifting ending which would have had me on my feet and cheering if it were on the screen.”
It is, by my estimate, the most ideologically extreme thing Ditko has ever made, depicting a heroic doctor brought off a tourist bus in a vaguely South American setting to tend to a Communist leader shot down while fighting fascist occupying forces. The doctor is not a resident of South Park and therefore the truth does not, in fact, lay in the middle; instead, he rejects both as forms of Force and idealistically refuses to operate on the wounded man. A horde of unsuspecting bystanders are gunned down as a result, which is terrible, but the Hero castigates his agitated fellow tourists for spouting meaningless irrational contradictions and delivers a rousing seven-panel speech on the practice of Justice.
We soon discover the critic’s denunciation of the art as “childish” and “an insult to man and humanity” carries a personal charge rooted in his youthful failures; his disgust with the notion of Heroism drives him to send thugs — all critics have them, I’ve got, like, twelve — to wrest the picture from Nora and destroy it, obliterating property for the sake of a mystic salve. Needless to say, the Question foils this scheme and proceeds to extract a confessional monologue from the critic by gassing his apartment so as to cause the hated image to arise, a j’accuse.
In the other, the woman is clear of the gray disease, and the man goes down.
There is no difference between men and woman, save for biology. There is no distinction between class. There is no substance to racial divisions in the face of Force/Fraud and Justice. There is no meaning to Western and Eastern culture so that they violate the rights of property and life. There is no logic to religion, and to respect differences between faiths is to respect the anatomy of shadows obscuring Reason. There is no difference between you and me, save that we are Individual.
And Individuals are subject to the cutting tension of knowing what is Good and Bad, and Ditko, while prolific with heroes, hones in on as many faces shuddering with torment. Why are you upset all the time? Why are you dissatisfied? Why are you unhappy?
It only looks easy on the page. But Ditko knows this struggle, summarized in every Ditko face. These are no longer only genre comics, these are sketches from the street, dispatches from the front. Ditko is everything on these pages, and so he is of these pages, hovering above and through them at once, 100% man and 100% God, living as he sees fit, getting by under his shared universe rules, and it’s so hard, it’s so hard, it’s so, so hard, but he is still here. He is still here, he is still here, and where, dear reader, are you?
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