Steve Ditko

Ditko Does Death Row |Steve Ditko's flair for the dramatic can be seen in this vintage panel, reproduced in Strange and Stranger

STRANGE AND STRANGER: THE WORLD OF STEVE DITKO
By Blake Bell. Fantagraphics Books. 216 pp. $43.95

Like Peter Parker, his creator, comics artist Steve Ditko, never fit into his surroundings that well. He lived with fetish artist Eric Stanton, but his own work was sexless. His version of the ‘60s counterculture came from Ayn Rand instead of the hippie scene — “With great power comes great responsibility” and all that. In one Spider-Man story, Ditko even shows Parker scoffing through a protest, activists bragging about skipping classes with all the subtlety of a Jack Chick morality leaflet as Spidey waves them off. Too much work to be done.

And yet, surrounded by hustlers and a long list of editors who paid him a lowly $6.50 per penciled-and-inked page, you can see how Ditko came to wholly embrace Objectivist ideals of freedom, fair pay, and self-reliance — so much so that he abandoned outright The Amazing Spider-Man, the legendary character he co-created with scripter Stan Lee,  over simple matters of plot integrity.

But his protests keep him a hero of sorts to comics fans, especially as he wangled writing credits on pages he’d been scripting for months as Lee was off building his handshake empire. Ditko is one of the few essential names in comic history — he just had to endure a little more fame than fortune, unlike some of his more lubricious contemporaries.

Now Ditko is the subject of a new biography entitled Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko. Like any writer should, author Blake Bell admires Ditko’s toil and especially his ability to stand up for his principles even as he takes shots at his sometimes-overworked, isolationist, fan-alienating tendencies. He quotes Alan Moore, whose unmatched Watchman graphic novel satirized Ditko’s political ideas and post-Spider-Man characters. “I have to say that I found Ayn Rand’s philosophy laughable,” Moore says. “It was a ‘white supremacist dreams of the master race’ burnt in an early 20th century art form. I would basically disagree with all of Ditko’s ideas, but he has to be given credit for expressing those ideas.”

Biographies, like musical best-of compilations, tend to glow in their subjects’ early heydays — the moments which first caught our attention. Ditko’s ride through Charlton Comics — a bargain-basement outfit run by two Italian ex-cons with absolutely no interest in quality — steeled his early career for the bumps he’d hit repeatedly throughout his professional life. His early shaping of Spider-Man’s action sequences allowed replacement John Romita to blossom into the title’s definitive artist, and the twisting visual mysticism Ditko brought to Dr. Strange is still parroted, never perfectly.

Each page of Strange and Stranger is filled with intelligently chosen illustrations which illustrate changing comics trends from the Comics Code-imposed limits of the ’50s and ’60s, right up to the present day. Bell also attempts to wedge open Ditko’s extremely guarded personal life, pulling out cosmetic details such as Ditko’s mother providing the inspiration for Aunt May’s hairstyle. Later, as his politics take over, Ditko’s cold antihero Mr. A scorns a robbery victim for having pity on her attacker: “To have any sympathy for a killer is an insult to their victims.” Harsh.

Bell quotes Ditko as saying, after his break with Stan Lee and Marvel Comics, “Stan chose not to know, to hear, why I left.” You can almost see him walking away in silhouette.

Still, as Bell points out, besides his skill with the pen, Ditko’s grounded style predated the comics’ trend towards everyday realism by decades. Ditko and Lee’s Spider-Man was the first superhero who life got considerably worse after he gained his powers.

In Strange and Stranger, Bell takes an objective long view of an influential comic artist who was determined to define right and wrong for us whether we liked it or not. Lavishly illustrated with images created by Ditko (as well as several illustrators who were influenced by him), Strange and Stranger deserves a place alongside such other must-have history books as Arlen Schumer’s The Silver Age of Comics and Marvel’s typically self-hyping Five Fabulous Decades of the World’s Greatest Comics — and, of course, the comics themselves. Throw in Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay for good measure and you’re set.