After Mark Evanier’s Kirby: King of Comics came out earlier this year, one would expect that a biography of Steve Ditko would come next. As cocreator of Spider-Man and Dr. Strange, Ditko ranks second only to Kirby among Stan Lee’s collaborators in devising the Marvel Universe. Blake Bell’s Stranger and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko (Fantagraphics, $39.99 hardcover) has followed quickly indeed, arriving in early summer.
Like the Kirby volume, Bell’s Ditko biography doubles as a magnificent art book, with illustrations, both in black and white and in color, that constitute a museum-quality retrospective of Ditko’s work. Readers may be most impressed with the dramatic power and the lush detail of the lesser-known, earlier Ditko work from the 1950s and 1960s that Bell reprints. His book also demonstrates once again the marked difference between seeing Ditko’s Spider-Man or Dr. Strange work in a typical reprint book and seeing the same pages reproduced in black and white at a size closer to that of the original artwork. As in the book jacket’s back-cover illustration of Spider-Man battling Mysterio, the dynamism of Ditko’s staging, the sharp characterization in his characters’ body language, and the elegance of his line are all enhanced when reproduced with the proper size and clarity.
Bell not only shows his readers the best of Ditko’s art, but on many occasions illuminates how it works, explaining how Ditko creates mood and atmosphere, or how he expresses characters’ personalities through their bodies. Sometimes Bell helpfully juxtaposes examples of Ditko’s work with artwork by comics artists who inspired him, such as Mort Meskin and Joe Kubert.
Once they started working on superheroes at Marvel in the 1960s, Kirby’s and Ditko’s life stories followed similar trajectories. They each collaborated with Stan Lee in creating classic characters and series; they increasingly assumed the task of plotting the stories; feeling cheated of rightful credit and recompense for their work, they quit Marvel and created new but less commercially successful characters at DC Comics. Both Kirby and Ditko eventually returned to Marvel, yet both ended up falling out of fashion, rejected by the comics business and the audience despite their extraordinary talents.
In chronicling Ditko’s career, Bell reveals how Ditko’s struggles with the comics industry differed considerably from Kirby’s. In Evanier’s telling, Kirby became the victim of the corporate mentality of the comics business and the fickleness of his former audience. Bell, in contrast, depicts Ditko as his own worst enemy at times, as a result of his consistent adherence to a personal moral code that, in another light, is rather admirable.
Bell confirms the account that the reason that Ditko took over from Kirby as the artist for Spider-Man was because Kirby’s version too closely resembled Kirby and Joe Simon’s the Fly. Readers may be startled by Bell’s revelations of how Stan Lee allegedly resisted what now seem essential elements of the Spider-Man series that Ditko insisted upon. For example, according to Bell, Lee did not want Ditko to place Spider-Man in his characteristic spiderlike poses, fearing that the Comics Code would somehow object to such freakish behavior. Originally, Bell writes, Lee wanted the Green Goblin to be an actual supernatural demon, and it was Ditko who turned him into a mysterious human mastermind.
Many are already aware of Ditko’s admiration for the work of the late Ayn Rand, author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, novels which propound her Objectivist philosophy. These readers also recognize that Ditko‘s characters Mr. A and the Question (the inspirations for Watchmen’s Rorschach) act out Randian philosophy through their inflexible opposition to criminals. One of the major strengths of Bell’s biography is his detailed analysis of how Objectivism influenced other elements of Ditko’s work and how Ditko turned himself into a living model of the uncompromising Randian hero.
Bell credits Stan Lee with the most essential element of Spider-Man’s origin story: the murder of Uncle Ben. Wracked by guilt, Spider-Man devotes his life to his perceived responsibility to do whatever he can to prevent other innocents from coming to harm. Yet Bell notes that Rand’s Objectivism rejects altruism and guilt as motivations in favor of self-interest. The reader might well wonder what Spider-Man would be like had Ditko continued plotting and drawing the series beyond Amazing Spider-Man #38.
Ditko’s successor as Spider-Man artist, John Romita Sr., is often accused of transforming Ditko’s ordinary-looking everyman hero into a handsome, more conventional superheroic lead. But Bell persuasively presents the case that Ditko “began moving Spider-Man away from Lee’s initial paradigm of Peter Parker, the obsessive, neurotic teenager, and toward Rand’s ideal of a young, romantic male hero.” But as Ditko came to regard the world as “morally empty,” his Peter Parker “was now growing into Rand’s ideal of the Individual, with viewpoints that segregated him from the populace.” Could it be that Ditko left his greatest cocreation at just the right time, enabling Stan Lee to retake the reins and re-establish Peter Parker as the personality we know today?
Decades later, Ditko was widely regarded as old hat, and although admirers like Jim Shooter got him work, Bell shows how Ditko’s ideology sabotaged his own career. Ditko decided that if he could not get creative control of his mainstream work, then he would refuse to do more than the loosest of breakdowns. There are still moments of brilliance in the artwork in this section of the book, but most of it pales in comparison to the earlier masterworks. The cocreator of Dr. Strange decided that as an Objectivist he could not even draw fictional tales of the supernatural. Whereas other comics artists took commissions from well-heeled collectors to recreate their classic work, Ditko refused, claiming it would be a move backward. Ditko even turned down a proposal to collaborate on Mr. A with Frank Miller, believing it wouldn’t sell!
Jonathan Ross’s recent BBC documentary In Search of Steve Ditko presented its subject as a reclusive genius, unjustly treated by the world. Bell’s biography presents a more complex and balanced view: his Ditko is blinded by his ideology to the point of undercutting his career and reputation, yet remains noble in his dedication. Then there is the best of the artwork in this book, which confirms Ditko’s greatness. Bell should be commended for his remarkable achievement in constructing so detailed and persuasive a biography of a man who so famously does not give interviews.
Over the past several years, we have seen Bob Andelman’s Will Eisner: A Spirited Life, Tom Spurgeon and Jordan Raphael’s Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book, Evanier’s Kirby and now Bell’s Stranger and Stranger. Are these books just the beginning of a growing wave of biographies of major figures in American comic book history? Which writers and artists will be profiled next, and how much of an audience will there prove to be for their biographies—or autobiographies?
