Ditko (daring to be a fanboy)

It's nice when someone else provides with inspiration to bring up comics (i.e. an excuse to jump on a bandwagon/topic I couldn't start myself). I ought to do it more, given that Robert Young over at TCI was nice enough to link my blog. Thanks again to him. And thanks to Tim O'Neil, who, back on the 9th brought up the recent revision of The Question, a character created by enigmatic artist Steve Ditko, by writer Rick Veitch. I'll include the same quote by Veitch that Tim did.

"We all agreed back in the very beginning that the Question needed some tinkering with to help him stand out a little more on his own while being true to his roots. He needed to be even crazier than Rorschach, but in a different and more creative way. I envisioned a Question who's spent so many years prowling the mean streets of Chicago in his lonely vigil that he's begun to see Chicago as a living entity. He talks to it and it communicates to him through his intuition. Like a native shaman who converses with nature spirits through the rivers and the mountains, the Question is in a dialogue with his city. He thinks that he walks in two worlds, the world of concrete objects that you and I perceive, and a hidden shadowy spirit world that only he a few others enter. He uses this knowledge to find criminals and bang heads in the name of truth and justice. But we never quite know if he's off his rocker or not."

Not the approach Ditko would have wanted for his clear-minded, champion of reason. And though Tim obviously leans to the left a bit, he takes the admirablestance of defending the spirit of the objectivist-inspired and driven Question character, who is being made more platable to the agruably liberal-minded comics readership. While I respecte and even agree largely with O'Neil, I have to saythat there really is no other way to approach the character than changing him. In fact, I can't think of any other way to remedy this problem short of giving the characters back to Ditko. But, I sometimes think Ditko is the least qualified to create ongoing stories for the characters he made today. I'll try to explain.

Ditko, for those who don't know, is the co-creator of Spider Man. Even with two successful movies with that character in the can, it's not surprising if you've never heard his name, or even remembered it if you saw it during the movies' credits. The artist, who is almost eighty, turned his back on much of the mainstream, only going back for minor (mostly memorable) runs, never returning to the character he helped make a franchise. When he has, it's been with no words to the press, as he has shunned interviews for over three decades now.

It's been said that Ditko's disputes with co-creator (or mere scripter?) Stan Lee was a big part in his leaving Marvel Comics. But much is owed to his alienating political worldview, which was swayed in large part by the works of Ayn Rand (I'd say it damn near completely swayed him, having read Ditko's work and Rand's two opuses, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged). This led him to draw for either smaller companies and/or quality fanzines to create not only different heroes but a different worldview than what comics showed at the time. Whereas some comic books in the sixties and seventies tried to appeal to and depict the hipper "hippie" crowd (hippie is in quotes because I'm unconvinced that Lee and the combined writers of the day ever met one), Ditko did everything he could to mock the left, showing them as filthy thoughtless animals and his hero as the perfect, flawless messenger of the truth.

I've been wanting to do an essay on Ditko for a couple of years now. I soon will. Here's what I've been able to deduce:

While this was no doubt radical to those in comics had/have more leftist views (though since so many are cool with having people in masks and hoods watch them from the safety of the moon and render the normal justice system worthless, I'd have to say most of us are moderate), it was pretty much in sync with the rest of the entertainment world. I'm reminded of the Simpsons episode where an old cowboy actor recalls one of his TV shows: "seems like all I did in the '70's was shoot hippies." That pretty much sums up the mainstream attitude towards the counter culture (up till today, I'd say).

Funny enough, his merging of superhero genre with Rand's objectiivism was all too convenient. Both are power fantasies. Both look good on paper until applied in real life. How much would we trust super beings in real life if we didn't get to look at them when the masks were off? How does Rand's let-the-businessmen run everything work if there's no one smart enough to create a clean energy source from static electricity?

While Ditko's path allowed him to really show off his amazing visual skills with only black/white imagery (more on this another time), it also stagnated his work and his characters writing-wise, bringing his style to the level of the simplistic pre-Marvel comics, only less fun.

All this rambling was to tell Tim that the reason the Question character--any character by Ditko, short of Spider Man, in fact--has to be essentially recreated is because to write him the way he was originally written is like asking Alan Moore to follow the original path that Marvel Man did (that being a silly Captain Marvel clone). It really is a throwback to thinking. Even Ditko isn't able to do it anymore. Most of his creator-owned characters have only had a handful of stories apiece, as he becomes bored with the images he draws and moves on, keeping himself only interested in his comic stories via the ever-changing visuals. His writing, of course, never changes, and neither does the cardboard personality he applies to any character he creates by himself.

Which is why every nutty fanboy should be glad Ditko left Spider Man. Evidence suggests (from an interview by Marv Wolfman about Ditko) that once Spider Man became an adult, if Ditko had his way, he'd be just the same as Mr. A. Or any other character Ditko has portrayed on his own. I can't help but feel that this would have made his most well-known character a forgotten character.

Unless Ditko had been allowed to express his views (as many editors had not), eliminating the sense of alienation he no doubt felt in a field largely unable to support any adult views at the time.

If he had been allowed free reign, he may have actually been challenged on a mature level and grown. And we'd be seeing a lot more of Ditko instead of shadows of what was.

BTW: Rorschach may have been the stand in for Rorschach in Mr. A., but Alan Moore really snuck in Mr. A. Rick Veitch knows better, I assume. The only reason he puts The Question and Rorschach together is because Mr. A. isn't as well known as he ought to be.