Doctrine: strange

A new book examines the daring,
difficult comic artist Steve Ditko

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

The early 1960s saw the birth of what would come to be the keystone Marvel Comics characters, the ones that defined the company and, in recent years, have exploded onto the silver screen—Fantastic Four, the Hulk, X-Men, Iron Man and of course Spider-Man. The trio of talents largely responsible included writer (and later Marvel president) Stan Lee, and artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.

Of the three, Ditko is the one most often overlooked, something for which Ditko himself is partly responsible. In many ways, however, he’s the most fascinating, and certainly the most frustrating.

His artwork lacked the immediate punch and dynamism of Kirby’s chunky, fortified graphic style, and his figures came across as stiff and unnatural. However, Ditko excelled at formal innovation, structuring his panels and pages in daring and unprecedented, even avant-garde ways. This became powerfully apparent in his Doctor Strange comics, brimming with proto-psychedelic, pop-art mysticism—an irony, given the defiantly square Ditko’s revulsion towards the drug-soaked counterculture of that era.

More irony lay in how Ditko’s formal tricks would make it too easy for him to later slide into creating comics not as eye-popping entertainment but wearisome, didactic harangues.

Ditko harboured a fierce and arguably self-defeating devotion to the Objectivist ideology established by author Ayn Rand, a philosophy that while founded in rational thought left little room for messy moral grey areas. This was epitomized by Ditko’s post-Spidey hero, Mr. A, conspicuously inconspicuous in appearance and obtuse in his moralizing (and as Ditko’s own property, truly a manifestation of his creed).

RANT DESSINÉE: Ditko’s Mr. A

At the same time, Stan Lee’s extroverted public personality, which has made a pop-culture icon of the man, was the opposite of Ditko’s notoriously difficult and reclusive character. Ditko’s longstanding introversion no doubt accounts for the notable absence of his voice in the otherwise exhaustive coffee-table bio/retrospective Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko from Fantagraphics Books, a tome overflowing with effectively presented artwork from every stage of Ditko’s career.

Perhaps it’s for the better that Toronto’s Blake Bell, widely regarded as an authority on Ditko’s work, built his profile out of quotes from those in the artist’s orbit. Given the tumult of his career—his angry resignation from the Spider-Man character, which he’d co-created with Lee, and his antagonistic relations with fans—a great deal of reflective soul-searching would be demanded of Ditko. His hard-line Objectivism would likely preclude any such ambivalence.

Bell’s biography and assessment, as painstaking as it is, feels rather dry. Lively prose is hardly his forte—odd for someone well enough schooled in Stan Lee’s hyperbolic writing. At the same time, it might be too much to ask for a vivid and intimate portrait of Ditko as a person, rather than the walking bundle of rigid principles and resultant rancour he came to present himself as—a stiff, blank-faced Mr. A come to life.

Strange and Stranger:
The World of Steve Ditko
by Blake Bell,
Fantagraphics Books,
HC, 216pp, $43.95