A moment of hardboiled Objectivism

“The police are picking up Baggot and his bunch! I’m here to make sure you pay for what you did! Roden marked the money he gave you — where is it?”

“No! No, he lied! You can’t believe a crooked lawyer! I swear I’m innocent!”

“I can make you talk like I made Roden. And you will talk, Purity! How do you want it?”

“I-I hid the money in my apartment! I-I’m not a real criminal! Please, give me a break!”

“You can confess to the D.A. on your own or I’ll drag you in… That is the only break you’ll get or deserve!”

“No, please! I’ll give you all the money! I deserve another chance! I’m sorry — I swear to God I am! I’ll never do it again! It-it’ll just be Roden’s word against mine! Please — have pity on me!”

“You scum, you betrayed the whole concept of justice! You sold out everyone who looks to the law as the protector of the innocent. And why did you do it? No one pressured you. No one threatened you. No one used force to make you! In a battle between good and evil, where there can be no compromise, you willingly chose to be evil’s secret ally! You wanted the advantages of both sides. Money you haven’t earned…respect you’re not entitled to!”

“But I’m sorry! Sob!”

“Your self-imposed blindness is over! You’re going to face up to pay for your sellout! Go turn yourself in!”

“Mr A: Money”
by Steve Ditko
(witzend #4, 1968)

Appreciating Steve Ditko

In 1966, when I was just a wee lad of 11, what then seemed a very big honkin’ piece of my world fractured and dropped away. Steve Ditko split from Marvel Comics and forever left behind Doctor Strange and, most horribly, Spider-Man. Neither character has been the same since. And if I may be so bold, neither has ever again been quite as good.

Ditko was the first comic book artist I really paid attention to, and his famous three-part Master Planner story (Amazing Spider-Man #31-33) locked in a diehard fanaticism that remains today. I followed him through his days at Charlton (doing the Blue Beetle, Captain Atom, and The Question), his brief periods with DC (creating the Creeper and the Hawk and Dove), into those days when you only found his stuff in fanzines like witzend and Guts. Part of Ditko’s magic may have been the mystery surrounding him. He didn’t sit still for interviews. He didn’t rub elbows with fans. As years passed, his work became harder and harder to find. Not until the past few years, when so much old Silver Age material has been collected into beautiful hardcover volumes, have I been able to revisit much of Steve Ditko’s great work.

Now, long overdue in my opinion, here comes Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko, an oversized, hardcover appreciation, biography, and analysis by Blake Bell. As soon as this bugger landed on my doorstep, I immersed myself in it. It’s fantastic.

Bell seems to have scraped together every bit of info, every mention he could about Ditko. There are wonderful things here, including a color reproduction (granted, it’s small) of Ditko’s original cover for Amazing Fantasy #15, Spider-Man’s debut in 1962; it was rejected and replaced with a cover by Jack Kirby (though Steve did the inking). Likewise, Ditko’s original cover for Amazing Spider-Man #10, featuring the Enforcers, is presented in this lovely book for, I think, the first time. For 40 years, I’ve wondered why an absolutely horrible, plain-as-vanilla Kirby cover graced that issue. I still don’t have the answer, but at least I’ve now seen Ditko’s terrific version.

One of the things that makes Steve Ditko fascinating to me is his steadfast commitment to his principles and the promotion of those principles, which are rooted in Ayn Rand’s black-and-white Objectivism. Not only did Rand shape almost all of Ditko’s work for the past four decades, her philosophy impacted his career and way of doing business — usually at great cost emotionally and financially. Strange and Stranger, as you’d expect, spends a lot of time in this area. Both the author’s account of this long period and his analysis is really first-rate. It’s really a tragic tale, with the uncompromising Ditko playing a defeated Howard Roark in an industry that never fully understands him. You can’t help but respect Ditko's unflinching determination, but at the same time, you’re frustrated whenever he shoots himself in the foot. For instance, the book reveals that about 15 years ago, Frank Miller approached Ditko with the suggestion that the two of them relaunch Steve’s Mr. A, his seminal Randian hero from the late 1960s. Miller wanted to present the character without concessions to political correctness. In the ’60s, the hard-right Mr. A had struggled in a flower power world. But in the tougher ’90s, an era that embraced Miller’s hardboiled classics like The Dark Knight Returns and Sin City, Mr. A might have become a sensation, catapulting Ditko out of the doldrums and to heights he hadn’t experienced since his old Marvel days. But alas, Ditko declined Miller’s offer, believing that Mr. A just wouldn’t sell.

Blake Bell’s Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko is essential for fans of the great artist. And if you’re a comic book fan unfamiliar with Ditko, this book might just pull you into his camp of devotees.

Howard Roark in Beijing

Just in time for the Summer Olympics, here’s the new headquarters for Beijing’s central TV station, CCTV. Instead of a traditional tower, the building’s 5.9 million square feet of vertical and horizontal sections create an enormous square tube. Where the hell are the elevators?

Is Atlas shrugging?

My old pal Brian Richardson has written the greatest book review of Atlas Shrugged ever. Here's how it begins:

"When she entered the room, she knew immediately that he had finished reading the book. His eyes surveyed the lines of her dress approvingly, as if remembering his glorious exploration of the underlying body and recognizing its perfection, content in the knowledge that he knew and understood every contour. As he looked around the room, she could tell he saw the furniture, the appliances, the ashtray full of crushed stubs with the telltale dollar sign, in a way he could not have seen fully unless and until he had read and absorbed every page into the core of his being."

Fer chrissakes, finish reading the review right here.

"Atlas" film can't be shrugged off

On again, off again, on again, off again. That's been the history of a possible Atlas Shrugged movie for the past three or four decades. Just a year or so ago, we heard about an Atlas project that might star Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, but that apparently wasn't to be. However, Robert Bidinotto reports that a movie from Lionsgate is indeed in the works, to be directed by Vadim Perelman (House of Sand and Fog). Perelman and Lionsgate vice president Michael Burns appeared earlier this month on a panel at the Atlas Shrugged 50th Anniversary Celebration, held by the Atlas Society at the Marriott Renaissance Hotel in Washington, D.C. Bidinotto's report is very interesting, and you can find it here.

Return of The Question

Talk about synchronicity! I’ve written about Steve Ditko and his Objectivist comic book hero The Question here and here in the past two weeks, and look what I found at my local comics shop yesterday! The Question makes a rare and marvelous appearance in the latest issue (#36) of DC’s Justice League Unlimited, based on the Cartoon Network animated series that wrapped up last year. This isn’t quite Ditko’s version of the character. Rather, as he was on the TV series, this Question is a data-collecting revealer of conspiracies. But he is Vic Sage, and he does strike the appropriate Randian poses. And it’s really quite a fun story, which is all that really matters, right? I don’t think Question buffs will be disappointed.

Steve Ditko revisited

Jack Kirby may have been The King, but my favorite comic book artist as a kid in the ’60s was, hands down, the great Steve Ditko. I read everything of his I could find, starting naturally with Amazing Spider-Man, then moving on to Doctor Strange (the Strange Tales back-of-the-book feature) and even his very early monster and sci-fi stories. I followed Ditko from Marvel to DC, where he produced the Creeper and Hawk & Dove, but the stuff he ground out for Charlton Comics in 1966-68, like the “new” Captain Atom and a relaunch of the Blue Beetle, is what enthralled me most.

Best of all Ditko’s Charlton creations, though, was his no-nonsense, blue-suited, faceless, Randian hero, The Question. (A few years later, I’d discover his similarly Objectivist-themed and even more unswerving Mr. A in Wally Wood’s Witzend fanzine.) The original Question canon consisted of just five short appearances in the back of the Blue Beetle comic and one full-length solo book — just 62 pages in all. (The Question also appeared in a Beetle story, but only as reporter Vic Sage.) Those stories were tremendous fun and crammed with hardcore “A is A” values:

“Help! Do something! We’re caught in the current! Can’t hold on much longer!” shout two murderous thugs The Question has kicked into the city’s raging sewer system.

“So why tell me your problems?” says The Question. “You’re both crazy if you think I’d risk my neck to save the likes of you! As far as I’m concerned, you’re just so much sewage! And you deserve to be right where you are!”

“You’re inhuman! You can’t leave us here! You’ve no right! It’s your fault we’re here! You must save us! It’s your duty! It’s...”

“Duty?? — to whom??”

I lost my copies of The Question’s original Charlton appearances long ago. I reread them so often that I probably just wore ’em out. But I never lost my love for the character. Unfortunately, Steve Ditko never returned to Vic Sage and most attempts to resurrect him have been unsatisfying. Denny O’Neil tried his hand at it in the mid-’80s, thoroughly discarding the unique Ditko flavor and injecting instead an inappropriate Zen philosophy. Recently, the Justice League Unlimited cartoon series presented a version of The Question more inspired by X-Files than Ditko. As far as I know, the genuine Ditko article has shown up just once in the past 40 years, still checking his premises and spouting the Objectivist jargon; that was in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Strikes Again graphic novel in 2002 (“I’m no Ayn Rander!” The Question yells at Left-leaning Green Arrow. “She didn’t go nearly far enough!”).

Anyway, I’ve wanted to get hold of and revisit Charlton’s original Question stories for a very long time. So everybody in San Diego last week probably heard my big gasp when I discovered at Comic-Con that Ditko’s entire Question saga, plus every smidgen of his Blue Beetle and Captain Atom work from the same period, is now collected into a wonderful, single hardcover book, part of DC’s Archive Editions series. The book’s titled The Action Heroes Archives Volume 2, and it’s fantastic. The reproduction is crisp and beautiful. For Steve Ditko fans, this book is a dream-come-true, as is the first Action Heroes volume, published in 2004, which features all of Ditko’s earliest Captain Atom stories from as far back as 1960.

Long live Steve Ditko. And long live The (quintessential) Question.

Cooper and Neal: catch the fever!

While I’m on the subject of Ayn Rand, which I was yesterday, I should mention that I found the recent DVD release of 1948’s The Fountainhead, starring Patricia Neal and Gary Cooper, at Costco for just ten bucks. I’ve always had a fondness for that movie, so I couldn’t pass it up. The film transfer is very good, and the movie is great fun to watch. The disc is pretty barebones, though, its only extras being the old trailer and a short making-of documentary prepared, it seems, under the auspices of Leonard Peikoff. Not a bad documentary, really, but I’d rather hear the Rand vs. King Vidor story told without Peikoff looking over my shoulder.

Why Objectivists support the war in Iraq

I’ve been listening to an audio edition of Ayn Rand’s The Virtue of Selfishness during some of my drive time, and I came across the following this afternoon. It’s as succinct an example of Randian foreign policy as one could hope to find. And it’s certainly one of the reasons I’ve never considered myself an Objectivist.

“Dictatorship nations are outlaws. Any free nation had the right to invade Nazi Germany and, today, has the right to invade Soviet Russia, Cuba or any other slave-pen. Whether a free nation chooses to do so or not is a matter of its own self-interest, not of respect for the non-existent ‘rights’ of gang-rulers. It is not a free nation’s duty to liberate other nations at the price of self-sacrifice, but a free nation has a right to do it, when and if it so chooses.”

— “Collectivized ‘Rights’,” Objectivist Newsletter, June 1963