A thought after watching WATCHMEN

Yes, I did see Watchmen this past week. And yes, I did like it. Very much.

My fondness for the graphic novel — and I’m one of those who first read it in comic book form back in the mid-’80s — is tied tightly to my love of Steve Ditko. After all, three of the Watchmen characters are based on heroes from Ditko’s run at Charlton Comics in the 1960s. Rorschach is an amped up (but not by much) The Question. Night Owl is based on Ditko’s version of the Blue Beetle. And Doctor Manhattan is pulled from Captain Atom.

So besides enjoying Watchmen the movie as a fine adaptation of the book, my imagination was stretched. I thought how cool it would be to see movie adaptations of the original Ditko source material. Why not a Question movie — or TV series? Why not a Blue Beetle movie?

Just a thought...

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.

The Best of 2007

Maybe it’s a little early for this 2007 Top 10. After all, I still haven’t seen Tim Burton’s movie version of Sweeny Todd, one of my favorite musicals, and Dean Koontz’s latest novel, which I hear is boffo, is waiting to be read. But reviews of those may come later, and if they qualify for this list, so be it. Anyway, here are my ten favorite items (books, movies, DVDs, what have you) for the past 12 months so far, in ascending order:

10. My niece’s boyfriend got the Transformers movie DVD for Christmas, so the whole family watched it on Tuesday afternoon. I liked it as much the second time as I did last summer in the theater. Hell, who doesn’t like giant robots with a sense of humor? But it’s not Transformers that’s on my Top 10 list. That honor goes to a young actress named Megan Fox, who stole every scene in that film, gave me life-threatening heart palpitations, and prompted naughty thoughts through most of Christmas dinner. Another star is born.

9. This was an especially “retro” year for me, and you’ll notice that almost everything on this list (besides the scrumptious Megan Fox) represents a bit of yesteryear. Case in point: the British double-CD import Last Flight, a live full-concert recording of Jefferson Airplane closing out its very last tour in 1972 at Winterland in San Francisco. This was Airplane’s last hurrah. Marty Balin and Spencer Dryden had left, and the band was on life support, having peaked three years earlier. But amazingly, this CD is fantastic, an extraordinary postscript to the Jefferson Airplane story.

8. Grindhouse was the most outrageous movie of 2007, a 195-minute two-for-one valentine from Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino to those great cheesy exploitation “double-bills” of the 1970s. I loved the movie, and I wish they’d release the whole goddamn thing in one big DVD package. But for now, the two pieces that made up Grindhouse — Rodriguez’s Planet Terror and Tarantino’s Death Proof — are available as separate “extended cut” DVDs. Even without the goofy trailers, they’re worth a look.

7. I’ve talked here about my love for The Third Man so many times that you may be nauseous from it. But here I go again. This year, the Criterion Collection released an upgrade of its earlier DVD release, and it’s not to be missed, even if you own the first one. The two-disc set includes a new transfer of the film, all the bonus features from the first Criterion DVD, plus two feature-length audio commentaries, the 90-minute 2005 documentary Shadowing the Third Man, a 1999 Austrian documentary, a 1968 hour-long British TV program on novelist Graham Greene, and a booklet of essays. Fans of Orson Welles, Joseph Cotton, Alida Valli, Trevor Howard, post-war Vienna, and Sacher-Tortes shouldn’t miss this package.

6. I’m so used to Hollywood butchering books I love that Gone Baby Gone, based on a terrific Dennis Lehane novel, surprised the hell outta me. It was not only one of the best movies I saw in 2007, it may be the best film in the private eye genre I’ve seen since Chinatown, more than three decades ago. Director-screenwriter Ben Affleck and most of the cast, which includes Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan, deserve Oscars for this. Too bad the movie tanked at the box office. Catch it on DVD when it becomes available.

5. The last time I saw Richard Lester’s 1965 classic Help!, starring John, Paul, George, and Ringo, I was watching a washed-out, choppy print at a revival movie house in Reseda, California. Now, for the very first time, Help! is on DVD. And this newly restored print is breathtaking. The colors pop. The clarity is startling. Help! looks like a brand new movie. And the songs — well, what can I say about the songs? It’s a great DVD. Bonuses include featurettes on the film’s painstaking restoration and interviews with Lester and surviving cast members (sadly, neither Ringo nor Paul). If you haven’t got this one yet, why not? It’s the friggin’ Beatles fer crissakes!

4. For many years, one of my regrets was misplacing my copy of a dusty little 1972 paperback titled A New History of Leviathan: Essays on the Rise of the American Corporate State, one of the few genuine Left-Right collaborations that sprung from Murray Rothbard’s notorious flirtation with the Left in the late 1960s. This eye-opening book, edited by Rothbard and then-Leftist Ronald Radosh, featured essays by, of course, Rothbard and Radosh, plus libertarian Leonard Liggio, New Leftist William Appleman Williams, and others. This year, the Mises Institute made this important bit of Libertarian Left history available as an absolutely free PDF download. Radical Rothbardians, if you care at all about your roots, don’t miss this great book, courtesy of the indispensable Mises Institute.

3. Maybe because so many different versions have been released over the years, I never before owned a copy of one of my favorite films, Blade Runner. I guess I’ve been waiting for this Blade Runner Five-Disc Ultimate Collector’s Edition all along. After I dropped repeated hints about it for several months, Deb got me this monster for Christmas, and it’s fabulous. It’s got everything, including four versions of the Ridley Scott classic (the original theatrical release, the international release, the director’s cut, and Scott’s brand new “final cut”), plus the work print, a three and a half hour long documentary, 45 minutes of deleted scenes, three feature-length commentaries, umpteen mini-features, a miniature replica spinner car, an origami unicorn figurine, and TONS of other doodads and bells and whistles, all stuffed into a facsimile of Rick Deckard’s metal briefcase. I’ve been weeding through this thing since Wednesday morning, and I’ve barely made a dent. Very cool. This package may set the standard by which all future “special edition” DVDs are measured.

2. Steve Ditko is best known as the co-creator of Spider-Man. But my favorite non-Marvel Ditko creation, hands down, has always been his no-nonsense, blue-suited, faceless, Randian hero, The Question, which he produced for Charlton Comics in the late 1960s. Years later, Denny O’Neil would resurrect and unfortunately reinterpret the character for DC Comics. But the original, uniquely Ditko canon — five back-of-the-book short stories in Blue Beetle and a single full-length comic book adventure, just 62 pages in all — were tremendous fun and crammed with hardcore “A is A” values. My old copies of those comics were long gone, and I thought Ditko’s Question was lost forever — that is, until this year, when all of those precious tales were collected into a wonderful hardcover book titled The Action Heroes Archives Volume 2, part of DC’s Archive Editions series. There are some Blue Beetle and Captain Atom stories by Ditko in this book, too, and they’re all terrific. But it’s The (quintessential) Question that makes this book worthwhile, and my greatest discovery at Comic-Con last July.

1. What’s more exciting to a radical libertarian than a brand spankin’ new Murray Rothbard book, written in the mid-1970s and finally published 12 years after the great man’s death? Not a damn thing. The Betrayal of the American Right, available from the Mises Institute in hardcover and even as a free PDF download, is a first-rate blend of memoir and libertarian movement history. It is the Libertarian Left treasure of 2007. And it tops my list. Onward to 2008!

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.

Once more, Steve Ditko

As I mentioned last week, I’ve been on a real Steve Ditko kick since Comic-Con, devouring the three hardcover volumes of 1960s era Ditko work I picked up there. I’ve re-read the old Doctor Strange stories he did for Marvel, his Captain Atom and Blue Beetle comics for Charlton, and best of all, the entire run of his Ayn Rand-inspired hero The Question, also produced for Charlton. All of which reminded me that I have two paperbound Ditko books boxed and stored in a portable storage unit in front of the house. Wish I could get to them right now, but that’ll have to wait until after our home remodeling project. Those two books contain, I believe, all of Ditko’s Mr. A stories from the late ’60s and early ’70s. To play with the Randian vernacular a bit, Mr. A made The Question look like a whim-worshipping skank. He was a black-and-white Objectivist through and through. And here’s what’s neat: there’re some nice samples of Steve Ditko’s Mr. A work available for view online, including, in full, the character’s first ever appearance in witzend #3 (1967). The Mr. A material comes in three parts — here, here, and here. Whether or not you’re sympathetic to the Objectivist life view, you’ll probably enjoy this.

But what's the answer?

Eric Newsom has responded to my recent post about Steve Ditko and The Question with an alert that he runs a web site, complete with busy forum, about all things relating to the great Objectivist comic book hero. I've just taken a look, and the site's terrific. You'll find it right here.

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.