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None Dare Call It Reason: The Ditko Heroes

To the outside, comics may seem no more than the warped lore of people incapable of dealing with reality, or the chosen reading matter of people who like to watch men dressed in leotards and capes hitting each other, or any of a number of insulting and inaccurate oversimplifications. Perhaps among the most damning of these accusations we could categorize the claim that comics do not educate, do not edify, and do not deal with important matters of character.

Unhappily, enough examples exist to defend such a position. Where, after all, do we find the real meaning of ultra-violent pieces where none of the understood markers that distinguish heroes from villains appear (for instance, Bloodstrike #5>)?

Officially beginning with the creation of Mister A, Silver Age cartoonist Steve Ditko began to present a number of works with a consistent message deriving from his own dabbling in the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand. But he took his own emphasis: Evil exists; Reason can identify it; and it originates through self-delusion, epistemological hedonism, wishful-thinking; and the Rational Man discards the corrupt concepts which convince him of a fatuous right to live at the expense of others, or to treat other men as property.

Appropriately enough, these works appear almost exclusively in black-and-white form, for they present a world in which only black and white exist, in which people either warp or follow principles, and in which the Law of the Excluded Middle plays the role of a moral law of the universe.

The Ditko Imprint

A disturbing strangeness infuses Ditko's work, even now that he labors in semi-obscurity, in his seventies, rarely doing work for major comics publishers. In no way has time or bitter experience smoothed off the peculiar edges of his work; something deep within his brain still imparts a strangeness to what he puts on the page.

This sometimes produces content that seems difficult or mildly incomprehensible, viewed with a single impression. For instance, the covers from Steve Ditko's end-of-the-millennium Package books seem, disturbingly often, to feature someone thinking out loud or whispering to himself, to no particular purpose. For instance, the 176 Page Package has one caption reading "What? What do you whisper? Huh? Oh! Okay!" And, similarly, the 32-Page Package has a cover with a concerned-looking face on it surrounded by the words "Tsk! Tsk! !?! Huh!? Who!? Me!? Why?"

One can follow the material inside these books somewhat more easily than the covers, but Ditko's non-philosophical idiosyncrasies could, if we let them, blur our ability to interpret the intended message of his works. But perhaps, with a bit of lucid concentration, we can glean substance from style and get to the core of what he intends to say, particularly through the proxies he provides in the form of his philosophical heroes.

Tracts v. Stories

In the Mister A stories from around 1970, one can note that the title character plays a somewhat limited and restricted role. One piece I recall involved A rescuing a kidnapped child from generic Ditko pistol-wielding goons, then leaving one of their number to fall to his death after denying him the mercy he begged for. This sequence occupied two pages or so, then the tale morphed into an abstract series of visual images about various types of human corruption.

Some fans describe this approach as "The Punisher meets Jack Chick." In essence, we have a small superheroic component introduced into a longer philosophical tract. Later, more mature Mister A stories integrated the costumed-adventurer story and the philosophical mini-treatise into a single piece and single form.

Still, the tractlike quality never completely departs, though Ditko's hand seems to weigh much less heavily on the late incarnations of these heroes and the stories in which they move. To some degree, the very presence of a story - a connected tale with beginning, middle, and end - shows a contrast with (say) Mister A tales from 1969, in that character's infancy.

Nonetheless, Ditko evidently does not fear to present the occasional piece that fits more precisely into a tract form, such as one tale where Mister A does little more than escort the reader into panels as a wife-killer analyzes his own character and deeds in a courtroom metaphor in which he plays the role of accused, counsel, judge, jury, and bailiffs. And, where the mood strikes him, he brings the tract to the story or the story to the tract; a reader might set himself up for disappointment by expecting some kind of hermetic isolation here.

Rand and Ditko

Ditko picked an interesting moment in comics to, in essence, come out politically. While Marvel made a visible shift from Eisenhower-era Cold War mode to a kind of Robert Kennedy bafflement at the military morass in Indochina, Ditko shifted in another direction. Noting the advance of the noose of taxation and regulation around the American neck, he found inspiration in the curmudgeonly libertarianism of the Objectivists.

While some libertarian principles attach, with varying degrees of (un)importance, to the major political philosophies of America, self-labeled as "conservatism" and "liberalism," neither of these consistently or centrally planted Randian concepts such as "the virtue of selfishness" (also the name of an essay and of an anthology of Rand's writings) and the primacy of the achiever as the central unit of meaningful human action. Where conservatism dabbled in libertarian concepts, it tended to refer to Constitutional liberties (Objectivists do not require a liberty to appear in a document before they consider it valid) and temper the notion of freedom versus various claims of civic, cultural, and geopolitical responsibility; where liberalism bothered with libertarian concepts, these tended to favor the freedoms of the hedonist or attached them specifically to historically-aggrieved groups of people, showing considerably less interest in freedoms that do not require a license of race, sex, political orientation, or sexual preference to apply. And, inasmuch as both liberalism and conservatism nominally invest their hopes in an oligarchical pair of political parties - the Democratic and Republican parties - we can note a certain flexibility towards their purported principles based on the convenience of the current set of suits representing these parties in the Capitol.

Objectivism better suits those who a) don't care for more exceptions to the rules of liberty than liberties themselves and b) don't care to warp their principles into whatever shape proves most convenient to some candidate hoping for re-election (or, at the very least, to beat impeachment). And, as an uncompromising position can ruin a politician's political viability, so can an uncompromising position cause trouble in the workplace. An argument, as noted elsewhere in other features about Steve Ditko, caused Ditko to drop a prestigious assignment at Marvel Comics and begin, from a vantage at DC, to move towards a more and more peripheral role as a creator.

Furthermore, the beginnings of his departure from the mainstream comics market (meaning DC and Marvel superhero comics) essentially began as a political argument - Stan Lee had wanted a villain called "The Green Goblin" to have an alter ego of a prominent businessman, and Ditko objected both to the heavy-handed ultimatum requiring this development and the notion that a career criminal might prosper in commerce among free men. He saw criminals as, essentially, bums who turned to criminal methods out of lack of the necessary grit to succeed at honorable callings. Lee persisted, Ditko quit Marvel Comics, and not since Amazing Spider-Man, around 1966, has he enjoyed the tenured role of artist-writer on a major ongoing piece reaching a significant portion of the comics consumer base.

Ditko, for better or worse, seems disinclined to compromise on the things that matter to him, regardless of the long-term detriment to his career. In the process of a habitual position of dissent, however, he has managed to remain in a consistent place away from the fashionable civic poses America tends to adopt for a few months or years and then abandon.

America, in general, has shifted from various positions to others, based partially on history and changing awareness and based even more on the inexplicable caprice of fashion. At moments, we favor an antipolitical posture; at moments, we favor waves of self-styled outsiders from either the political right or the political left to haze and harry the complacent monolith in Washington, D.C. Whatever particular squint on politics enjoys the current stamp of stylish approval, however, at no recorded moment in our history has the set of Rand-derived philosophies enjoyed the role of Consensus du Jour in America; taking such a position and making it public through his work effectively placed Ditko into a philosophical / political / intellectual minority about a generation ago (as I write in 2001).

Such a position has certain advantages. For instance, an Objectivist need not play the role of apologist for errant Rand Party elected officials at high levels of government. On the other hand, an more and more as time goes on, we can note increasing numbers of people who refuse to work for, with, or under persons with dissimilar political leanings (I have heard a number of stories from people who claim to have quit their jobs because they disliked the presence of Republicans at their workplace). Socially, the problem shows more intensely: Simple gatherings frequently involve sessions where individuals attempt to sound out noncompliant opinion in order to denounce it and its holder (and thereby somehow establish an illusion of moral superiority). A surly and contentious man holding superminority opinions could well find himself devoid of most human contact by virtue of the unhealthy, though increasingly popular, tendency to impose political shunnings on civic deviance.

However, Ditko has, through his work, a vehicle whereby he can leapfrog the barricades provided by censorious wine-and-cheese-crowd opprobrium, which allows him to explain his concepts through ethical parables in which superheroes - or nonpowered costumed adventurers like Mister A - play the role of protagonists.

Warring Philosophies

Since the early nineties, when a hyperminimal comics prevailed and the methods of heroes and villains tended to blur, one often strains to distinguish the factions of good and evil in many comics pieces. Even intelligent comics of some substance, such as The Authority, leave a reader wondering about what defines the line between heroes and villains. When heroes kill with impunity, when they follow no particular morality, and when they impose their will on the world by virtue of superior force - how, then, can we tell what makes a Jack Hawksmoor a hero and a Golgoth a villain?

Ditko wants the reader to understand, without wallowing in difficult gray areas, where virtue lies.

No One Measures Up

From the manner in which Ditko divides all human thought and emotion into the Rational (capitals understood) and the Irrational, and delegates all virtue to the former and all vice to the latter, I know from the beginning that I won't measure up in his scheme.

For that matter, I don't want to. And not, as he might see it, because I lack the necessary courage to dedicate myself to the Rational.

Logic, the tool of rationality, has limitations. The conclusions a logician derives will not, typically, exceed in quality the assumptions that drive them. In essence, logic suffers from a "garbage in, garbage out" problem. Furthermore, purportedly logical arguments led to claims that large numbers of human beings under the yoke of German rule in a hideous decade in the twentieth century belonged to a class called "useless eaters," and that these useless eaters would do their best favor to the world by taking a quick jaunt to one of Hitler's abbatoirs. So-called logic designated living human beings as no more than "matter in motion," with no more rights than an equal quantity of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, potassium, iodine, nitrogen, and sulfur.

If one can point to the Nazi embrace of the mystical and esoteric as a cofactor in the murders that occupy a principal place on the National Socialist Party's resume, one can equally point to the materialistic, anti-mystical character of Stalinist rule, a rule that also drove millions of innocents to their graves. One might conclude that rationality and irrationality become equally dangerous in the hands of evil men, and some flaw in the emotive makeup of the murderer causes his behavior, not his relationship to numerical determinism or to vaporlike manifestations of the Unknowable.

Evil, Understood as Such

To Ditko and his heroes, evil exists. While not clearly defined dictionary-style, the evil of the villains in his political works manifests itself as the desire to do harm to others, either via direct physical damage or by attacks on property; and, though many of these criminals seek self-justification through sophistry (some at length, and some incessantly), the evil remains unmistakable, betrayed by their means and confirmed by the dishonesty and insincerity of their self-justifying rhetoric.

We understand this notion of evil in our hearts, even when our heads tend to say otherwise. For instance, if someone slashes our tires and sprays offensive graffiti on our automobiles, we understand this as a deliberate act of free will designed to do us harm, regardless of considerations such as the perpetrator's frustration at lack of opportunity or anger from historical ethnic conflict. Many of us simply do not care what excuse someone provides for an act like shooting us in the head - indeed, it matters little to the dead man whether the assailant who puts a bullet in his skull does so because he saw visions identifying the victim as Lucifer, or because the drugs made it seem like fun, or because some political slogan suggested such murders make for good policy.

This said, we can note a dualistic tendency in Ditko's political works to divide the world into the definitely good and definitely bad, with no fence straddlers, and no changes of position (although we must assume, in this model, that a transformation from good to bad remains possible). Obvious flaws in this model, such as the inherent impossibility of reform, come to mind; perhaps among the worst of the flaws belongs the notion that anything not perfectly good qualifies as perfectly bad. Given the axiomatic lack of marginal cases, what could possibly motivate someone to improve his behavior? Once having fallen into the land of the Bad, given the impossibility of reform required by this duality-fixed-in-stone concept, why not escalate from graffiti to genocide?

Then again, though, we note that comics do not do well in attempting to simulate reality too closely. The nature of the medium requires some distortions, including violations of known laws of physics and some degree of moral simplification. I doubt that Ditko, if pressed on the question, would entertain for long the notion of the impossibility of reform or moral improvement; one can imagine he would answer that he eliminated these questions for the sake of clarity.

The Posture of Rationality

Throughout Ditko's philosophical-hero works, one encounters recurring examinations of rationality-versus-irrationality, with a presumption that rationality must inevitably guide the thinker towards the ethical positions of Ditko's heroes (and Ditko himself) and that raw, unblunted emotion provides the origin of contending principles.

Such an oversimplified model, naturally enough, ignores possibilities such as a) other positions derive from different chains of reason, which, nonetheless represent some kind of rational process, whether flawed or not; and b) some may arrive at positions advocated by the Ditko heroes via altogether nonrational means.

Rationality, naturally enough, has advantages as a means. One might question whether it represents an end, and if one could consider such an end altogether desirable. However, in the haste to denounce wrong-headedness as the product of emotion (with the presumption that emotion can yield only illusions) and right-headedness as the product of reason (with the presumption that reason, properly applied, invariable provides infallible results), one tends to overlook the importance of action.

The perfect man, perhaps, would do the right thing for the right reason because he came to an understanding via the right process. For those of us affected more by actions than rationales or processes rendering these rationales, however, it matters little whether someone does the right thing as the result of flawed reasoning. Nor does it ameliorate the effects of a wrong action if we can trace its origin to correct motivations (for instance, sentencing the wrong man to a suitable prison term for a truly heinous crime).

In the strong and weak forms - meaning in their origins in the sixties and in there more time-tempered, less brittle incarnations at the beginning of this millennium - for the Ditko heroes, action, principle, and rational process remain an inseparable whole, and the villains follow a similar pattern. All three entities move together, invariably toward right and toward wrong.

And, as a symptom of the sometimes-fetishistic relationship to pure reason per se, we can observe questionable claims, including the notion that metaphysics only harbor in disordered minds (yet we have yet to explain away the Christian inspiration of Martin Luther King, Jr. or the atheistic brutality of Josef Stalin from these premises; such a model predicts a Torquemada-like personality for King and a somewhat more benign one for Stalin).

Mellowing with Time?

A heavy approach to selling an idea can turn observers against the idea, regardless of its merits. A preachy approach can prevent the message from ever reaching its intended target, allowing considerations of style to supersede those of substance.

In a Mister A tabloid-styled comics section I purchased sometime around 1980, probably reprinted from ten-year-old pieces from the earliest days of that character, I noted a few things absent from recent Ditko work on the philosophical heroes. The multi-page digressions where the story vanishes and visual metaphors for various human intellectual follies proceed, ad infinitum, do not appear here. Nor do the sequences of blunt indifference in matters of life and death, such as one occasion where Mister A, unblinkingly, allowed a criminal to fall to his death because, as he judged it, the man had forfeited his right to live (an arguable position in the case of the specific criminal who had kidnapped and ransomed a child).

Instead, here, where the fatalities occur, they generally derive not from a hero's refusal to intervene on the behalf of a corrupt man, but from the logical consequences of their own sins. One Mister A nemesis, for instance, dies on his own blade while attempting to kill the hero. Another dies of fear when the hero manages to resist and slowly overcome a seemingly irresistable assault. The stories, in this context, suggest self-enforcing moral laws of the universe in a way that earlier versions did not (requiring, in general, a helping hand from a Ditko hero to guarantee the comprehensive fall of the immoral blunderers who hide their evil behind rhetorical obfuscation).

Return to the Quarter Bin.
Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 264. Completed 21-JUL-2001.