He co-created one of the most recognizable and lucrative characters on the planet, but today Steve Ditko lives off meagre pensions, still virtually anonymous outside the world of comics. That’s partly by design. A profoundly shy and private man, the cartoonist has forsworn photographs and interviews for 40 years, not long after abandoning his most famous creation: Spider-Man.

Now, with Strange & Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko (Fantagraphics, 217 pages, $43.95), Ditko expert Blake Bell offers an overdue appreciation of the artist. Part oversized art book, part biographical sketch and part career retrospective, the text offers few revelations about its subject’s secret identity; Bell’s strength is as a critic passionately celebrating Ditko’s work.
Ditko was raised by working-class immigrants in depression-era Pennsylvania. “He preferred the company of his immediate family,” Bell writes, “and was uncomfortable with outsiders, even his cousins, in the home. His bedroom never changed, remaining the same as it was before he entered the Army.” There are a few revealing anecdotes, but the author can only spin a limp web from Ditko’s patchy personal history.

However, once Ditko embarks on his career, Bell’s nimble, unadorned prose seems to find its purpose. In the late 1950s, Ditko started working for Marvel Comics in tandem with huckster/editor Stan Lee. It was the beginning of his creative prime, and the chapters devoted to this period are packed with insights.

Bell fruitfully compares Ditko to fellow Marvel legend Jack Kirby: where the latter’s stories focus on majestic battles and trippy cosmic grandeur, Ditko dwelt on scrawny angst and street-level realism. Peter Parker was “the first person whose life actually got worse after becoming a superhero,” a wallflower whose new powers exacerbated his problems. He and his foes were rendered freakish in an ordinary way, distinct from the grotesque glamour of a Joker.
Although Ditko and Kirby would both leave Marvel over artistic control and creators’ rights, the former’s adoption of Objectivism spurred him to walk away first.

Ditko’s increasing adherence to Ayn Rand’s altruism-scorning philosophy only makes this story more tragic. Bell is obviously sympathetic to the moral conviction that inspired his subject to create ideological mouthpieces like The Question — whose very mask, a blank face, elides all ambiguity and nuance — but at the same time he uses exacting reproductions to exhaustively document Objectivism’s debilitating effect on the comics. Drifting towards the margins of a disreputable medium, Ditko subsisted on hack work for mainstream publishers (reduced to illustrating a Transformers colouring book in 1985, the master shrugged that “work is work”) while self-publishing didactic Randian tracts.

The latter are often brilliantly designed, experimental and independent before those adjectives became cartooning movements, but they’re also maddening to read. At his book’s recent Toronto launch, Bell related a ruefully funny anecdote about his apologetic pilgrimage to Ditko’s NYC studio, having upset the old man by publishing an imaginary tale that involved him. Displaying the same easygoing sense of humour that once moved him to draft a six-page memo explaining why The Question would never use sarcasm, the subject informed the biographer that “historical fiction is an oxymoron.”

Ditko rejected characterization and even drama itself to broadcast his Truth. It’s sadly ironic: Bell shows that the recluse created his greatest strips in collaboration. 

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