The Four Color Media Monitor

Reason wrote some history of the late artist Steve Ditko's influences by Ayn Rand:

Of all the popular storytelling artists striving to emulate Ayn Rand, the most significant was Steve Ditko.

Ditko, a comic book artist, is most famous for co-creating Spider-Man and Dr. Strange. Rand, in addition to writing novels that still sell hugely seven decades down the line, developed a philosophy she called Objectivism, the politics of which were highly libertarian and highly controversial.

Ditko's commitment to Rand's ideas led him down a curious and troubled path, and made him resemble a real-life Rand character. From developing enduring legends for Marvel Comics in the 1960s to Kickstartering in the 2010s with fewer than 150 sponsors his uniquely and often bizarrely abstract stories, Ditko emulated aspects of both of Rand's most prominent fictional protagonists.

And the place where he may have done this more was with Charlton creations like the original Question, and Blue Beetle (which have since become DC properties):

While no one seems certain when and under what circumstances Ditko became a Rand devotee—Ditko biographer Blake Bell thinks Lee may have been his entrée to her work—his unmistakably Rand-influenced art didn't start to appear until after his first departure from Marvel. In 1967, Ditko debuted a character who would never be owned by any corporation: Mr. A. The hero was named for Rand's core directive via Aristotle: that "A is A" and all reasoning must be rooted in never countenancing contradiction.

Mr. A is a vigilante with no superpowers—or perhaps, as Ditko wrote, his superpower is "knowing what's right, and acting accordingly." In a famous sequence in his first appearance, a woman stabbed by a malefactor nonetheless wants Mr. A to save the crook from falling to his death. Mr. A tells her that "to have any sympathy for a killer is an insult to their victim."

The next year, he vividly brought Rand's aesthetics into mass-market superhero stories in a Charlton Comic starring another of his creations, the Question, allied with an older superhero Ditko had significantly revamped, the Blue Beetle. The pair gets involved in a case centered on two sculptures, one representing man as misshapen and grotesque, the other strong and noble. They fight the artist and forces that want to promote the ugly, and thus anti-man, and thus anti-mind, and thus anti-life, art.

That's certainly interesting, and I'd strongly recommend checking out Ditko's Silver Age stories like those just as much as Spider-Man and Dr. Strange, because there's bound to be plenty to think about in the early Question stories, along with Blue Beetle, that shouldn't be overlooked. Ditko may not have been perfect, and I think it's a shame he had fallouts with Stan Lee back in the day. But Ditko too has admirable work to consider, and that's why it's a good idea to check out these classics as well.

Labels: dc comics, Doctor Strange, good artists, history, marvel comics, Spider-Man