MYTHCOMICS: AVENGING WORLD (1973)

Wally Wood devoted a 1975 story, "My Word," to a scathingly ironic demolition of the city of New York, which metropolis was technically the star of the show. But two years previous, Wood's sometime collaborator Steve Ditko allowed the Whole World to speak for itself, putting humanity on trial for the World's many unnecessary tribulations. But Ditko, being a lifelong disciple of Ayn Rand, was not content to take Wood's ironic stance, and what he presents better fits the mythos of drama. Though in many interior scenes The World is shown as having been beat-to-crap by the misdeeds of the planet's human occupants, the cover depicts The World emitting a brilliant spotlight on the cowed throngs of evil-- mostly various thug-types, though prominent space is given to a dictator-type and what looks like a Catholic bishop. One can almost imagine Ditko thinking something along the lines of the old Green Lantern oath, perhaps revised to "the dark things cannot stand the light of the World with a Slight Sneer on His Face."

On the opening page the interlocutor makes clear that even though we're seeing a World battered and supported by crutches, "The World isn't in a mess; people are in a mess." Interlocutor Ditko further claims that no catchphrases or easy solutions will fix the problems, for they originate from the way human beings are willing to act irrationally for gain: "Man-- who is defined as a rational being-- chooses to act on his own behalf as an irrational being." The World himself glosses this assertion by claiming that many such irrational persons are working hard to make "my condition" worse, with the interesting phrase that they can do so both "knowingly and unknowingly."

It would be far too time-consuming to anatomize all seven of Ditko's philosophical banes, all of which read pretty much the same anyway. The second bane, "The Skeptical Intellectual," sustains some special interest in that he opposes the logical cornerstone of Ditko's Randian universe: Aristotle's law of identity, or "A=A." But the last of the banes, "The Neutralist," may have been the hobbyhorse who most aroused Ditko's ire, because immediately afterward he uses the character's inability to take a stand to show how wishy-washiness supports evil.

Further, though the Neutralist claims not to take sides, he shows immense disgust with the "Man is Rational Being" party because its members implicitly or explicitly demand that people should make choices between good and evil. Meanwhile, he sympathizes with the "Man is Irrational Being" because its proponents, whether they expouse violence or self-pity, make no demands upon the Neutralist's ethical system. In the four-page vignette "The Neutralist Settles a Dispute," the character, wearing some sort of "compromise cop" uniform, settles a dispute between a holdup man and his victim by giving half the honest man's wages to the thief. The vision of the hordes of "have nots" who then arise to pillage the honest worker of his wages is one of Ditko's most mythic meditations on the victimization-tropes favored by the American Left, particularly in the form of Socialism (also a very big bug up the rear of Ditko's mentor Ayn Rand). The most one can say in the Neutralist's favor is that he may be one of those who is "unknowingly" working to benefit evil, even though he thinks himself above the controversies.

Ditko then introduces one more type, the "Power Luster," and he seems to pull all of the banes together to reign over those who have surrendered their individuality, and who as a result occupy a Dantean hell, under the thumbs of "the Mystic," "the Humanitarian," and so on.

On page 19 Ditko announces that he's on "Part 2" (though no "Part 1" was established earlier). After some more shots at the immorality of compromise, Ditko depicts one of the many "everyman" types he used to depict in all of his horror-stories, both previous to and following the artist's famous Marvel works. Whereas the horror-protagonists were forever enmeshed in suffering terrible occult dooms, this poor sap suffers for his own irrationality: his desire to "satisfy his emotions, to do whatever he feels like doing." For Ditko this philosophical step takes the poor sap into the abyss of non-meaning, while a supercilious World claims that, "Every man must be the protector of his own rationality!" There follows another Dantean image of doomed souls moving along pathways leading nowhere, including one with the swastika and one with the hammer-and-sickle.

The best stand-alone page in AVENGING WORLD reduces all the participants to geometrical circles, in which a collective of hostile spheres try to prevent Circle A and Circle B from doing something of which the collective does not approve. As to what the activity is-- yes, my mind went there too, but the activity could be a lot of things, including a few things that most people would agree should be prohibited by law. But though Ditko's screed might not apply to many practices-- one of which involves a partner without the "age of consent" that would make "mutual consent" possible-- the artist is indubitably correct about the hypocrisy of the collective" We have rights! But you have no right to X!"

AVENGING WORLD then concludes with a three-page vignette, "The Deadly Alien," in which a whole community rouses itself into a lynching mood because a new child is born, a child who may someday threaten their way of life. (I note in passing that the mother is holding up one hand with upturned thumb, which looks like a reference to the "thumbs up/thumbs down" verdicts seen when fictional Roman emperors preside over fictional gladiator-games.) This sequence too is another jeremiad against collectivism, but it does allow Ditko to come full circle to his original statement; that people are responsible for the sad state of The World. This assault on irrationality, though, ignores the paradigm of persons committing irrational acts for sheer gain, the way thieves, dictators and religious pundits do: knowingly. Ditko would seem to be saying that the most insidious form of collectivism stems from an unknowing violation of other persons' rights simply to make certain that one's own priorities get first consideration. Ditko even asks the reader about his own process of socialization: "How well did they succeed with you?" All that said, though, if The World actually contains the Light of Rationality as Ditko depicts on the cover, the author doesn't succeed in making his case. Often Ditko's ideals are negatively defined. He rails against the use of violence to gain one's ends, and such offenses are an affront to Rationality, the essence of man. So far so good. But is not the same law enforcement brought into being to restrict acts of knowing violence extremely vulnerable to being manipulated by the proponents of irrationality who "know not what they do?" And does that not make the law enforcement just as vulnerable to the accusation of Irrational, Collective Rule as any group of individuals who let others do their thinking for them.

But if Ditko's screed fails as rigorous philosophy as to how one should live one's life, WORLD is nonetheless valuable for its very qualities of expressiveness-- which Ditko ironically opposes to the Rationality he favors.

MYTHCOMICS: [KILLJOY 2,], E-MAN #4 (1974)

The KILLJOY series, consisting of exactly two stories appearing respectively in issues #2 and #4 of Charlton’s E-MAN, was a rarity for author Steve Ditko: a comedic superhero. Ditko often used elements of comedy in his “straight” superheroes, most notably the original Spider-Man feature, and he sometimes included little japeries in his self-published comics. But KILLJOY was a lighter look at the artist’s professed Objectivism, though it was no less scornful than his serious works of societal irrationality.

The main joke in the first KILLJOY is that the red-clad avenger lives in a world constantly menaced by super-villains, all of whom firmly believe that they’re fully entitled to steal from hard-working citizens. When the hero—who never speaks while in costume, and whose face-mask features a frozen smile—jumps in and defeats such evildoers as Robber Hood and General Disaster, the defeated fiends whine and cry like little babies. Ditko gives the hero no defined alter ego, though he does present three possible candidates for Killjoy’s secret ID, in such a way that the hero might be all of them, or none of them.

KILLJOY 2 works in a few more variations. The story opens with a maddened criminal holed ip in his hideout as he exchanges gunfire with cops. He boasts, “I swear no one is taking me, Killer Ded, alive!” Killjoy steals in the hideout, disarms the crook, and sends him down to the cops with a little parachute attached to his belt. Ditko uses this running joke three more times, each time ending with the desperate criminal thoroughly humiliated by being taken alive.

Page two is devoted to the entitlement of the disenfranchised, as Killjoy rescues a solid citizen from a horde of thieves who all spout things like, “Your selfishly earned money rightfully belong to the unselfish, we who have not earned it.” The hero has a tougher time, though, with an elastic-bodied robber, S.S.S.Snake, who defeats Killjoy twice. These defeats occasion celebration from a protesting malcontent, Mister Hart, who rejoices, “The guilty have a right to succeed as well as anyone else! Why should the true always be right?” This bleeding-heart then meets his perfect complement in another rabble-rouser, Mister Sole, who has the same arguments: ”Nobody has a right to own property—anything! Everything belongs to everybody!”

For his next crime, Snake attempts to steal a valuable diamond, but about ten other crooks show up, all of whom are diamond-themed villains: “Diamond Eyes! Captain Diamond! Blue Diamond,” etc. However, Killjoy is on the scene, disguised as a diamond merchant (in which guise he utters the only words that are unquestionably from his own mouth), and the hero unleashes a trap that confuses all the diamond-hunters and neutralizes Snake’s elasticity.

In terms of delineating Ditko’s Objectivist philosophy, there’s nothing in either KILLJOY tale that didn’t appear in superior works like THE DESTROYER OF HEROES. Crime is irrational untruth and crimebusting is the reassertion of objective truth, as is shown by the final panels, where Killer Ded finally can’t take the constant humiliations any more and resigns himself to serving out his jail sentence—after which the last panel shows the silhouette of Killjoy’s smiling visage. It’s interesting that a face with but one expression connotes for Ditko the same rational imperturbability as faces with no expression, as seen in The Question and Mister A. But even if one doesn’t agree with Ditko’s fetishization of law and order, the recent George Floyd protests have shown the artist to be a prophet with regard to the pernicious entitlement of citizens who have no ability to discern any kind of truth from any kind of experience.

PATTERNS AND POTENTIALITIES

...I agree with Jung's comment that "ideas" are developed out of what might as well be called "images" (Kant called these lesser elements "notions.") However, I want to specify that one need not buy into Jung's specific concept of inherited mythological images in order to validate his basic schema. Jung's predecessor-and-influence Cassirer said much the same thing, sans the inherited images.-- A PAUSE FOR POTENTIALITIES, 2015.

In WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION, Schopenhauer distinguishes between "intuitive" and "abstract" representations: humans share "intuitive representations" with other animals, in that they are based in the body's "percepts."  But humans alone have the power to conceive "abstract representations," for humans alone can base representations in "concepts."  I will use this basic opposition here, though I'll substitute "intellectual" for "abstract" purely for euphony.-- HERO VS. VILLAIN, MONSTER VS. VICTIM PART 3, 2012.

The first quote lists some of the predecessors that influenced me in my formulation of the four potentialities, though only two potentialities concern me in this essay:

The DIDACTIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of abstract ideas.

The MYTHOPOEIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of symbols.

I've also lined up these potentialities with my terms "overthought" (for the didactic) and "underthought" (for the the mythopoeic). The primary function of the "over" and "under" terms is illustrative, using a spatial metaphor to show how these discourses were functionally separated from the discourses spawned by the other potentialities, "the kinetic" and "the dramatic." I've lumped these two discourses together as "the lateral meaning," because I believe this represents the base experience that all audiences experience fictional constructs. And while I derived this line of thought largely from one of Frye's essays, there's also a possible influence from Schopenhauer. The discourses of "the kinetic" and "the dramatic" are theoretically comparable to the "intuitive representations" available not only to humans but also to the lower animals, since those discourses, whether simple or complex, may be reduced down to "does this 'other' cause me pain or pleasure," and "does this 'other' give help or hindrance?" Similarly, the didactic and the mythopoeic line up with what Schopenhauer called "abstract representations," because their subject matter is not concrete but abstract. Arguably, though, the very abstraction of the abstract potentialities may cause them to overlap much more than the "intuitive" pair.

In last year's essay AND THE HALF-TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE PART 2 I wrote:

Both "symbols" and "ideas" are abstract constructions, but symbols offer the artist "a free selection of causes"-- which I have aligned with my concept of "affective freedom"-- while ideas depend more upon establishing a chain of cause and effect, which I have aligned with "cognitive restraint." But both abstract constructions depend upon the use of fictive epistemology.

It was in my two HALF-TRUTH essays that I introduced the term "epistemological patterns." Though the term was new, I'd been writing about this particular abstract concept since the blog's beginnings, probably the first time I brought up Joseph Campbell. But because so much of the blog's content is devoted to sussing out the nature of mythopoeic discourse, I've neglected to give specific examples of the very different way in which the didactic phenomenality makes use of epistemological patterns.

The word "didactic" is derived from a Greek term meaning "apt at teaching." Thus any use of the didactic phenomenality must rely upon using rhetoric to teach audiences something. I suspect most if not all of the ancient Greeks would have viewed a literary's work meaning as one that was both rhetorical and discursive, and the later notions regarding "poetic intuition" would have been outside their wheelhouse. For me, writing in the shadow of Jung and others, I see that the didactic and the mythopoeic sometimes reinforce one another, sometimes conflict with one another, and at other times barely seem to exist in the same narrative-- as one can see in the 1984 Steve Ditko story ""AM I MARO, ROMA, OR RAEM?"

Because the philosophy of Ayn Rand has such a profound effect on Ditko, his greatest passion seems to have been to codify his Aristotelian/Randian beliefs into narrative entertainment. Ditko certainly knew that he could not make a living thumping this particular tub, and so many of his works don't overtly address his didactic concerns. Ditko also had considerable skill in rendering the discourses of the kinetic, the dramatic and the mythopoeic, but a story like "Raem" shows how intensely Ditko sought his version of epistemological patterns in the world of abstract ideas. One character in this story, featuring Ditko's short-lived hero "the Missing Man," voices Ditko's theme as explicitly as possible:

We're starting with reality and the law of identity, Syd. A is what it is, A. We intend to establish definition by essentials, root out false axioms, invalid anti-concepts and all the fallacies that permit the irrational to be treated as anything other than what it is: the inhuman.

The story's embodiment of "the irrational" is the villain of Raem Lanet, the Missing Man's opponent. This scientist, out of a desire for "prestige," transforms himself into a half-man, half-robot creature, in which form he attacks employers who have actually done him no wrong. Despite this overriding purpose, Raem experiences a conflict between his human half and his robot half, and this stands not as a mythopoeic discourse but a didactic one, since Ditko is trying to "teach" his readers that one side of Raem's personality is flawed and irrational, while the other is somewhat more rational and thus closer to the Randian truth. The "epistemological pattern" in this narrative would be predominantly psychological in nature, probably more than a little beholden to Freud's :"ego"  and "id" conceptions.

Now, though Ditko's principle discourse is didactic in nature, the ego-id pattern has a mythopoeic potential as well, and can be found in literary works that precede Freud's rise to prominence, such as Stevenson's 1886 DOCTOR JEKYLL AND MISTER HYDE. A given artist might be able to utterly ignore that potential, for the sake of making a rhetorical point, and something like this transpires in STAR TREK's version of the Stevenson story, "The Enemy Within."

"Raem," however, shows instances where Ditko's instinct for the mythopoeic interferes with his rhetorical purpose, as I pointed out in the review:

...in "Raem," Ditko is close to invalidating his own philosophy. If the irrational is "inhuman," as Wrds says, than why isn't it incarnate in Raem's robot half? There have been any number of SF-stories in which a robotized human regained his humanity through empathizing with other humans, but though Ditko' does use the same basic trope, his focus is squarely upon the Randian choice between the true and the untrue. Ditko may have intuited that there was no way to attribute irrational bitterness and violent intent to the robot half, so he ends up with a final scenario in which the rational renunciation of such "anti-concepts" comes from either the robot half alone, or from some belated interface of human and robot. Either way, "Raem" may be Ditko's most passionate defense of Randism-- and as such, may also be a back-door admission of the significance of emotional value.

To enlarge on this a little more, the same psychological patterns that Ditko uses in a didactic way, to get across a certain message, also have symbolic values, wherein "robot" usually connotes the antithesis of human empathy. Ditko doesn't want to default to that symbolic value, because he wants to critique the selfishness of human beings, so he tries-- with equivocal success-- to make Raem's robot-half more empathetic than his human half. The idea of human feelings arising from an inhuman imitation of humanity is at least as old as Collodi's "Pinocchio," and as Ditko uses the trope it's more of a mythic than a didactic concept given that Ditko doesn't succeed in giving Raem's robot half in a rational cause-and-effect origin.

So in "Raem," we see Ditko drawing upon psychological patterns for both the didactic and mythopoeic potentialities, even though his usages of each may contradict one another.

DITKO AND FIGHTIN' FOOLS

I wrote this in response to a CHFB poster who wondered why Ditko had expressed (in a conversation) a dislike of seeing heroes fight amongst themselves, and why he liked Ayn Rand, whose "characters only cared about themselves."

_______________

I've only read a handful of Rand works, but IMO it's not correct to say that the characters only care about themselves. They care about high ideals based in rational choices, and such rationality is conveyed even through the medium of aesthetic accomplishments, such as Howard Roark and his architectural designs. I think Ditko believed that he conveyed such rational ideals through his art as well. 

I don't think Ditko was ever that crazy about the concept of heroes fighting each other. He drew things like Spidey/Human Torch battles because Stan Lee was the editor and Stan, at that time, emphasized heroic crossovers, often with fights brought on by big misunderstandings. I don't think you'll find any such hero-fights in SPIDER-MAN when Ditko began to be credited with plotting. After Ditko left Marvel for Charlton, he created the Question and a new version of the Blue Beetle, but though the characters appear together in mufti in BLUE BEETLE #5, they never team up in costume. In the Question story for MYSTERIOUS SUSPENSE #1, an anonymous character gushes about how great it is to see "heroes with feet of clay," but Ditko frames this enthusiasm so as to make the opinion seem foolish.

Given that Ditko's history shows him to be uncompromising in his ideals-- at least, as much as he could possibly be in mainstream comics-- I would bet that at the very least he resented having to be a tool of the company, being required to hype other characters that he had nothing to do with. (Think of SPIDER-MAN ANNUAL #1, where he pretty much had to work in almost all the 20th-century Marvel characters into his story.)  Kirby, who co-created so much more of the Marvel Universe, had no problem with working in characters he didn't create, though fan-critics have opined that he never really got the Spider-Man design right. There's no way to be sure whether Lee or Kirby first came up with "quarreling heroes." Either one of them could've been inspired by the example of DOC SAVAGE, as well as remembering the fan-excitement that accompanied the battles of the Golden Age Human Torch and Sub-Mariner. But Ditko just didn't dig that sort of thing.

I am pretty surprised that he would even comment on the Avengers fighting amongst themselves. I have a dim memory that he did a few make-work AVENGERS issues, so maybe even at that late date he was rather discouraged to see that Stan Lee's meet-and-fight trope was still regnant. 

As for Hawk and Dove, Ditko could've used the same excuse he used once for Spider-Man's faux pas: that they were too immature to know better.The Atlas character you remember, the Destructor, starts out as a punk but quickly gets religion and becomes a stand-up guy.

MYTHCOMICS: "AM I MARO, ROMA, OR RAEM?" (PACIFIC PRESENTS #3, 1984)

This, then, is the most certain of all principles, since it answers to the definition given above. For it is impossible for any one to believe the same thing to be and not to be, as some think Heraclitus says. For what a man says, he does not necessarily believe; and if (1) it is impossible that contrary attributes should belong at the same time to the same subject (the usual qualifications must be presupposed in this premise too), and if (2) an opinion which contradicts another is contrary to it, then obviously (3) it is impossible for the same man at the same time to believe the same thing to be and not to be; for if a man were mistaken on this point he would have contrary opinions at the same time.... -- Aristotle, METAPHYSICS, BOOK 4, Part 3 (trans. W.D. Ross)

To modern ears the proposition "A=A" -- often credited solely to Aristotle-- sounds no more profound that the proposition, "If it quacks like a duck, it's a duck."

However, the above citation from the METAPHYSICS indicates that, Aristotle's philosophy arose at a time when Greek philosophers still had to fight against the mythic idea that a thing might be more than one thing. Archaic myths, obviously, had no problem with depicting such metamorphoses as giants' bones morphing into mountain ranges and the like. Probably Aristotle was not personally influenced by whatever remained of the Greek religious tradition in his time. Yet the passage shows that he still considered pre-Socratics like Heraclitus worth refuting. Thus he furthered Plato's conception of the "law of identity" and elaborated his own "law of non-contradiction."

I don't know how much Aristotle Steve Ditko read, but I suspect he got most of his knowledge of the law of identity from its re-formulations within Ayn Rand's Objectivist writings. From his early professional years to his demise, Ditko remained, to the best of my knowledge, a devout Randian, frequently quoting the formula "A=A" and even incarnating his idea of that principle in the comic-book crusader "Mister A." Yet, because Ditko was an artist-- arguably a more consequential one than Ayn Rand-- his idea on identity and non-contradiction are imbued with his own take on the matters, which focuses on the moral compass one must have to choose between rational and irrational modes of consciousness.

One could even see this choice reflected in Ditko's interpretation of the established superhero-trope, "the scary crimefighter." For Ditko, criminals were, to paraphrase Bruce Wayne, "an irrational and impressionable lot," and, being irrational, they were wont to be terrified by heroes who projected irrational fears-- Spider'-Man's pupil-less eyes, the Question's featureless visage, and even the Creeper's clown-like riot of primary colors. That said, some Ditko heroes are more odd than scary, and this is true of the Missing Man, the hero of the story under examination (which I'll henceforth abbreviate as "Raem"). No origin is ever cited for the character, who enjoyed only three adventures. All the reader knows is that in his civilian identity, the hero is Syd Mane, computer tech-consultant. When trouble arises, the hero dons a pair of glasses, and he's transformed into what looks like an incomplete sketch of a human being, consisting of the magic glasses on his eyes, ears, a mouth, a head of hair, and very cartoony arms and legs, all of which are colored green-- while his hips and torso are entirely missing. (Insert Freudian joke here.) Further, as in his other stories, the Missing Man is mostly a prop through which Ditko interrogates the failings of irrational malcontents.


Syd Mane is working to fix computer glitches at "WRDS Processing," which is apparently Ditko's loose idea of what a 1984 software-firm might be like. (I should note here that the story is entirely Ditko's, though the credit-box attributes the dialogue to Robin Snyder.) A maniac, appearing to be all-human on his left side and all-robot on his right, invades the work-space and tries' to slay Syd's employer, the grey-haired owner of the firm, "Mister Wrds." No one knows who this cyborg is precisely, though an employee named Eva thinks he looks something like a fully-human former employee, Raem Lanet, who had been her fiancee some time ago. Syd transforms into the Missing Man and keeps Raem from killing Mister Wrds. Before security can arrive, Raem escapes, one of two times that this half-metal man will vanish from sight despite his eye-catching appearance.

Though the Missing Man and the other witnesses to the crime can see Raem's divided nature in an outward sense, the reader gets a pipeline to the cyborg's thoughts, where the division is even more pronounced. In a reversal of certain genre-tropes, the robot-half of Raem is the reasonable part of his consciousness, urging against violence and revenge, while the human half lusts to kill Wrds and anyone who gets in the way. Later the reader will learn that Raem left the employment of WRDS of his own free will, and that the villain is retroactively placing the blame for his decision on the shoulders of his former boss.

Ironically, though Raem's human half seems the messed-up part, Syd testifies in his clinical way to the fact that mechanisms too can suffer trauma: "The program is in a loop. Like a short circuit. Like a contradiction that will destroy the integrating function of the unit and kill the whole system." He makes this observation about a damaged computer, but it's clearly Ditko warning the reader as to the contradictions in the mind of the would-be killer. But just so that Mane doesn't have to do all the lecturing, Mister Wrds--  whose office is  filled with "alphabet-soup" arrangements of assorted letters-- boasts about his project to "define language:"

We're starting with reality and the law of identity, Syd. A is what it is, A. We intend to establish definition by essentials, root out false axioms, invalid anti-concepts and all the fallacies that permit the irrational to be treated as anything other than what it is: the inhuman.

This is without a doubt Ditko at his most Randian, though he and Snyder may not have realized that they contradicted themselves here, since it is the "inhuman" part of Raem's cyborg nature that is the rational part, the part that knows Mister Wrds did Raem no harm. Later Wrds will blame Raem's insanity on "the interface with [Raem's] robotic half and his human half," but this tossed-off rationale doesn't dispel the conceptual dissonance.

Ex-fiancee Eva, instead of doing the rational thing and telling the police about her suspicions, seeks Raem out at a lonely cabin. In her presence the cyborg starts ranting about having alternate identities with the names of "Maro" (apparently "Man-Robot") and of "Roma" ("Robot-Man") which presumably illustrate his internal struggle. He conceives that Eva betrayed him, and despite the protests of his good side, strangles her. Since by the next day the police have found Eva's body-- though, in a bizarre touch, they rule her death "an accident"-- the reader must assume that Raem discarded the corpse somewhere far from the murder-scene.

Eva's death serves to center the Missing Man's investigation on her missing fiancee, so that he interviews Barker, another of Raem's employers, who (surprise, surprise) also talks like an Objectivist, and who says that Raem would "rather choose prestige over value." Raem eventually works himself to attack Wrds again, with the result that a lot of Ditko's alphabet-soup collages fall off the wall, or something like that. Fortunately the Missing Man shows up as well. With a clever trick the hero causes the demented cyborg to think Wrds is dead, and so again the half-robot manages to shamble away and not be seen by security. However, Wrds finally has a moment of clarity and recognizes Raem, which makes it possible for the software-maker to direct the superhero to the isolated cabin.

Missing Man finds the cabin deserted, but thanks to his other research, the hero's able to track the pitiable creature down to the laboratory where Raem was transformed into a half-robot. Then, for the story's final six pages, Ditko focuses not on a pitched hero-villain battle but on Raem managing at last to override his murderous irrational impulses, even though the effort results in his death. Standing over the dead cyborg, the Missing Man muses, "he died not as Roma or Maro-- but as a man-- as Raem!"

Not many comics-critics sympathize with Ditko's black-and-white morality, though I view the moralizing as a necessary evil that made it psychologically possible for Ditko to unleash his vivid if erratic creativity. This creativity was also accompanied by some definite quirks, like the artist's oddball affection for names that are usually awkward conglomerations of vowels and consonants. (Apparently Ditko never met a consonant blend he didn't dislike.) But in "Raem," Ditko is close to invalidating his own philosophy. If the irrational is "inhuman," as Wrds says, than why isn't it incarnate in Raem's robot half? There have been any number of SF-stories in which a robotized human regained his humanity through empathizing with other humans, but though Ditko' does use the same basic trope, his focus is squarely upon the Randian choice between the true and the untrue. Ditko may have intuited that there was no way to attribute irrational bitterness and violent intent to the robot half, so he ends up with a final scenario in which the rational renunciation of such "anti-concepts" comes from either the robot half alone, or from some belated interface of human and robot. Either way, "Raem" may be Ditko's most passionate defense of Randism-- and as such, may also be a back-door admission of the significance of emotional value.