CURIOSITIES: DITKO RUBS OUT RATS

In JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY 81-- slightly before the debut of Thor-- Lee and Ditko have an exaggerated opinion as to the power wielded by comic strip artists.  

For good measure, the same issue plays host to yet another King Kong Kalamity, name of "Kunga."

DITKO ON THE SPECTRUM OF SADISM PT. 2

 In PART 2, I cited one possible formula for all of fictional narrative, based largely on the radical of conflict:  

most if not all art requires the element of *transgression*-- simply expressed, that X wants Y but someone doesn't want X to have Y (where the "someone" might even be Y). 

This conflict doesn't always eventuate in fictional violence. But the first two important critics of the comic-book medium, Gershon Legman and Frederic Wertham, thought that, at least within the context of children's entertainment, fictional violence was always capable of poisoning the well of young minds, resulting in the unwanted syndromes of sadism or masochism. Though their ideals were not the same, Legman and Wertham favored the same sort of one-sided, hectoring arguments to prove they were right. Today, Legman is barely known to comics-critics, and Wertham is seen as a massively dishonest, though possibly well-meaning, fraudster. I may be the only person who's critiqued them in tandem within essays written for this century, emphasizing that neither of them seemed to know how to distinguish between syndromic and non-syndromic forms of sadism. In SADISM OF THE CASUAL KIND I wrote:

"Casual sadism" as I conceive it is not a syndromic phenomenon. It is just one of many affects communicated by many forms of fiction generally and the adventure-genre specifically, and it refers here to the pleasure one takes in seeing a "villain" violently beaten by the hero. For that matter it can occur in any number of non-literary contexts, particularly those of adversarial sports. Legman and Wertham assumed, perhaps both of them were so phobic to any kind of fictional violence, that "casual sadism" could develop into the syndromic kind.

I'm also probably the only writer who ever gave either of them any credit for getting anything right in the midst of their overall wrongness. In the 2024 essay GIVING THE DEVIL HIS DUE, I mentioned how at age 10 I encountered a mention of Legman in this 1965 TIME essay, whose writer was enamored enough with Legman's 1949 book LOVE AND DEATH to quote a significant passage, part of which reads:

...in the identifications available in the comic strips—in the character of the Katzenjammer Kids, in the kewpie-doll character of Blondie—both father and husband can be thoroughly beaten up, harassed, humiliated and degraded daily.

Now, suppose in that same year of 1965, there had been another young reader of that TIME essay, name of "John." Being also about ten, John would have been reading comic strips since he could read, including both BLONDIE and KATZENJAMMER KIDS, but he probably wouldn't have known anything about sadism or masochism. But John reads that passage, and though he doesn't give a squat about the Katzenjammers, John gets a bit of a buzz from the idea of hapless Dagwood being "degraded daily," in such a way that all the pains and humiliations he suffers, no matter their origins, are somehow ascribable to "the kewpie-doll character of Blondie." John isn't sure, because of Legman's vague language, as to exactly why the adult readers of Chic Young's domestic comic strip would find such fantasies attractive. But the broad implication would seem to be that something about seeing Dagwood forced to be The Eternal Goat must also give those adults such a buzz.

Now-- was John, or any of the millions of Americans who regularly watched the tortures of Dagwood, necessarily a syndromic sadist because he, or they, derived some sadistic or masochistic pleasure from seeing those tortures? Legman would have said so. I would say that one only becomes a syndromic fetishist of any kind because the subject continues to seek that particular pleasure over and over, rather than just getting the buzz from time to time when one encounters the stimulation in a "casual" fashion, without especially looking for it. This is the same "casual sadism" that moved Elizabethans to watch both "bear baiting" spectacles and Shakespearean dramas, because the cruelties of both were diverting, though not necessarily syndromic.

Now suppose that I read every Ditko comics-story in existence, and I found no sadistic/masochistic content in anything but in his collaborations with unquestionable fetishist Eric Stanton. That could prove that Ditko had no more than a casual creator's interest in the dynamics of sadomasochistic art. We don't seem to have any testimony from the reticent Ditko as to what he thought or felt about working with Stanton. However, Stanton did make a significant comment on general relationships of artists sharing the same studio.

PURE IMAGES: I've shared studios with different artists and you can't help but work on each other's stuff. You'll be there reacting with energy to their work, and in turn they get excited about the project.

STANTON: Yes, you have to. You'll be working in one train of thought and you don't even realize that there are other opportunities.

PURE IMAGES #1 (1990)

To slightly reiterate my point from the first essay, if Ditko were a syndromic sadist, I think we would have seen much more evidence of his inclinations in his rich career. I would expect to see something closer in spirit to the oeuvre of Tom Sutton, who produced both sadomasochistic art for the erotic comics market and edgy mainstream horror stories that dripped with perversity. But that's just how things look to me at a point when I've yet to read every story Steve Ditko ever produced.             

DITKO ON THE SPECTRUM OF SADISM PT. 1

RIP JAGGER'S DOJO now carries this recommendation for a book by one Richard Seves. The book concerns the fetish art of Eric Stanton, as well as the American subculture in which certain types of fetish art were promulgated, usually concentrating upon sadism, masochism, or some combination of the two. Stanton is not well known to most comics-fans even today, but during about ten years of his career, he shared a New York studio with an artist who was then reaching the apogee of his fame in the limited venue of American comic books, Steve Ditko. 

I have not read the book but will probably plan to do so some time in the future. At least one reason for me to do so is that much of my literary project on this blog is to examine art of all types from the viewpoint that most if not all art requires the element of *transgression*-- simply expressed, that X wants Y but someone doesn't want X to have Y (where the "someone" might even be Y). 

I don't remember encountering info on the Ditko-Stanton connection any time before the 1990s. A few quotes from Stanton appear in PURE IMAGES #1 (1990), a magazine devoted almost entirely to Greg Theakston's essay "The Birth of Spider-Man." Those quotes were purely focused on the question of what, if anything, Stanton might have contributed to the web-slinger. Most fans seemed to take the position that Ditko, well-known for taking strong moralistic stances in his essays and comics-works, probably participated very little in the quasi-legal erotic comics/artwork that Stanton produced. But the Seves book, going on Rip's review of it, seems to take the position that Ditko's contributions, if only in terms of inking artwork, were much more substantial than many fans imagined. 

 Based at least partly on the Seves book's information, Rip said:

I confess little interest in this form of kinky presentation, and at the risk of protesting too much I think like many this has perhaps caused me to overlook something quite obvious. Steve Ditko was a fetish artist. He was not as I had previously thought a colleague who helped touch up an image here and there for his studio mate who was a fetish artist, but instead he was part of an artistic team which intentionally created narratives within the confines of the fetish field. It's a bit of a surprise to find this out about a guy who despite his reclusive nature has had his work feverishly examined for decades now.

 I too don' t tend to associate Ditko with any form of fetishistic erotica. Yet I have no problem in arguing for such content, even if it's expressed on a purely subconscious level, if there's strong textual support for the argument. And that's the only way one could approach Ditko's work, because as most fans know, the artist never gave interviews and only started disseminating his memories of SPIDER-MAN's creation very late in his life, through the venue of privately printed fanzines. I've only read a few Ditko essays, usually in excerpted form, and I tend to doubt that Ditko ever discussed in any terms the increasing cultural focus on erotic art that began in the decade of the 1960s, the same era in which he came to prominence. I also get the impression that Ditko never publicly commented on his work-relationship with Stanton. But if he did, I'd guess that said commentary would have been minimal at best, dwarfed by Ditko's marked concentration on his many Randian social pronouncements.

If the totality of Ditko's oeuvre contains any significant fetish-content, I would think it would have manifested less through his various superhero works for Marvel and DC, than in the short horror stories in which the artist specialized before his sixties breakout success and after he left the Big Two for a time in the 1970s. These would probably represent Ditko in his purest state, in which he was most free of editorial oversight. My impression of those stories I've read-- but usually not reviewed-- is that they lack erotic content, and that they usually hinged on the trope of "the biter bit," where some malicious or foolish individual Gets His in the End. I guess one could argue, as did Gershon Legman and Frederic Wertham, that such tropes are fundamentally sadistic. But I do not, as I'll try to clarify in Part 2.           

  

 

COSMIC FLIGHT, SPIDER BITE

 I'm currently working on an extensive FANTASTIC FOUR critical evaluation that will encompass the two mythcomics posts I have planned for this month, respectively posts #399 and #400. (Since the first time my posts reached 100, I have endeavored to make each hundredth-post something special, as do many comics-serials.) Since I'm planning to eschew my critical jargon where possible, I decided to get at least some of that out of my system by expanding on the following remarks from last year's DUELING DUALITIES PT. 3:

I should qualify this, though, by stating that the L/K FANTASTIC FOUR still had a very strong ontocosm with respect to developing the kinetic and dramatic potentialities, in comparison with even the best of the other contemporary Marvel offerings from the Silver Age... In fact, the kinetic qualities of the Lee-Kirby FF are at least equal to those of the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN. However, with respect to the dramatic potentialities, the L/D SPIDER-MAN is more fully devoted to the soap opera model, generating a superior level of melodramatic intensity with what must have been comics' largest-ever ensemble of regular support-characters. By comparison. the L/K FANTASTIC FOUR concentrated most of its energies on the four principals, and the most-used group of support-characters in the series-- The Inhumans -- didn't so much mesh with the four principals as randomly bounce off them.

Here, then, are some demonstrations of my perceptions re: the four potentialities in each Silver Age serial.

 The kinetic potentiality in fiction concerns anything that's an analogue to physical sensation. Often I've referenced this potentiality with respect to those immortal selling-points, "sex and violence," but it also includes all sympathetic and antipathetic affects linked to sensation. Within the sphere of the L/K FANTASTIC FOUR, Jack Kirby designed an almost unparalleled rogues' gallery of unattractive villains to engage in combat with the generally attractive heroes (and yes, over time the Thing becomes cute than horrifying). This cover to FF #100-- which I for one wish could have been Kirby's last contribution to the series-- shows a good cross-section of the heroes and their opponents.

Ditko's run on SPIDER-MAN was not as long as Kirby's on FF, and he never showed a literal assemblage of all his best villains. (To be sure, both artists produced a handful of loser-foes, whom no one would particularly want to see again.) The closest thing to a Ditko "greatest hits" would be the "Sinister Six" tale in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN ANNUAL #1.

Despite how long each artist worked on each series, they're both in the same domain as far as how well they exploited the kinetic potentialities for repulsion and attraction. However, as I said above, the ways in which each writer/artist combo approached the dramatic potentiality took very different forms.

In the L/K FANTASTIC FOUR, melodramatic tragedy arose every once in a while, as in the story "This Man, This Monster." Yet I believe editor Lee chose most of the time to soft-pedal such emotional tumult, if only because he was always writing about four characters in an ensemble that had to remain together for the series' sake, no matter how often they talked about breaking up. Thus I'd argue that comedy rather than tragedy tended to rule the FF-realm, as seen in these pages from FF #54:         

In contrast to this series, though, SPIDER-MAN was a loner. Thought the series displayed an ample amount of comedy-- often in the form of playing jokes on J. Jonah Jameson-- there was a marked emphasis upon Peter Parker being caught in a tangled web, woven by some dispassionate god and in which Parker was tormented as for sport. From AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #17:

I'm not in any way devaluing comedy over drama; that's the sort of thinking that makes the Oscar Awards such a drag. But I am saying that because Lee and Ditko focused so much on teen melodrama, with some parallel crime-melodrama content, they often didn't veer into the vertical level of meaning very often.

 All of the famous Spidey villains seen above are just crooks in costumes; they want to steal things, Spider-Man gets in their way, and they want to kill him so that they can go back to stealing with impunity. That's why I've found so few mythopoeic or dramatic complexities in the L/D SPIDER-MAN, or, for that matter, in later iterations of the franchise. A couple of Spider-foes have world-conquering ambitions, like Doc Ock and the Lizard, but arguably Lee and Ditko devoted less space to their abstract motivations. 

The Red Ghost, in his first (and only good) story, wants to dominate Earth's moon for the glory of Communism. The Puppet Master has more interest in controlling other people's lives than in interacting with his stepdaughter. Doctor Doom is obsessed with being the best at everything and thus wants more than anything to prove that he can beat his detested rival. All of these motivations BEGIN in the dramatic potentiality, but as I've argued in the various mythcomics essays I devoted to each FF-villain, the creators found ways to organically develop the mythopoeic and the didactic OUT of the dramatic motivations.       

And with all that in mind, my next essay will deal with a quick and dirty history of the Fantastic Four after Lee and Kirby.
              

ADDENDUM TO SAVING TIME IN A BRAIN

 

In the preceding essay, I forgot that AMAZING ADVENTURES wasn't just dropped, but that it was converted into Stan Lee's experimental all-Ditko book AMAZING ADULT FANTASY, which in its final-issue form (with the "adult" ironically knocked from the title) had at least as much consequence for Marvel as FANTASTIC FOUR #1. I'm sure I read of the title changeover many times but it just got filed in the "not significant" pile of memory engrams.

The switch from AA to AAF is also more significant than I'd thought, now that I've read all the AA issues online. Though there's some Ditko mixed in to AA, the six issues are heavily Kirby-dominated. Kirby's SF/monster books had evidently been selling OK for Atlas/Marvel even during DC's big superhero push around 1958. But AA must not have sold well, possibly indicating a sea-change in reader preferences. (It would take a little longer for all of DC's SF-anthology titles to become saturated with continuing-character features.) So the transition to AAF shows Stan Lee trying to aim a little higher than the usual Atlas/Marvel fare, building up Steve Ditko's aesthetic. I've never seen any commentary on AAF by either Lee or Ditko, so I have to accept the reigning fan-theory, that Lee hoped to emulate the model of TV's successful TWILIGHT ZONE anthology. I doubt he was counting on that as a long-term strategy for success, given the fate of EC Comics about six years previous; he probably just hoped for decent sales while enjoying seeing his stories brought to life by Ditko's burgeoning talent.

Most of the Kirby stuff in AA is pretty ordinary fare, by the way. I need to do a writeup of the "Doctor Droom" stories some time, because they definitely don't feel like "New Marvel."

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.

COORDINATING INTERORDINATION PT. 2

In Part 1, I emphasized that when I spoke of my newly christened category of "interordination," I conceived it to be a subset of all those narrative strategies that Julie Kristaeva designated as "intertextuality," stating at the essay's conclusion: 

I don't expect to use interordination on a regular basis, except as a means to clarify the ways in which crossovers belong more properly to this specific type of "quotation" rather than to the more generalized category of intertextuality.

Upon exploring even the basic Wiki writeup of intertextuality, I find that other critics have attempted to make distinctions between different forms of the concept:

Intertextuality has been differentiated into referential and typological categories. Referential intertextuality refers to the use of fragments in texts and the typological intertextuality refers to the use of pattern and structure in typical texts

The term "typological" has some appeal to me because in INTERORDINATION PT. 1, I devoted particular attention to the example of the Moore-Gibbons WATCHMEN as comprising several forms of intertextuality, none of which relate to the subcategory of interordination as I've conceived it. But even "typological" needs some finessing. What is Alan Moore doing when he bases his WATCHMEN-heroes upon the Charlton heroes? He is *emulating* certain *tropes* that he observed in the earlier stories of the heroes, after which he then crossbreeds those tropes with other tropes. Of course, all of these were borrowed from other sources as well.

In fact, all literature as we have it now is founded in "trope emulation." From caveman times on, one author puts forth an icon of some sort (not necessarily an original one) that his auditors find pleasing, so the next author tries to emulate something about the icon in order to enjoy similar popularity. In Classical times, one can observe this process in Athens' belated attempts to formulate a city-hero, their Theseus, in loose emulation of Thebes' protector Herakles.

Now, going back to Wiki: what does the essay's author mean by "referential intertextuality?" Without going into this too much, the basic contrast is that this form directly borrows from passages in earlier works. Though this concept is not a direct parallel to my line of thought, it's close enough to suggest a contrast to "trope emulation," and that is "icon emulation." In the latter formulation, a derivative author does not choose to create a new character, but attempts to tell a new story with an old character. To be sure, "newness" is difficult to ascertain with archaic figures, given that it's impossible to be 100% sure when a given Herakles story originated. At best, archaeology can tell us the earliest known record of a given story. However, we can be relatively sure that even the earliest Herakles stories were not all devised by one writer, but by innumerable authors-- some of whose stories may have simply fallen off the cultural map. 

Returning to the importance of names outlined in I THINK ICON, I THINK ICON, Moore took all of the tropes he borrowed from Steve Ditko's hero The Question, plus all those he took from other sources, and thus forged a new character, Rorschach. No matter how many fan-readers know about the influence of The Question, the name of Rorschach keeps him distinct from the Ditko character, far more than any of the formal differences between the characters.

Such formal differences are of lesser importance because in many cases an author utilizing "icon emulation" may deviate from the original model just as much as does the one utilizing "trope emulation." 

Steve Ditko's character of The Question appeared in about half a dozen stories for Charlton Comics, and since these were produced under an implicit work-for-hire contract, the stories and the character both belonged to Charlton. When DC bought up all or most of the Charlton superheroes, DC then produced several new "icon emulation" variations on those characters-- and of these variants, none diverged quite as far from the original model as the 1987 Question first produced by writer Denny O"Neil and artist Denys Cowan. Ditko supplied nearly no character traits or back history for "Vic Sage," the secret identity of his crusader, and only a very marginal rationale for the hero's blank-masked appearance, since Ditko was principally concerned with using the hero as a spokesman for philosophical belief. O'Neil not only paid zero attention to any of the philosophies exposed by the Ditko character, he formulated a detailed back history for Sage-- even to the extent of stating that his name was a revision of an Eastern European cognomen-- and gave the New Question all sorts of "film noir" adventures in which the nature of good and evil was never as distinct as it was in Ditko.

Yet, by keeping the name of the character and a few choice bits of his mythology, O'Neil's Question is an icon derived from an icon, rather than being an icon created from some of the tropes that constituted the original icon.

It's because of this "crypto-continuity," as I dubbed it earlier, that it's possible to view derivative icons as being coterminous with their original models. Thus, despite all the dissimilarities between the Kong of the 1933 film and the Kong who fights Godzilla, the two Kongs are coterminous because the second icon was grounded in the identity of the first one. The same applies to all of the various icons based on non-fictional originals like Billy the Kid and Jack the Ripper. I've pointed out that such characters are based on what I term "innominate texts," meaning that the models are not purely fictional, but there's still a icon-to-icon derivation, rather than a trope-to-icon derivation.

In closing, I devoted some space in I THINK ICON to the fact that "icons" included countless entities that are not characters as such, but only cited a couple of examples. Another noteworthy example is Edgar Rice Burroughs' land of Pellucidar, an environment characterized by its assorted flora and fauna as well as its unique location at the center of the Earth. In the formal "Earth's Core" series, the entire environment of Pellucidar is simply a subordinate icon to whatever hero is the star of the story. However, in 1929 Burroughs produced his most distinctive crossover of two franchises, by having Tarzan, superordinate icon of his own series, have adventures within the environment of Pellucidar. Because Pellucidar is not normally aligned to Tarzan's adventures, this interaction rates as a "charisma-crossover."

ADDENDUM: Since I've previously made some remarks on spoof-versions of established figures, the sort I'm now calling "icons," I feel I should expand on these remarks. Spoofs are for the most part "trope emulations" because the artists simply borrow tropes from the originals, frequently (though not always) distancing the spoof-characters from the originals with goofy names like "Batboy and Rubin." But it's possible for an author to produce an "icon emulation" that is loosely coterminous with the original, even if said author decides to alter the myth-radical that dominates the established icon. Such icons as Superman, Modesty Blaise, and The Lone Ranger all belong to the mythos of adventure. However, the filmed stage play of SUPERMAN-- THE MUSICAL is a full icon emulation of Superman, but in the mode of comedy, while both Modesty Blaise and The Lone Ranger got redone into modes of irony for the big screen.

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.

MYTHCOMICS: “SAVING FACE” (THE QUESTION #13-14, 1987)

One of the aspects O’Neil frequently touched on in his Bronze Age Batman stories was the notion of the hero as a master martial artist. Prior to O’Neil, Batman fought like a boxer most of the time, with occasional touches of judo or wrestling. But even though the author imported into the Batman mythos many tropes of the martial arts genre, one particular trope—that of the use of martial arts as a means of personal growth—made no appearances in O’Neil’s Batman-tales, or, for that matter, in anyone else’s Bat-tales. The Cowled Crusader needed no personal growth; being Batman was his entire raison d’etre.

O’Neil did use the "spiritual growth" trope somewhat in the largely forgettable RICHARD DRAGON title, but not until the late 1980s did he find the proper vehicle to merge his interest in hardboiled crime with that of Oriental esotericism. Indeed, the foremost work to spring from DC Comics’s acquisition of Charlton Comics’ superhero characters was the first run of THE QUESTION, originated by O’Neil and artist Denys Cowan. To fans of Steve Ditko’s original blank-visaged crusader, this version must have seemed a travesty, foregoing Ditko’s trademark moral sbsolutism in favor of a hero who constantly had to “question” everything—culture, society, and his own inner nature. Indeed, the original hero, as presented in the first issue, literally “dies” before he receives tutelage by none other than O’Neil’s previous kung-fu stalwart, Richard Dragon.

I’ve already praised the metaphysical questions posed in issue #11, but the two-parter that I entitle “Saving Face” orients more on the sociological end of things. Following a “grabber” scene in which an army recruiter is killed while giving his enlistment pitch, Vic Sage, a.k.a. the new improved Question, converses with Doctor Rodor, his sometime mentor. Their short dialogue gives Sage just enough time to make a distinction between the tortures of coercion and the ordeals of discipline by stating that “discipline comes from inside.” Then Sage is called away to the scene of a disaster, where, all unknowing, he has a near-encounter with his next opponent.

Said adversary is Colonel DeBeck, an ex-military man full of the desire to castigate the armed forces of the United States for weakness and lack of discipline. To graphically illustrate this vulnerability, DeBeck and a small squad of other disaffected men attack a small detachment of soldiers giving a public demonstration of their training. Sage can’t reach the soldiers before DeBeck’s men slaughter them. Later Sage expresses a muted admiration for the sheer nerve behind the assault. In the guise of the Question, Sage tracks down DeBeck, but the former colonel summons his squad, and the hero is captured.

Rather than simply killing the vigilante, DeBeck tests the resolve of his opponent, burying him in the earth up to his neck, so that the hero can breathe and speak but nothing else. Yet DeBeck also claims that he withstood this same torture in Cambodia, and so promises that if the Question will go free if he surpasses DeBeck’s record for withstanding the torture.

O’Neil plays fair throughout the ordeal: the Question gets no lucky breaks or last-minute rescues from allies. To survive, the hero must use his Oriental meditative techniques to sink into himself, to escape the torment of being unable to move while exposed to the elements. He does receive a little imaginary help from a scorpion, on whom Sage projects the persona of his teacher Richard. Of course it’s really Sage giving himself “sage” advice: “accept the discomfort and pain and fear and cherish it. It’ll only leave when you invite it to stay.”

Without giving away the well-orchestrated ending, the Question does indeed survive his encounter with the honor-obsessed murderers, and goes on to continue his inquiries into other aspects of existence. In an interesting subplot, Sage’s girlfriend Myra runs for office, and the constant hectoring of the publicity machine causes her to dream of herself stripping on a stage before a crowd of horny gawkers.

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.

NEAR MYTHS: "THE END AT LAST" (STRANGE TALES #146, 1966)

Since this week's mythcomic falls into the domain of a metaphysical myth, this gives me an excuse to look at one of the most famous metaphysical myths in mainstream American comics.

Two issues prior to STRANGE TALES #146, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko had just finished the longest, most ambitious story-line in the "Doctor Strange" feature, during which the master of the mystic arts was forced to run from pillar to post, fleeing the minions of his earthly enemy Baron Mordo, who in turn had been granted superior magical power by the extra-dimensional dictator Dormammu. Strange attempts to cope by petitioning another entity, the mysterious Eternity, for help-- thus giving rise to one of Ditko's most visually arresting creations.

However, once Strange does find Eternity-- made to look like the cosmos in humanoid form-- the cosmic being simply tells Strange to pull himself by his own bootstraps. What seems like a brush-off turns out to be the simple truth: Strange does manage to defeat both Mordo and Dormammu without any special resources, ending both threats for the time being in #144.

The done-in-one story in #145 is so negligible that few fans back then could have anticipated that it would give way to "The End At Last"-- which was also the end of the Lee-Ditko collaboration on the good doctor or on anything else, for reasons that have been discussed on the web in great detail.

It starts out with Dormammu, smarting from his recent defeat, deciding to make another foray against the Earth-magician. In addition, the mystic madman decides to launch a pre-emptive strike against Eternity, just in case the ethereal incarnation of the cosmos might give him some trouble.

Thus Dormammu seals Eternity away in his own dimension and spirits Strange into yet another occult contest. However, Eternity doesn't stay sealed very long.

Ditko's artistry was at the top of his game here, and arguably he would never produce another magic-scape battle equal to this "clash of thaumaturgic titans." Dormammu is apparently destroyed, and Strange just barely escapes the dimensional chaos.

Yet despite the intensity and artistry of Ditko's panels, the story lacks the concrescence I've found necessary for a mythcomic. Dormammu, as always, is no more than a typical blustering tyrant despite his unique appearance, while Eternity, while pleasingly enigmatic, remains too abstract to take on any deeper resonance. Even though I would presume that Ditko's Randian outlook permitted no religious sentiments as such, I can't help feeling that he called upon Biblical myths in order to ring down the curtain on the "Doctor Strange" universe by bringing together a figurative "God" and a figurative "Satan"-- though the tone of the contest reminds me more of the pre-Adamic rebellion of Satan and his forces against God than the final conflict of Revelations.

But, even though metaphysical myths allow for more abstraction than the other three types, Ditko's opposition of "upstart evil" and "a force beyond good and evil" simply doesn't generate the symbolic discourse necessary for a full-fledged mythcomic.

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.