The amazing Steve Ditko

Sixties hipsters thought that Ditko's urban realism and trippy visions meant that he was one of them. They couldn't have been much more wrong. Around the time that Ditko fell out with Marvel Comics in 1966, he became fascinated with Ayn Rand and objectivism, and his work started to take on a severe and increasingly strident right-wing tone. He spent a few years working for the small company Charlton Comics, where his most significant creation was the Question: a hero in a suit, hat and tie, with no face -- just a blank pink blot -- and a ruthless contempt for moral relativism. At a subsequent stint with DC Comics, he created the Hawk and the Dove (a pair of superhero brothers, whose personalities were exactly what you'd guess) and the Creeper (a yellow-skinned, green-haired, red-maned, screeching maniac).

And then, by the end of the '60s, Ditko retreated into the world of the small press -- fanzines and self-published comics -- where he could write and draw whatever he pleased. Comics like "Mr. A" and "Avenging World" became his venue to rant semi-intelligibly about objectivism, how there's no middle ground or gray area in morality, and so on. He spent most of the next 30 years creating Rand-inspired comics that are beautifully designed and composed but almost unreadable; they're explicitly didactic, but so heavy-handed that it's impossible to imagine them swaying anyone's opinions. (Ditko continued to draw hundreds of pages a year through the '90s but hasn't published any new work since 2000.)

After 1970, he occasionally returned to mainstream comics, but his only major new creation was a bizarre and short-lived mid-'70s series, "Shade the Changing Man." (It was ahead of its time; revived in 1990 by writer Peter Milligan without Ditko, it ran for six years.) "Marvel Visionaries" leaps from 1966 to two stories originally published in 1980, one from 1988, and one from 1992, in which Ditko's phoning it in, barely bothering with even basic anatomy and perspective.

By then, though, Ditko's fingerprints were all over the comics world. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' landmark "Watchmen" is, in some sense, one long tribute to Ditko, from its nine-panel grid to the character of Rorschach, whose appearance and inflexible morality are directly inspired by the Question and Mr. A. Before Todd McFarlane created his hugely popular horror comic "Spawn," he made his name with work on "Spider-Man" that was a slicked-up variation on Ditko's style. Peter Bagge ("Hate") wrote and drew a Ditko parody a few years ago, "The Megalomaniacal Spider-Man," in which Peter Parker becomes obsessed with objectivism. And near the end of Neil Gaiman and Andy Kubert's recent graphic novel "1602," there's a scene in which we briefly see another dimension -- an image that's directly lifted from (and credited to) a 40-year-old Ditko "Dr. Strange" story, since there's no way anyone else could have captured that otherworldliness better.

Most of what's in Ditko's "Marvel Visionaries" volume are stories that have been reprinted to death already, fine as some of them are. But it also includes some remarkable, long-unseen material: 10 short horror, suspense and science fiction stories he collaborated on with Lee for anthology comics like "Tales to Astonish" and "Amazing Adult Fantasy" between 1961 and 1963. Lee knew how to spur Ditko to do his best work, and these corny twist-ending tales are drawn with the single-minded force of nightmares. The artwork is largely close-up shots of distressed characters, with little or no background, which makes the world they inhabit seem as suffocatingly tiny as the scope of the stories themselves. "Help!" opens with an image of a man clasping his ears as he's surrounded by seven screaming disembodied mouths; "Those Who Change" begins with a gigantic close-up of a huge-eyed reptile's head beginning to emerge from prehistoric ooze. The blunt alienation of these early pieces is still shocking now, and the way Ditko draws the characters' hands alone tells the stories almost as much as Lee's words.

Douglas Wolk's writing on comics and graphic novels will appear the first Friday of each month in Salon Books.

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