The John Galt of Comic Books |
Comics
Brian Doherty | From the January 2026 issue
Of all the popular storytelling artists striving to emulate Ayn Rand, the most significant was Steve Ditko.
Ditko, a comic book artist, is most famous for co-creating Spider-Man and Dr. Strange. Rand, in addition to writing novels that still sell hugely seven decades down the line, developed a philosophy she called Objectivism, the politics of which were highly libertarian and highly controversial.
Ditko's commitment to Rand's ideas led him down a curious and troubled path, and made him resemble a real-life Rand character. From developing enduring legends for Marvel Comics in the 1960s to Kickstartering in the 2010s with fewer than 150 sponsors his uniquely and often bizarrely abstract stories, Ditko emulated aspects of both of Rand's most prominent fictional protagonists.
Like Howard Roark, the individualist architect of The Fountainhead, Ditko insisted on doing the creative work his soul demanded, expressing his deepest self and values, even if few customers or patrons appreciated it. Like John Galt, the scientific wizard who led the strike in Atlas Shrugged, he was willing to walk away from his greatest inventions when he thought they'd fallen into hands that no longer deserved his best efforts.
Ditko's most enduring impact on comics has embedded in it a personal irony. Spider-Man, created with writer/editor Stan Lee (who milked far more public relations mileage out of his role at Marvel), is credited with pioneering the idea of a superhero with feet of clay and everyday human problems, haunted by self-doubt. Ditko was contemptuous of that perceived quality, writing that "Lee's…flawed, neurotic, anti-hero rejected the best standards for a hero as rational being at his best and as an agent of justice."
While Spider-Man was never quite as much of a sad sack teen as people sometimes remember—he was never sidelined from superheroing by acne or prom issues—he was frequently mocked and derided by his peers as teenage egghead Peter Parker. On more than one occasion, Spider-Man did blunder, by, say, trying to nab crooks he saw casing a jewelry store before they actually entered the store, so that they called the cops on him.
At times, he emitted such self-pitying declarations as "Am I really some sort of crack-pot, wasting my time seeking fame and glory? Am I more interested in the adventure of being Spider-Man than I am in helping people??…Why don't I give the whole thing up?" or "A lot of good it does me to be Spider-Man….Why don't things ever seem to turn out right for me? Why do I seem to hurt people, no matter how hard I try not to? Is this the price I must always pay for being…Spider-Man??!"
Ditko had griped about "the introduction and sanctioning of all kinds of spoilage (flaws, neurotic behavior)" into Spider-Man. He managed the tension in his mind by emphasizing that Spider-Man was still a teen, not a fully developed adult, and that the comic could show how "Parker has to learn and grow up to be a hero," as he once wrote to a fan.
One critic looking at Ditko's Spider-Man work through a Randian lens, Desmond White, wondered whether Parker's altruistic sacrifice of his time and happiness fighting crime and villains—inspired by an act of selfishness that led to the death of his beloved Uncle Ben—wasn't perhaps a slyly Objectivist experiment in showing how altruism doesn't lead to fulfillment. Despite a late-period Ditko Spider-Man villain whose moniker was the much-used Randian term "the Looter," it's difficult to squeeze Spider-Man into either an Objectivist or an anti-Objectivist mold.
Ditko's second iconic Marvel character, one even credit-hogging Lee admitted in print "twas Steve's idea," was also an ironic paladin for a Randian. The core idea of Objectivism is our ability, indeed duty, to flawlessly perceive and reason from strictly defined facts of purely material reality. Dr. Strange, a master of the mystic arts, could literally make whims come true through the speaking and casting of spells, and he spent most of his time fighting impossible, unreal beings in alternate—that is, nonexistent—dimensions.
Strange's magic peregrinations and conflicts were so bizarrely groovy, his imagery so impossibly hallucinatory, that comics editor and scholar Catherine Yronwode (who later earned Ditko's ire while writing a never-finished book about him by prying too deep into his personal life) insisted that many of the sorcerer supreme's hippie fans (a group that included Ken Kesey of the Merry Pranksters) were sure his creator must have had his soul psychedelicized.
Ditko, though, was not........