STEVE DITKO: THE RECLUSIVE COMIC BOOK LEGEND WHO CREATED DOCTOR STRANGE — AND FELL OUT WITH MARVEL’S STAN LEE:

Ditko hasn’t given a formal interview since 1968 and has avoided fans for almost as long. He has become the comic industry’s J.D. Salinger, though with much more extreme political views. Ditko became a devotee of Ayn Rand, a man who practices a strict philosophy of self-reliance*, creative control and absolutely no truck with the supernatural. And yet he lost control of much of his signature work, while one of his most famous creations uses magic to travel to other dimensions. So how did one of the industry’s legends become such a contradictory figure?

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It was positively bizarre that Ditko was the man to invent Strange. The weirdness of those comics is hard to overstate: Strange went into bizarre realms of twisting, Escher-like shapes that reflected Ditko’s history in 3D work, and faced enemies with names like Nightmare and Eternity (a galaxy in human form). Yet since about 1960, Ditko had been a devotee of Rand, the strict Objectivist who mandated a hyper-capitalistic* philosophy of rational self-interest, small government and the moral primacy of creators.

The above passage brings new meaning to the phrase “magical thinking.” Why, it’s like Ditko was a creative writer imagining fiction or something! Next thing you’re going to tell me is that Bob Kane didn’t live in a mansion with cave under it before envisioning Batman, and Gene Roddenberry never flew on a NASA space flight before creating Star Trek.

* I’m old enough to remember when the London Telegraph didn’t view self-reliance and free markets as evil scary things.