Jog had a great comment on Jacob Canfield’s recent Ditko post, so I thought I’d highlight it. It’s below:
I enjoyed this, although I must confess some amusement with your identification of Ditko’s “worrying and depressing trend” – if anything, Ditko has eased up since the ’70s, when he was making polemical comics about (in one instance) a kidnapped doctor heroically refusing medical care to a Che-like revolutionary before striding away into the sunrise as milquetoast, compromise-prone bystanders are torn to shreds by crossfire: a fitting end for their kind! Also, the final panel is occupied almost entirely by a large word balloon. I’ve really come to prefer his abridged style of… dialogue (which makes no effort to accurately copy speech patterns, instead functioning as graphic flourish that ‘works’ to impart basic motivation; this strikes me as an effort to evade the clutter he rails against in the Public Service Package, which has to be understood in the context of an industry that used to lean very very heavily on words reiterating the content of pictures).
The Public Service Package is a weird book in general, in that Ditko adopts a burn-it-all attitude that allows for remarkably little satiric grounding; when *everyone’s* a moron (I’d question whether Ditko even likes the good old days all that much), it’s difficult to discern the advocacy behind the lampoon… and Ditko is ALL about advocacy. I don’t think Jack T. Chick comparisons are out of line; I’ve made them myself, several times. The trick is, to Ditko, MAN is GOD, and hell is less a tangible place than the state of surrendering one’s self to the neuroses and guilt relentlessly promoted by the fallen world which we inhabit. Mr. A. passes judgment, yes, but you’re not supposed to worship him: you were not made in His image, but you can make yourself INTO him.
(By far the most Jack T. Chick story of Ditko’s is in his & Snyder’s recent Mr. A. reprint book, wherein a convicted thug struggles to reform his life, effectively putting Mr. A. into the role of a tough-talking preacher ministering to the city… except, there’s no God. Ditko uses religious devices as prompts for self-betterment, and query whether there’s any substantive difference…)
Another good Ditko comparison is the movie critic Armond White, who sometimes errs on the side of assuming the reader has been following his (often counter-intuitive) arguments for months and months, resorting to a shorthand of self-reference that baffles new and curious readers. I don’t actually think Ditko is nearly so bad — that Earth cartoon you’ve posted seems clear enough to me; as you indicate elsewhere, Ditko spells out what he means in plain fragments, i.e. that the Earth is troubled by excessive regulation, though it probably helps to have previously read some his opinions on property rights, which abhor basically any restriction on use — insofar as his art tends to be compelling enough that understanding rapidly accumulates.
That said, I do think you misunderstand Ditko’s point about gender representation. It’s not that women don’t have a place in comics, it’s that lobbying for gender-based representation is a sop to abstract, collectivist concepts that demean the observable solidity of the individual human’s experience. It’s not an atypically right-wing view: individual excellence providing a cure-all to systemic injustices. Indeed, if you’re nonetheless trampled by the system, it doesn’t matter, because material gain and social standing are irrelevant in the face of Ideals, of self-satisfaction: not so different from Christian suffering in the hopes of a paradise to come, though with Ditko ‘paradise’ is in knowing you’ll never have to remember anything because you’ve never told a lie…
Allow me to try and characterize why I find the Earth cartoon childishly contrarian and not all that clear in message despite your careful annotation about his intent.
I have no doubt that you are 100% correct about what Ditko intends to do with it. Here’s my thought process.
Typically when one “protects” something you are insuring its teleological continuation in an ideal state.
If “protecting” the Earth involves using its resources without restriction, that is a bizarre characterization of Earth’s teleologically optimal state (i.e. exploited, or, more softly, used). This characterization of what’s “good for the earth” goes against thousands of years of charaterizing the Earth as an organic system, i.e. one that is better off left “natural”, here meaning self-regulating without human input. It would be pretty astounding if Ditko had some sort of human/environment dynamic stewardship idea that he was attempting to put across (e.g. that as a dynamic system the Earth needs human beings to regulate its catastrophic tendencies or something) but based on this and the other work, I’m skeptical that he has such a complex ideal in mind (in fact, based on what you’re telling me, this is clearly not the case.)
Now here’s how that cartoon could make sense by a similar (forgiving) logic. Presumably the Earth includes human beings. So what the Earth being troubled in this comic is human beings, as a part of the Earth, need protection from environmentalists. If this is the logic, the comic is still pretty damn stupid; there are a thousand better ways to draw that comic (e.g. a bunch of outraged, hardworking, objectivists screaming “WHO’S GOING TO PROTECT US??”). Unfortunately, it appears ole Steve refused to exercise the brainpower, or, perhaps, the emotional maturity to make this anything other than the resentful and contrarian scribbling of a kindergartner (“NO THE EARTH DOESN’T NEED PROTECTING FROM ME IT NEEDS PROTECTION FROM YOU!!!”)
I think there’s some cartoons where the joke is a cute bunny rabbit wants to be eaten for dinner or whatnot, although the only example I can think of off the top of my head is Dicky and Jackie, where cute anthropomorphized vegetables are really into the idea of being cooked into a stew and killed.
The earth thing almost reminds me of it. Or… it’s almost like one of those 1920s cartoons where everything is anthropomorphized in a wacky way with no sense of logic.
Ditko’s comic seems like really bad propaganda, but its so of the wall it seems like it can be enjoyed ironically.
Even the title “Public Service Message” sees ironic, it sounds like a government PSA, but its ranting about the authors pet concerns like comic critics.
Owen – That’s very good! I should have said up front there’s also an element of rhetoric at work in this piece… which is to say, the Earth is an “Earth” not because it’s an actual globe, subject to diminishing of resources, etc., but because Ditko’s point of view seeks to implicate the notion of “objective” reality – i.e., the Ditko view is the correct means of seeing “the world,” because it is (purportedly) the only view fully borne on rational observation. As such, when “Earth” speaks, it is an anthropomorphization of Ditko’s views, because Ditko’s views can ascertain the the world in its observable state… others are befuddled by abstractions and compromises.
That’s the joke of the piece. Environmentalists are attempting to save ‘the Earth,’ but they are actually an affront to Ditko’s World, a notion of rationality that supercedes all notions of sentimental caregiving. (Honestly, any sort of altruistic “caregiving” is a pretty bad idea in Ditko comics… and he HATES the notion of ‘caring for the Earth,’ that’s an affront to human progress, property rights, etc.)
(And before anyone asks, the reason human-esque superheros fight crime in otherwise anti-altruistic Ditko comics is — if Ditko’s graphic novel Static is to be taken as the official word — because they’re working from a rather extended self-interest, not so much saving hapless citizens from muggers but saving themselves in some hypothetical future… I don’t find this any more convincing than Ayn Rand accepting Social Security as a responsive taking of tax monies seized from her against her will, but maybe an A-list Ditko scholar can school me on this point.)
(Of course, another reason would be that ‘superheros’ never so much benefit luckless innocents as metaphorically expose the ideological failings of persons on the slope toward Evil, which is explicitly the direction Ditko has been taking his comics anyway in recent years… inhuman superheroes who lack any mortal concern.)
Actually, you’ve made the potential confusion here clearer to me… Ditko has used an “Earth” character in this way for decades and decades, always basically to indicate “the true state of things,” i.e. Ditko’s observations. But if you take the Earth as… the Earth, well that’s as much complicating factor as a potential source of humor!
pallas – Not that you’re saying this, but for the record, *I* don’t enjoy these ironically. I enjoy them because they’re part and parcel of the Ditko scheme – the properties of drawing he employs in these cartoons recur in his more complicated strips, all of them serving the messages at the center of much of his work… “much,” because part of reading Ditko is seeing how much of his political character does or does not become submerged into this or that assignment.
Also, maybe I’m just being charitable, but I really do think Ditko *intends* language like “Public Service Announcement” to be humorous… this IS a man who’s recently taken to spelling out the issue numbers of his new comics phonetically (Ate Tea N, #9 Teen) for no apparent reason other than he’s feeling whimsical…
Jog- Yeah it could be Ditko is very intentionally being humorous. It’s sort of hard to tell, like with Frank Miller’s All Star Batman, to what extend the artist is in on the joke, in part I think because neither really do interviews where they state their intent, I’m guessing.
I think it’s worth noting that Ditko didn’t draw “Earth”, but an abstraction (and anthropomorph-ization) of Earth… the Earth is made up of latitude and longitude lines, rather than continents and sea. Ditko’s Earth is only a human construct than anything physical…