Steve Ditko’s ‘Toyland’
by Batton LashWith all the recent discussion of the Watchmen movie, the most talked-about character seems to be the morally uncompromising Rorschach. Originally intended to be a scathing satire/commentary on Objectivism, Rorschach was based on a character called The Question, whose principles were informed by Objectivist philosophy. The artist who created The Question is the legendary Steve Ditko, best known for co-creating Spider-Man.
Ditko is still very much active as both a cartoonist and as the author of essays in which he discusses such subjects as comics history, “creative” crediting, the media, and the dichotomy of philosophy and politics in comics and popular culture. His writing frequently appears in The Comics, a small press newsletter published monthly by Robin Snyder.
Ditko has recently written an essay titled “Toyland,” which I think will be of great interest to Big Hollywood readers. Ditko takes exception to how the popular culture has been shanghaied by the creatively bankrupt and the morally dishonest. I believe Ditko’s essay applies not only to comics, but to pop culture across the board.
Ditko (through his publisher, Robin Snyder) has granted permission for “Toyland” to be posted on Big Hollywood. “Toyland” is an important piece by one of comics’s all-time greats and deserves to be read by as large an audience as possible.
TOYLAND
S. Ditko
Like in the James Bond movies where Bond is given a license, by an authority, an official government permission to kill enemies threatening the British crown, there is a license to destroy, not from a government or a law, but one by some authority to establish a precedent, the principle of destruction, a permission to destroy a certain type of threat or enemy.
This can be seen, shown, with a recent real life example.
A Russian, Alexander Livinenko, became a British citizen and was living and working in London. Some authority gave another person a license to poison, to kill, Livinenko.
The authority, license, operates in military combat with soldiers facing an enemy.
It’s with criminal gangs, their power struggles with hit men, contract kill, etc.
It’s with the law/police against armed criminals, killers.
And it’s even with rioters believing they have the authority and license to smash, destroy, loot the property of others and to terrorize, even kill, the innocent who get in their way.
It doesn’t matter the type of immoral, illegal authority that grants the license to kill, smash, destroy an individual or make thousands of human lives into corpses. The principle (and motive) is the same as will become increasingly clear and convincing.
So let’s examine the license context. One would think that book, newspaper and magazine, publishers, editors, writers, anyone whose main tools are facts, words, definitions, language for valid communications, would be the greatest defenders, have the greatest self-interest in, self-respect for, facts, reason, logic, objectivity, valid definitions and seek the clearest, most honest communications with self and from others with all communication products respecting reality, man, mind and life.
One would also believe them to be vigilantly against all attempts, all forms, of anti-reality, anti-mind/reason, against fallacies, deceptions, corruptions of truth, propaganda, against all forms of deceit, irrationality in communications and in life.
But with that very understanding of what correct, honest communications must consist of is the very tempting opportunity to cheat, manipulate and corrupt with words, language, communications for one’s own dishonest, unfair, undeserved, unearned advantage.
So the power for the good is also the power for tempting, compromising, and the opportunity to corrupt, to even destroy, the good for one’s own dishonest gains.
It is first done by rejecting the values of one’s own mind, its rational integrity. That mind then must keep rejecting facts of reality, of A is A, of objectivity, of truth, honest communications and keep denying justice, the truly earned and deserved.
It is a damning self-confession.
It is a confession of deliberately seeking, wanting, granting to oneself, the authority, the license, to be anti-reality, anti-man/mind and, not only to get away with it but, to be rewarded, to profit from, the deliberate negation of rational, positive, life values.
Another real life example. The press has rejected the principle of objectivity, of the truth corresponding to a fact of reality, that A is A, for their self-serving claim: “The public has a right to know.” What that objectively means is that an abstraction, “the public”, a non-biological entity, a non-living entity, a nothing like a ghost or a gremlin that one cannot see, point to, in fact and in reality, actually exists as a single, living being.
So the non-existing has a moral, legal “right” to be told whatever can be known and by whatever immoral, illegal means because the press authorities “license” their news gathering methods and practices.
Check the library. There are regularly published books on deliberate, biased reporting methods, of slanted coverage, doctored photographs, tapes, etc. concerning business (bad), the environment (good), the war (bad), profits (very bad), etc.
Yet, the “public’s right to know” via radio, TV, newspapers is not given to the public for free. That “right” has to be first paid for by individuals with a prior cost of a radio, purchase of a TV set or paid for daily with newspapers.
So we have a press industry, an authority, giving itself a license to be non-objective like leaders of nations, authorities, keep giving themselves and the United Nations authorities a license to be unconcerned with actual rights, freedoms, of dictatorial member nation’s citizens.
The comic fans variation of that authority and license is their claim that they have a “right” to interview professionals, to know what is none of their business, to publish any “fact”, “truth”, arbitrary opinion about the industry and its professionals.
Examples of their authority and non-objective license are found wherever fans express themselves.
2.
We can now turn to a specific case relevant to the comic industry.
“Asked point blank by a fan if things in the Marvel Universe will ever go back to normal after being ‘screwed up’ by House of M and Civil War, Joe Quesada said, ‘These toys are meant to be broken. If we just told stories that kept the status quo, nobody would be in this room, and I’d be out of a job. They’re meant to be thrown against a wall, smashed together, and built back up again.’” (“Baltimore 06: Cup o Joe”, Newsarama.com, 10 September 2006.)
First, let’s examine and understand a necessary and fundamental distinction: The natural (disease, germs, etc.) and the man/mind made (science, medicine, cars, computers, etc.).
Everything man/mind made serves some purpose of being useful, good, practical or mistaken, useless, bad.
And almost everything man/mind made can be used to serve some purpose that it was not originally, purposefully made for: Airplanes are made, used, for air transportation, a human good, a value for living. But they were used as a deliberate terrorist weapon for the destruction of a life-serving, economic creation and for the deaths of innocent lives.
Every mind can identify the authority and the license involved in that destructive action.
And words can be and are used for all kinds of negative purposes, for excuses, lying, rationalizing, propaganda, ideologies, pseudo-sciences, prestige, etc.
With that, let’s examine that Joe Quesada sentence and some key words in the full context of comic book characters, stories, editing and publishing.
“These toys are meant to be broken”, “smashed together” and “status quo”.
“Broken” and “smashed” are not creative concepts but aggressive and destructive.
Next, there are two definitions of a toy: (1) “…a thing of little importance; trifle” and (2) “a plaything especially for children.”
So the purpose of a toy can be useless, negative or useful, positive depending on the particular context and on the toy’s purpose, function, of why it was made and what the end or goal it serves.
So a super hero comic book, a super hero, can be seen, held, as a “toy”, a “trifle”, of little use, value, to human life, so only fit to be “smashed”, “broken”.
Or the comic book, the “hero”, can be seen, held, as important, useful, a real value for man/mind and life.
It all depends on the evaluating, judging mind, the degree of rationality, reasoning, and what is believed, accepted, as a valid standard of value–the intrinsic, subjective or objective– that is used, operating.
A toy as a plaything for a child can be for a purpose of activating, stimulating, broadening his mind toward new experiences, discoveries, opportunities, benefits, possibilities, etc.
A toy doll can give a young girl all kinds of new experiences, of playing at being a friend, a sister or even a parent, etc.
A toy game for a young boy can be used to play with learning various skills, being adventurous, competitive, competent, even suggesting a future career.
A further elaboration on toys is with the Montessori School for young children (3-6 yrs.). The Montessori teaching method is teaching with toys. A young mind implicitly learns identity–A is A, causality, if/then, etc.– in having to fit round, square or odd-shaped objects into their appropriate holes on a board.
Toy building blocks teach a mind that there must first be a solid base, a foundation, to build, erect, a firm block structure (pyramid, etc.). There is an implied hierarchy, ranking, for the whole to stand, exist.
What is learned implicitly is that contradictions of identity, A is A, cannot lead to success in the real world.
It is the still emotionally-driven mind that gets frustrated and wants to “smash” the “toy”, the learning device, when it can’t get the material, the identities, to act any way it emotionally wants: A square piece in a round hole, etc.
The child’s mind has to identify, understand, learn to train the beginning of an ordered mind in the actual, successful doing. A pleasurable, rewarding experience.
A child’s mind learns that if he wants a certain effect–standing blocks, etc.–his mind has to obey the non-contradictory, the facts, identities of reality.
In contrast, the Summerhill School for young children, like progressive education, rejects reality, i.e. identity, reason, objectivity, for subjectivism and a disordered mind.
The child is not to learn how to think, not to develop cognitive, intellectual efficacy, not to be an independent thinker, not to be an individual.
The child is taught to have a community, group, mind, to have collective opinions as to true knowledge on issues such as the environment (“Stop killing, murdering, trees”), scientific and ethical issues and practices, to have collective opinions on social issues (the “poor”, the “needy”, others less fortunate, etc.) and all involving a child’s mind needing reliable knowledge, understanding, of psychology, morality, politics, etc., a whole philosophy.
The progressive child is taught, encouraged, to act on whim, on emotions, for gratifications, emotionally to “smash” what has a specific identity for no reason other than that group mind can’t competently deal with objective facts, identities.
Facts, truths, the real, are to be “smashed”, “broken”, as the workable best and the rational good, as the destroyed successful Twin Towers business offices and destroyed productive workers lives are to be replaced with justifying fantasy and illusions that the destroyed towers can be rebuilt better than before and that the murdered human individuals don’t really matter as, in justice, they should.
Those valued irreplaceable identities had to be “smashed”, “broken”, for no other reason than to express feelings of being unfit for the real world, expressed by turning valuable entities, “toys”, into pieces, into rubble, into corpses, into anti-authentic identities, all to “create” a pseudo self-esteem with irrational beliefs and actions.
The Progressives‘, all anti-objective education’s, goal is to teach, train, the child’s mind the need to “smash” particularly the status quo like property rights, i.e. the right to life, that the abstract community “mind”, meaning some authority with a license, decides what is to be “smashed”, to be “broken”, turned into a non-, an anti-identity for some common good.
But what can one build from anything smashed?
The NYC Twin Towers were “smashed” into rubble. What was built is a rubble dump, graveyard material.
All the identities were “smashed” for no greater purpose than to destroy that which others had created and to kill innocent, productive human beings, all that to create a pseudo-self-esteem, an illusion of righteous power.
That kind of “smashed together” destroying is always in the name of some greater, higher purpose or good, be it religious, social, humanitarian, environmental or artistic.
“…stories that kept the status quo…”
The dictionary definition of status quo: “[L., lit., the state in which] the existing state of affairs (at any specific time), or existing condition {of anything specified): also ”.
So “status quo” means something constant, not changing like a law, a marriage, an existing comic book company or the latest on-going editor, etc.
Does keeping the “status quo” in Marvel Comics stories mean doing the same story idea over and over again and again–the “hero” defeats the villain, the “hero” keeps having personal problems, etc.?
But there never was any real “status quo” in Marvel stories or Marvel would just keep continually repeating, reprinting, the first original comic titles with no further, different issues made, published.
If there is to be no “status quo” then all the characters, their names, relationships, “toys”, have to also be “broken”, “smashed together” with all completely new “toys” with every issue.
And if no “status quo”, then stop all reprinting.
Stop making “status quo”, “hero” statues, “toys”.
Smash merchandising.
Smash Marvel Comics (which is actually being done, with slow rot, without being realized).
So a super “hero” comic book, a story, is held as a “toy” with no real value, a “trifle” and of no real worth, importance, for a mind to see, buy, read, and must be “smashed” into some non-identity rubble.
Let’s compare comic book stories with more serious novels. Both deal with handling characters lives, choices, actions and with good or bad results, endings.
Both forms give buyers/readers a fairly large menu of different types, degrees, of men/women characters, goals, why they choose to act the way they do, what for, and how they will or must end up as they do. It’s: If this identity, then this must follow and end as it does.
In all stories, the reader/viewer can decide which characters he likes/dislikes, admires, would like to be like, to avoid, to fear, or envy, etc. He has choices.
If there are “smashed” identities of contradictory identifications, then everyone becomes a non-entity, indefinable by any valid standard.
The black-and-white standard has already been agreed upon by the majority as “smashed” into a grey rubble of more or less grey, into anti-heroes and non-entities, down to zeroes, a nothing, so useless.
The much maligned B-westerns showed a clearly defined moral code, a standard. Those westerns identified a range from good to degrees of wrong, to the bad/evil.
The cowboy in the “white hat” (good), the hero, fights fair, helps people in distress, defends the law, fights rustlers, lawbreakers, etc. He acts as an agent of justice.
The cowboy in the “black hat” (the bad), the villain, fights unfairly, cheats, stabs, shoots people in the back, steals property, robs banks, rustles cattle, etc. He acts as an agent of the bad.
The cowboy in the “grey hat” (a sneak), tips off the villains about gold shipments, spies on the sheriff, on honest people with wealth, spreads lies, is an agitator, etc. He is an agent of compromise and corruption.
The honest but uncertain sheriff doesn’t have the information, knowledge, about the newcomer hero, so he’s suspicious, tending to believe the lies of the local black and grey hats who are posing as helpful and honest townspeople. He is an agent still collecting, weighing, actions, evidence, for a legal judgment.
The confused heroine is also not trusting the hero because of the uncertainty of the sheriff and the lies from the black and grey hats. She is an agent of emotional and moral uncertainty.
Later, the anti-hero western’s realism muddied the clear identities into greyness: “We’re all alike,” “Nobody is better than anyone else.”
Black, grey, white western identities were “smashed” and the new “status quo” offered a character menu of hash or a stew with no clear identities to recognize, know and savor.
One who reads Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple will find her saying “I don’t like bad people who do bad things,” and “It’s a wicked act and the wicked should not go unpunished.”
There is the goal of her Hercules Poirot: “The truth, always the truth,” and his Spanish proverb: “God says take what you want, then pay the price.”
Far too many today are the takers unwilling to pay any price.
They want mercy not justice. They do not want to be treated as they deserve.
They want to be treated better than they deserve.
So what kind of man-/mind-made offerings have the most value, worth, the clearest or the muddiest, for the best, the benevolent, or the worst, the malevolent kind of human mind?
The only real choice is: It‘s either/or.
Conclusion
So what is ignored/evaded is that there is a long, ongoing “status quo” in Marvel Comics company’s very existence and publishing that needs to be “broken”, “smashed together”.
There are periodic operational changes in the company’s “status quo” with different editors. But while these new editors create different personal styles, they all maintain the same editorial “status quo”, that same anti-hero premise.
That anti-hero premise was initiated by a prior authority and is continually licensed to the new, changing, “status quo” editors.
Quesada himself is only the latest “status quo” mind, a different editorial body change with the same “status quo” editorial mind, the same “license” from the same original anti-hero “authority”.
That same ongoing “license” is to “smash”, create “broken” “toys”, i.e. various negative, destructive ideas, art, in a super hero story.
Every new “status quo” editor has the “license” and the incentive to “smash” whatever aspect of a hero that particular editor’s whim finds gratifying.
What has to be ultimately “broken”, “smashed” into a non-identity, is the original idea not of a valid comic book super hero but the idea that man is a rational animal, that a hero is any person admired for his qualities or achievements and regarded as an ideal or model, that a hero is a moral agent of justice embodying A is A.
That idea of an authentic hero is the ever remaining, indestructible “status quo”.
That ideal, that “status quo”, is always rejected by all “licensed” editors continually trying to “smash” some positive man/mind made values (“toys”) and continually unable to touch the reality of man and a hero.
So which identities, “status quo”, remain at Marvel? One is the ongoing identifying label of “super hero”. The “authority”, “licensers”, desired, preferred label is anti-hero with all its implications and manifestations.
The Marvel editorial mind could really try to “smash” the Law of Identity–A is A–of man as a hero, by smashing not the second, merely conventional hero label–Spider-Man–but what some editors tried to “smash” with the new Spider-Man costume: his visual identity, with a different, anti-Spider-Man costume, but the original costume, its identity, its reality, the original creation, is the original creation, the visual, existing Spider-Man, and that “status quo” identity stymies them if Spider-Man is Spider-Man.
They need that original creation because they still want, need, to keep feeding off the two labels: super hero, Spider-Man, and my costume design, off the “toy” believed, held, as a “trifle”.
So as much as the “status quo” Marvel editorial mentalities act to destroy, want to have them “smashed” to create “broken” pieces, those identities continue to mock, ridicule, their motive and their anti-hero, anti-mind behavior.
Beyond Quesada’s explicit confession to create “smashed”, “broken” “toys”, his confession clearly reveals, exposes, the source, the actual origin and the one who first assumed the authority, the power, and who first initiated, practiced, the idea that a hero is a “toy” to be “smashed”, “broken”, as an ongoing editorial anti-hero policy and duty.
That original source authorized the perpetual “licensing“, the sanctioning, of the nihilist principle of envy. That authority sanctioned in thought, action, goal and end to “smash”, destroy, the real identities of a rational man/mind and the just hero (toy”, “status quo”).
That authority sanctioned envy, the hatred of the good, the just, pro-life serving, because it is the good.
That authority, in rejecting the idea of a valid comic book hero, started undercutting, deforming, the hero, contradicting the hero’s identity, greying him so that one is unable to know what is the right, good, and what it means to be an agent of justice.
At that time in the 1960s, the overwhelming number of people in the comic industry (fans included) believed that a comic book character, especially a costumed character, was a hero fighting criminals and villains. There was the implicit black/white, villain/hero standard.
That authority started by showing it is permissible to deface a “toy”, a hero, to esthetically start to spoil, introduce rot into, a hero’s stature, identity, so soon no one will be able to know or to care what is objectively right or good or heroic.
The degree of tampering, undercutting, was not the true goal but that of those true heroic qualities, values, identities, of a hero as an agent of justice. Those identities were to “smashed”, “broken”, for all time.
This was not just a mistaken, free will choice. The freedom to undercut, deform, is a license, an ongoing editorial operating principle. It is a pseudo-creation, a higher “heroic” ideal and is a deliberate fraud, fake, an anti-hero as the true heroic, just ideal.
That original authority violated the Law of the Excluded Middle: It‘s either/or. Either a character named a hero (A) is a hero or that character named a hero is not a hero (not A).
There is no middle ground.
The deliberate introduction of some middle ground element, identity, is a violation, contradiction.
It is like deliberately introducing, accepting, spoilage (rot) into healthy food, introducing, accepting, intellectual spoilage (fallacies, lies, etc.) into healthy minds; introducing, accepting, moral spoilage (emotionalism) into healthy, ethical behavior; introducing, accepting, physical spoilage (germs as daily vitamins) into a healthy body.
That original authority started the downward slide on the negative, anti-, slippery slope by claiming the anti-, the flawed “hero”, is the “true”, “just” “hero” by the introduction and sanctioning of all kinds of spoilage (flaws, neurotic behavior, etc.).
With an authority, a licensing and sanctioning, the downward slide had to continue with increasingly greater spoilage and rot (the alcoholic Iron Man) to a continuing sliding downward to the level of hero stories, heroes, as “toys” to be “smashed”, “broken”, to where we now have some Marvel covers showing their super heroes in stages of rot, decay, the biological form of “smashed”, “broken”.
As an aside, other comic company editors, writers, have taken the authority, license, to kill some heroes. All companies do kill some supporting characters more for a shock gimmick, confessing their incompetence at achieving a needed, ongoing, dramatic story line. At DC, Speedy, the Green Arrow’s kid partner, became a drug addict and there was the death of Superman and his “humanizing” so to be no better at handling his personal problems, life, than people in therapy.
As with the press mentality and its subjective floating abstractions of “the public” and the “right to know”, the Marvel editorial mind operates with its subjective, floating abstractions “super” and “hero”, neither “super” nor “hero” in any true correspondence to the correct intellectual, moral action.
The damage done to the authentic concepts of “the public” and “the right to know” and “hero” is objectively real and unjust damage.
And damage is damage.
That which is “smashed” is “smashed” and that which is rotten is rotten.
But there are things, identities, in fact, truth, justice, that will remain untouchable, inviolate, indestructible, not to be smashed: A is A and justice of the earned and the deserved as “status quos”, unchanging, enduring and ever inspiring.
If no A is A, no real identity and nothing is or can be what it is, then every word Joe Quesada said is not the word he said.
If a word cannot have a “status quo”, a specific, ongoing, conceptual meaning, identity, then there can be no real communication because then even identities such as Marvel Comics cannot be Marvel Comics.
But either Marvel Comics is Marvel Comics or Marvel Comics is not Marvel Comics.
Which do you believe?
One cannot have it both ways at the same time and in the same respect.
It’s either (A is A) or (A is not A).
And one has to accept the consequences of one’s choice.
Either a super hero is a super hero, having all the legitimate qualities of a super hero, or the super hero is not a super hero and does not have the valid super hero qualities, identity, and therefore is a deliberate fraud, fake and a lie.
There must be a necessary “status quo” with ongoing identities.
Either Marvel Comics is Marvel Comics, a Marvel editor is a Marvel editor, and both are absolutely known, understood and can be continually, truthfully communicated or words, identities (Marvel, Marvel editor) must only be words as “toys”, to be continually, eternally “smashed”, “broken”, and then there must only be endless conversing in a “smashed”, “broken” alphabet, in useless, meaningless sound waves.
It’s either/or, A or not A, or the famous “You can’t eat your cake and have it, too.”
There’s a long, historical, ongoing war against the rational mind, reason, against an objective reality, with all kinds, forms, of protesters, “smashers”: religious, nominalist, ideologues, the politically correct, ethnicities, subjectivists, pragmatist, etc. All the anti-minds using all kinds of authentic concepts such as “the public” and “the right to know”, “reason”, “hero”, etc., to destroy the rational mind/reason and objective identification, understanding, and communication and actions such as by using planes to destroy property and human lives.
A mind must accept, use, A is A even in the very attempt to reject, “smash”, identity.
Everyone who has read this far has accepted A is A to some degree. But not everyone will choose to accept what has been written as convincing or even important. Many will not be willing to continue to think about the issues or care to present their own case or be willing to face up to the implications or accept any valid conclusions. The material will be discarded like the latest newspaper reports on problems, issues, etc., the way most problems are dismissed, left to others. There will continue to be a stagnant, undefined, unsettling, uncomfortable status quo.
And the unvoiced thought: “Why doesn’t someone else make everything right?”
The anti-identity mind contains the mental “broken”, “smashed” identities of a self-“authorizing”, a self-“licensing”, a self-smashing of the rational, objective potentials in reality and in that mind.
It’s a free will choice of self-negation.
One should accept the anti-minded for what it is, the anti-life. That anti-premise can only offer and deliver piles, forms, of “smashed”, “broken” authentic potentials and actualities in the continuing slide down the slippery slope of anti-reality.
It’s a choice every mind has to continue to make and it will get the results it deserves, not in the pseudo-results of prestige, popularity, status, etc., but in justice, the truly, honestly earned and deserved.
Reality is the ultimate authority and its “license” of justice, in treating everyone objectively, is not in the immediate “public history” of losses (jobs, opportunities, etc.) or gains (prestige, money, etc.) but in real history’s record where a man/mind/action has truly earned and deserved his mark or his stain.
“Toyland” is ©2007 Steve Ditko and originally appeared in the September, October, and November 2007 issues of The Comics, published by Robin Snyder.
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46 Comments
And it's not getting any better. Power plays, expediency rules the day, all in the service of self-service with little or no consequences. And 'reality is as I define it' is heard in board rooms and conference rooms in business and government across the land. Hard to imagine how a creative, insightful mind such as Ditko's hasn't lost a tread.
Ditko needs to pick one descriptor per sentence and leave it at that. Definitely nailed the current trend in popular culture to have one's cake and eat it too. Why superhero comics are sucking so bad right now is because they are being created by people who don't believe in good and evil. Its all relative in the zeitgeist.
Marvel's current iteration of "War Machine" is no different. He goes to Iraq ("Aqiria") and the greatest evil he can find is Blackwater ("Eagelstar")?! And DC is every bit as bad. The "Justice League" just had an issue long argument about who was in or out of the team. Lots of problems and dysfunction, no bad guys.
Ditko speaks about facts as a baseline, but we live in an era where we can't even agree on what is reality. People are rewriting history with regularity. "The USSR was not so bad, FDR knew about Pearl Harbor beforehand, 9/11 was an inside job." And the media/arts makers believe this garbage at worst or don't want to upset these nutcases at best.
Bosch Fawstin would appear to be a bit of a white hat in the medium at the moment. Maybe his comics will find an audience and encourage some more pop culture artists to go after truth (damn the consequences).
My comment was already taken…Holy Cow that was awesome! I was intrigued by the anti-hero, but only as an underbelly, not as the status quo. And not for characters I love, like Spidey, Captain America, etc…
I never bought that whole "deconstruction" business viz Watchmen and comics. Academic blather. Comics never needed deconstruction. They self-decondtructed with every issue.
Good to see Ditko is still at it. He and Alan Moore should get together on a project.
Have you been following Cap? I hope when Steve Rogers comes back, they let him be genuine Cap. I am enjoying Matt Fraction's take on Iron Man so far.
Not being a reader of comic books, I narrowed in on this bit:
“These toys are meant to be broken”, “smashed together” and “status quo”.
“Broken” and “smashed” are not creative concepts but aggressive and destructive.
Next, there are two definitions of a toy: (1) “…a thing of little importance; trifle” and (2) “a plaything especially for children.”
So the purpose of a toy can be useless, negative or useful, positive depending on the particular context and on the toy’s purpose, function, of why it was made and what the end or goal it serves.
So a super hero comic book, a super hero, can be seen, held, as a “toy”, a “trifle”, of little use, value, to human life, so only fit to be “smashed”, “broken”.
Or the comic book, the “hero”, can be seen, held, as important, useful, a real value for man/mind and life.
I think all of that pretty much sums up the cultural climate I grew up in, me who was born in 1967 and heard most of my young life that there were no such things as heros, who needs heros? Be your own hero yada yada yada, and how the open classroom would 'break down all barriers' to education and the only way someone could be classified as serious…nay, TALENTED…was if they were 'questioning.' Why should I question when I already like the answer? That men are men and women are women and they are endlessly fascinated with each other and its fun to get to know each other…that maybe barriers are there for a reason and one thing I am ALWAYS telling my daughter is "you cant break the rules if you dont even know what they are to begin with." And that is the state of our cultural decay: we dont even know the rules anymore because the toy has been broken…so why should I play with the toy?
I love all the other things he says about identity – being adopted that has real implications for me. This article has given me a LOT to think about. Thank you.
Marvel was always the company of the flawed hero. However, the flawed hero did the right thing in the end. That's what made Spider-Man so appealing: "With great power, comes great responsibility."
If you look at the last five years of Marvel continuity (especially), you will see heroes villified, villains elevated to prominant status, smashed alliances and storylines either unresolved or end bitterly. Peter Parker has gone from honoring his uncle's memory to making a deal with the devil to save his aunt. It's like he learned NOTHING, and therefore, did the fan of the series really learn anything?
[...] titan he founded. Apple shares have surged in the 10 weeks since Jobs stepped away on a five Steve Ditko’s ‘Toyland’ – bighollywood.breitbart.com 04/07/2009 With all the recent discussion of the Watchmen movie, the [...]
Steve Ditko…I remember those trippy Dr. Strange panels. Well…I have tremendous respect for Ditko but that piece felt very college freshman late-night pot or Red Bull fueled screed to me, good points and all. I have to agree with Whiskey though(*gasp*)–comic books aren't really kiddie fare anymore except for a small percentage of clearly marked titles that stick to the time honored themes of good/evil/secret identity. Kids' gateway fantasy medium is arguably going to be video games for the foreseeable future. Ditko's right that mainstream comics are sort of a joke–every succeeding editor reshapes the whole ball of wax with seldom any improvement or respect for what came before. I liked parts of Civil War (by the way OverMind, the Thor Clone killed Black Goliath–I remember him from the 70's when he was part of the wave of often-lame black superheroes. Of that group, Black Panther and Luke Cage are still around, and somehow so is DC's Black Lightening) But it ended very weakly, and things seem to be underway to undermine the whole hero registration thing by the current regime. DC is no better–will Infinite Crisis NEVER end?? But at least Hal Jordan and Barry Allen are back.
Sharon, I was also born in 1967, and I was very much taught that heroes existed, but I was also taught to question my teachers. I grew up on New York's upper West Side–yes, we were all pretty much issued "Free To Be You and Me"–but I was also taught to look for the friendly cop who walked the beat (do cops walk beats anymore?) and to develop a good pretentious twit aka b.s. detector. I dunno…I've always felt that those who questioned the status quo tended to make the greatest developments in civilization, from Galileo on up. Sometimes the only way to learn (when young) is to flout the rules, fail spectacularly and start over (hopefully) a little smarter.
—- maybe barriers are there for a reason and one thing I am ALWAYS telling my daughter is "you cant break the rules if you dont even know what they are to begin with." —-
"Never take a wall down until you know why it was put up." – G.K. Chesterton
[...] DIAMOND JEWELRY put an intriguing blog post on Steve Ditkoâ [...]
Ditko can get pedantic at times, but when he is on, as with "Static" and "The Safest Place on Earth" there is no one better. He is a serious guy whose talent has hardly diminished in 40 years.
[...] OK, now show me some pictures put an intriguing blog post on Steve Ditkoâ [...]
Wow – Ditko's really gone off the deep end.
I suspected he was crazy when he refused to step forward to accept the accolades and monetary rewards that Stan Lee has for co-creating Spidey. Instead, he's become the JD Salinger of comic books, occasionally surfacing to spout such nonsense as the manifesto above.
Meawnhile, Stan Lee's become a household name and multimillionaire, while Ditko, foolishly clinging to some weird sense of pride (still angry that Lee made the right choice by making Norman Osborn the Goblin, perhaps?) remains relatively unknown outside the world of comics.
[...] View original here: Steve Ditko’s ‘Toyland’ [...]
A friend of mine from high school draws for Marvel/DC comics and has worked on some of their biggest properties in the past 10 years. He'd moved from Texas and was living in NYC during 9/11 and know he was deeply affected by the attack at the time. Is he a political conservative? Well, probably not at all anymore.
He doesn't write the words in the comics but every one of his panels and covers are amazing.
Thanks, Batton, for bringing this to our attention. I was unaware that Ditko was writing essays recently.
Eh… the thing is, when it came to dialogue Ditko more-than-occasionally seemed/seems to not care to differentiate between writing characters who embodied Objectivist philosophy and character who went around yakking about Objectivist philosophy in the midst of their adventuring.
I should correct myself in referring to Watchmen as being a Ditko "parody," since thats not wholly accurate to the finished product or the intent – that "background" of Watchmen is that DC aquired the rights to the defunct Charlton Comics stable of 60s characters and contracted Moore to do a series retooling them for the 80s. When he submitted his story, they LOVED it and knew they had a smash hit on their hands… but also that using the actual Charlton characters would render them unable to be integrated into the family-friendly "mainstream" DC continuity. The mutually-agreed solution was for Moore to replace the Charlton guys with rough-analogues of his own making (The Question = Rorschach, Blue Beetle = Nite Owl, Captain Atom = Dr. Manhattan covers the Ditko creations) and do his story anyway; resulting in Watchmen.
As a kid I began collecting comic books by virtue of never getting rid of any. When my mother did the grocery shopping, she would give me a dollar to buy comics from the drug store next to the market. I could pass the time by reading stories of heroes who inspired me.
Although never really recognized as such, comics then weren't only for kids, but the entire family. Comic books were easily accessible, not just in quantity, by being in nearly every newsstand, drug store and many super-markets, but also in content. Anyone of any age could pick up a comic book featuring a super hero, soldier, teenager, funny animal, etc. and actually be entertained. I know, of course, comics have always been treated as the red-headed step child of the entertainment industry and most adults seldom picked one up. The point here is, though, that they could. They could be entertained and even occasionally learn something. Many was the time I scrambled for my Collegiate dictionary while reading of fantastic adventures in places near and far by people I could look up to, people I could cheer for… good guys.
My family went through a difficult stretch for a few years as I became a teen. At the time I preferred the DC line of stories because I wanted to escape, even momentarily, our problems. The Marvel universe, while having some great characters, often seemed to get bogged down in the hero's own moral dilemmas. While that made them more "real" (which is silly, we're talking about super-powered people in comic books), I had enough of my own problems that I really didn't want to read those of others, real or imaginary.
In my 20s I got something new: a car payment. I quit buying comic books altogether save for an occasional back issue. Fast forward to 2008. My 12 year old daughter is proving to have some of the same art skills as her dad. Even better than when I was that age. To encourage her, I pulled out some old comic books. She loved them and the work of people like Neal Adams, Walt Simonson, Marshall Rogers and Steve Ditko, among others, really animated her desire to draw.
Her interest renewed mine. But I had heard some things about the downward slide comic books had taken: characters I loved 're-imagined" into something I no longer recognized. The politically correct obligation the companies feel to have super heros question their sexuality, for instance. Even implied incest between two of Marvel's characters. Clearly, these are no longer story lines suitable for any age. Add to that the implosion of comic book circulation after speculators gave up on them in the 1990s. Leading to comic books all but disappearing from store shelves, outside of comic shops.
The solution, I found, was Archie Comics. Yeah, you can wrinkle up your nose and say "cornball", but the fact is the values of the Archie line haven't changed much in 50 years. What's right is right, what's wrong is wrong. The stories are still fun and appropriate for any age. The art is pretty good too. They inspire my daughter to practice drawing and story telling. They entertain us both. I don't have to worry about thinly disguised adult-themed material slipping into the plot. As for me, I've decided to not even bother with the new stuff. I'm just looking to fill gaps in my collection. The irony is, while I'm not rich, I have a helluva lot more than a dollar to spend on comic books these days.
I bought her subscriptions to four Archie titles. Cornball maybe, but "wholesome" is the word I'd rather use.
As a kid I began collecting comic books by virtue of never getting rid of any. When my mother did the grocery shopping, she would give me a dollar to buy comics from the drug store next to the market. I could pass the time by reading stories of heroes who inspired me.
Although never really recognized as such, comics then weren't only for kids, but the entire family. Comic books were easily accessible, not just in quantity, by being in nearly every newsstand, drug store and many super-markets, but also in content. Anyone of any age could pick up a comic book featuring a super hero, soldier, teenager, funny animal, etc. and actually be entertained. I know, of course, comics have always been treated as the red-headed step child of the entertainment industry and most adults seldom picked one up. The point here is, though, that they could. They could be entertained and even occasionally learn something. Many was the time growing up I scrambled for my Collegiate dictionary while reading of fantastic adventures in places near and far by people I could look up to, people I could cheer for… good guys.
My family went through a difficult stretch for a few years as I became a teen. At the time I preferred the DC line of stories because I wanted to escape, even momentarily, our problems. The Marvel universe, while having some great characters, often seemed to get bogged down in the hero's own moral dilemmas. While that made them more "real" (which is silly, we're talking about super-powered people in comic books), I had enough of my own problems that I really didn't want to read those of others, real or imaginary.
In my 20s I got something new: a car payment. I quit buying comic books altogether save for an occasional back issue. Fast forward to 2008. My 12 year old daughter is proving to have some of the same art skills as her dad. Even better than when I was that age. To encourage her, I pulled out some old comic books. She loved them and the work of people like Neal Adams, Walt Simonson, Marshall Rogers and Steve Ditko, among others, really animated her desire to draw.
Her interest renewed mine. But I had heard some things about the downward slide comic books had taken: characters I loved 're-imagined" into something I no longer recognized. The politically correct obligation the companies feel to have super heros question their sexuality, for instance. Even implied incest between two of Marvel's characters. Clearly, these are no longer story lines suitable for any age. Add to that the implosion of comic book circulation after speculators gave up on them in the 1990s. Leading to comic books all but disappearing from store shelves, outside of comic shops.
The solution, I found, was Archie Comics. Yeah, you can wrinkle up your nose and say "cornball", but the fact is the values of the Archie line haven't changed much in 50 years. What's right is right, what's wrong is wrong. The stories are still fun and appropriate for any age. The art is pretty good too. They inspire my daughter to practice drawing and story telling. They entertain us both. I don't have to worry about thinly disguised adult-themed material slipping into the plot. As for me, I've decided to not even bother with the new stuff. I'm just looking to fill gaps in my collection. The irony is, while I'm not rich, I have a helluva lot more than a dollar to spend on comic books these days.
I bought her subscriptions to four Archie titles. Cornball maybe, but "wholesome" is the word I'd rather use.
Isn't Ditko essentially a recluse? The photo at the top of the post is decades old and Ditko refuses to let his photo be taken. You know what would be very strange, but very entertaining? A conversation between Ditko and Alan Moore.
[...] Toyland and ethics. [...]
Naybob, there's a lot of nonsense in your reply.
First, Ditko "refused to step forward to accept the accolades and monetary rewards" for Spider-Man? That implies that the monetary rewards were offered. Did Jack Kirby refuse them for his many characters? Do Len Wein and Herb Trimpe refuse them for Wolverine? There are dozens of other examples I could name. In what weird fantasy world do you live that the owners of Spider-Man would hail and reward Ditko if only he'd ask them to?
Then you repeat the Green Goblin nonsense, which Ditko himself has refuted multiple times over the last decade, as recently as last month ("The Ever Unwilling", THE COMICS v20#3, March 2009).
I have to disagree with your assessment about Lucius Fox abandoning Bruce Wayne/Batman. He clearly tells Batman (before agreeing to help locate the Joker under the extreme circumstance) that as long as the cell phone surveillance machine was at Wayne Enterprises, he wouldn't be. Batman tells Fox that when the mission is through, to enter his name.
When Lucius types his name into the computer and the machine destroys itself, he nods with satisfaction and smiles to himself. At the same time, Batman says this in a voice-over: "…people deserve to have their faith rewarded." So while the movie does not explicitly say one way or the other whether Fox resigns, it is implied that he does not.
To the extent that I can understand this (I found it difficult to read), Ditko has some great points to make here. Too bad he doesn't express his ideas with the clarity and economy of novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand, who has no doubt influenced his thought in other respects.
Thanks for getting permission to post this, Batton.
Amazing that Steve Ditko writes the way that Rorshach talks.
I agree that I prefer heroes with solid morals battling villains without morals than I do anti-heroes battling each other, or what seems to be the theme of most Marvel comics, amoral powered beings fighting for survival with mankind simply in the middle.
I don't agree that this is conservative/liberal argument. It seemed to me that it was the conservatives in the '80s and '90s who argued most vehemently for the grim and gritty, "I'd just kill the bad guys so they never come back instead of putting them in some liberal, mamby-pamby prison where they'll just escape," but there were obviously a lot of writers/artists/creators of all political biases who agreed with that and dragged much of the industry down a sordid path.
Well, I think in your last couple of sentences you support my statement: "cant break the rules until you know what they are." I guess I was too busy trying to figure out what the rules were to really spend energy breaking them. And I totally get your point about how some of the best achievements come from breaking rules. In my obtuse way though I think what I wanted to say was not every rule should be broken. Doing so has led to some severe consequences. I didnt want to be the one that people would point to and say "dont do what that girl did" and they'd be right…
I grew up in a teeny town near Houston – the Old South has serious meaning here LOL and I learned about heros too ie police men, firemen (my father was a volunteer fireman) so I had plenty of examples of heroes all around me. Personally speaking, Im not too bright when it comes to BS detecting…I was taught the proper female role: be nice, be compliant, and always accept at face value (until proven otherwise.) Mama didnt teach that there were sociopaths who were good at deceiving. I had to learn that the hard way. Not having larger cultural heroes (because the Larger Culture was too busy knocking them down) I think helped prevent gaining any sense of what a villain would/could do.
Just me b.s.ing… LOL
But if I take Tolkien's side, then I'd say that four color comics are more moral as the producers are closer to the original wonder of mankind, and the destructive Punisher types do show justice, but they have not the touch of even higher things. This is basically an arguement that we are descending from a golden age, that we, the moderns are the degenerate children of greatness that we don't understand fully. And I'm pretty sure Tolkien would agree with that sentiment as I do as well.
I believe I read that Ditko was offered some sort of money when the first "Spider-man" movie was released, (probably to avoid the Siegal-Shuster controversy that dogged the '76 "Superman" film), and he refused the money because it wasn't in his original contract and he doesn't accept money he hasn't earned.
Sorry you had to learn the hard way…I find a good b.s. detector to be one of life's necessities, no matter where you grew up. And of course, some rules like, "sit down while the plane is taking off" make a lot of sense. But just because I grew up in NYC in the Woody Allen Golden Age doesn't mean my folks didn't train me to appreciate/value the important things.
[...] CVN Business created an interesting post today on Steve Ditkoâ [...]
I feel sorry for Steve Ditko after reading "Toyland." He sounds like a disillusioned man. I was a kid during the very early days of Marvel and, naturally, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko were my favorite artists. I always thought that Ditko's artwork for Dr. Strange was better than that for Spider-Man. The Dr. Strange panels conveyed a creepy sense of menacing forces just outside of our senses (the realms of Nightmare and Dormamu.). He brought that same quality to House of Mystery and the other anthology comics that Marvel was so good at. But then I became a man and "Put away childish things." I hope that kids today get the same kick out of their comics that I got out of mine but I doubt it.
Sojourner, I don't know if Grant generally avoids rumour-mongering, but that's definitely what he's doing there, though at least he has the decency to load it up with disclaimers ("Reportedly", "I don't recall", "alleged"), unlike most who are happy to refer to half-remembered fairy tales as facts.
Contact and ordering info for THE COMICS (and Ditko's in-print creator owned work, including THE AVENGING MIND which includes the essay above and much more) is here:
http://ditko.blogspot.com/1990/01/ditko-books-in-...
There's a recent list of available issues of THE COMICS with Ditko essays. Add March 2009 to that for the most recent one.
Fans of the comics learned to flee from them and their lame depiction of Spidey. Thus, before the Obama issue, the Spidey comics were actually DROPPING in monthly sales.
I'll look again, but I swear there was a point where Fox says something to the effect of, " If I do this, it'll be the last task I do for you", since he felt prying into people's lives electronically to be abhorrent.
Still, I maintain that smashing elements and characters in stories, shaking things up, is good, and even MUST be done once in a while, for the good of the story/franchise.
Another example I thought of was killing off Spock in Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan – and destroying the Starship Enterprise in Star Trek 3: The Search for Spock.
Good stuff, Steve and Rigor. I think that for it would be actual bravery for one of the majors to make their heroes less gray and more heroic. Russ Dvonch's post tonight about Jurassic Park and morality in screenplays toucehes on this kind of thing. Quesada is a mad egoist, but I am giving Brubaker and Fraction the benefit of the doubt with the books they've been writing for him. Rigor, I like the mention of the love it takes to craft heroic comics.
"Ditko needs to pick one descriptor per sentence and leave it at that."
You're not kidding, joking, joshing, having a lark. I found this very hard to read, absorb, follow- it's almost as if, perhaps, maybe someone has given him a new, unspoiled, never previously possessed thesaurus, vocabulary aid, storehouse of words, language reference book.
This essay, article, treatise, exposition could have been shortened by half, been a fraction of it's size, twice more than a quarter in length, or just plain shorter.
Good grief. Anguish. Sadness. Misery. Mourning.
Steve Ditko’s Toyland…
A contributor to Big Hollywood presents an essay veteran artist Steve Ditko of Spider-Man fame has written called “Toyland”, which focuses on how popular culture, comics included, have been hijacked by the creatively bankrupt and morally dishones…
Thanks guys. It's pretty weird that Sid wore a Punisher tee shirt.
SC your "mad egoist" comment is spot on. He has zero respect for what the people before him built. A real child of these times.
BobH, would you be able to quote the relevant passage from "The Ever Unwilling" regarding the Green Goblin? Thank you.
Does anyone write classic superheroes for adults? An earlier commenter noted that "kid friendly" comics are the last bastion of the traditional superhero. For the most part, I agree with that statement. Certainly from Marvel and DC, iconic superhero values have fallen by the wayside with few exceptions. Of the "adult" books I nominate Justice Society of America as DCs best example and Nova for Marvel (come on, a book where the titular hero's expletive is "Blue Blazes!"? That's golden!). I'm interested if anyone has other suggestions for current books or publishers that espouse the virtues of the heroic and superheroic.
[...] Over at Big Hollywood, Batton Lash posts an recent essay by Steve Ditko on comics and the alleged moral bankruptcy of modern pop culture: So what is ignored/evaded is that [...]
[...] and that ’status quo’ identity stymies them if Spider-Man is Spider-Man.” – Steve Ditko (link via Rich [...]
[...] Steve Ditko’s ‘Toyland’ [...]
[...] voy a repetir las palabras de Ditko aquí, para eso mejor lean Toyland. Pero voy a usar la misma cita de Quesada para reforzar lo ya dicho latamente sobre [...]
"A toy doll can give a young girl all kinds of new experiences, of playing at being a friend, a sister or even a parent, etc.
A toy game for a young boy can be used to play with learning various skills, being adventurous, competitive, competent, even suggesting a future career."
I'd like to have a comment to make on the actual point of this article.
But I don't, because I'm stuck on this turn of phrase, because…argh. Toys do not divide along gender lines like that, okay? The implications of the way that was phrased are ALL WRONG unless you want to perpetuate the idea that boys have a monopoly on the games that inspire competence and adventurousness.
(Not to mention, I know I'm not the only girl whose main lesson from playing with her dolls that if you swing them by the leg you can clobber your sister good with the head. And that Barbie feet are good for stabbity.)
– Ame, longtime raider of the boys' end of the toy shelf
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