Strange and Stranger - The World of Steve Ditko by Blake Bell

This is as fine a book as anyone could ever expect on the life and work of a highly influential figure in recent popular culture, as well as a complex and baffling man. Filled with excellent examples of his startling and innovative artistic style, and ably describing his rise and self-orchestrated fall. As a kookologist of long standing, having spent decades in the study of people who dedicate their lives to the promulgation of a personal ideal or philosophy, Ditko appears to me to be a classic example of the self-disabler. Rarely has such a talented, respected and admired artist more completely destroyed his career and even crippled his own artistic skill in the service of an unreachable idealism. First by making reasonable demands of his dishonest employers, then progressively unreasonable demands of people whose sincere desire was to help him achieve any goal he wished to attain, he ultimately made it impossible to do the one thing he most wanted to do - communicate his ideas through the skills to which he had dedicated his entire life. I believe he discovered and enacted this principle: the only way to always be right is to always make everyone else be wrong. His idealism was a form of perfectionism impossible of existence in this world, a philosophy of pure black and white which can only be enacted in fantasy - since in this world dichotomies and true "black and white" are manufactured by the mind and have no natural existence. His Objectivist idealism compelled him to literally deny reality, a direct contradiction of its fundamental principle that reality is what IS, and not what we wish it to be. Most telling is the complete absence from this book of the slightest mention of his having any personal, emotional, or romantic relationship with another person - not even to say that such a thing was absent from his life. If, as I write this, Steve Ditko still lives, he lives in a world of his own creation - poverty and obscurity, unable to afford even to self-publish, surrounded by hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars worth of his own work which his principles will not permit him to sell, and looked on from a distance by dedicated admirers who are willing and able to publish anything for him, if he would only let them. What an opera it would make.