games

With regards to college protests, some people have claimed that Stan Lee showed college protests more sympathetically after Ditko left. The evidence does not exist.

Take ASM#68. Unlike Ditko’s last issue that came 30 issues prior, Lee and Romita represent an actual political protest with students. Rather than an all-white group we have a mixed group led by prominent African-American students. This issue in fact introduces Randy Robertson, the son of Joe Robertson. Randy is represented as the more firebrand son of his Dad, reflecting somewhat the split between the older Civil Rights generations and the younger activists (think MLK and Black Panthers, though neither Joe nor Randy are quite as radical as either of those two). Randy falls under the influence of an older African-American student who’s implied as a more “rock-the-boat” type. Then there’s a scene where the students ask Peter to join their protest against the Dean. And Peter says, “Okay, that’s your side of the story! What does the Dean say?” and then he walks away leading the protestors to call him a chicken. It’s virtually the same comic thirty issues later but unlike Ditko’s brief 8 panel grid which is a side gag to larger story, ASM#68 is explicitly about student politics as a major subplot, featured on the cover and the title “Crisis on the Campus” and we have Peter walk away from solidarity from an African-American led protest. Where Ditko satirized a protest as frivolous in content, Lee and Romita satirize protesting as frivolous in essence. So the question is why does this scene written and drawn after Ditko left, not subject to scrutiny of any kind? Abraham Riesman’s biography on Stan Lee is the major exception. He spotlighted this comic: Stan’s dialogue played with fire, putting words like,’ ‘Uncle Tom,’ and ‘soul-brother’ into black characters’ mouths and depicting Peter as telling them to see the administration’s side of the story and yelling, ‘ ”Anyone” can paint a ”sign,” mister! ”That” doesn’t make you ”right!”” There’s no real resolution to the political questions posed by the comic, merely a bizarre deus ex machina in which the protest leaders are arrested on the false belief that they were linked with the Kingpin, something the reader is supposed to see as a positive event because the courts will surely exonerate them. Even jail is a bonus, muses Peter: ‘And they’ll ”all” have a chance to ‘cool off!’

So with regards to politics, there was more consensus between Stan Lee and Steve Ditko than most allow. Now of course, this doesn’t mean that there’s no nuance in Lee’s engagement with politics (that’s a topic deserving of its own post), and it doesn’t mean that Ditko didn’t in fact become an Objectivist. The point to emphasize is that Randian interpretations in Spider-Man is too over-determined and disproportionate in focus.

...More recent is Al Ewing’s Captain America and the Mighty Avengers #1 where he has Spider-Man admitting that he read Rand in college and spent a week thinking he was John Galt and yelling at protestors. Al Ewing is a very smart writer with a deep knowledge of Marvel continuity and yet this is a case of over-cleverness, with Gaiman’s narrative clearly clouding his judgment over his close-reading. Because Peter doesn’t in fact yell at protestors in ASM#38, he merely seethes silently and walks away.

The Randian interpretation of Spider-Man has mostly served as a vehicle to attack Ditko. It’s a way to distance Spider-Man from his major creative voice. It’s not concerned with asking real political questions about Spider-Man as a comic and concept, of which there’s a lot. It’s not concerned with gauging Spider-Man in the context of Ditko’s life and career and his biographical trajectory. It’s not concerned with contextualizing Spider-Man with other Marvel creations of the time, by Ditko and others.

It’s not concerned with actual history.

There is a lot more in the article, especially about Dr. Strange and I would highly recommend people check it out https://elvingsmusings.wordpress.com/2022/06/07/ditko-rand-the-objectivist-spider-man/