Friday, February 24, 2023

MYTHCOMICS: AVENGING WORLD (1973)




Wally Wood devoted a 1975 story, "My Word," to a scathingly ironic demolition of the city of New York, which metropolis was technically the star of the show. But two years previous, Wood's sometime collaborator Steve Ditko allowed the Whole World to speak for itself, putting humanity on trial for the World's many unnecessary tribulations. But Ditko, being a lifelong disciple of Ayn Rand, was not content to take Wood's ironic stance, and what he presents better fits the mythos of drama. Though in many interior scenes The World is shown as having been beat-to-crap by the misdeeds of the planet's human occupants, the cover depicts The World emitting a brilliant spotlight on the cowed throngs of evil-- mostly various thug-types, though prominent space is given to a dictator-type and what looks like a Catholic bishop. One can almost imagine Ditko thinking something along the lines of the old Green Lantern oath, perhaps revised to "the dark things cannot stand the light of the World with a Slight Sneer on His Face."



On the opening page the interlocutor makes clear that even though we're seeing a World battered and supported by crutches, "The World isn't in a mess; people are in a mess." Interlocutor Ditko further claims that no catchphrases or easy solutions will fix the problems, for they originate from the way human beings are willing to act irrationally for gain: "Man-- who is defined as a rational being-- chooses to act on his own behalf as an irrational being." The World himself glosses this assertion by claiming that many such irrational persons are working hard to make "my condition" worse, with the interesting phrase that they can do so both "knowingly and unknowingly."




It would be far too time-consuming to anatomize all seven of Ditko's philosophical banes, all of which read pretty much the same anyway. The second bane, "The Skeptical Intellectual," sustains some special interest in that he opposes the logical cornerstone of Ditko's Randian universe: Aristotle's law of identity, or "A=A." But the last of the banes, "The Neutralist," may have been the hobbyhorse who most aroused Ditko's ire, because immediately afterward he uses the character's inability to take a stand to show how wishy-washiness supports evil.





Further, though the Neutralist claims not to take sides, he shows immense disgust with the "Man is Rational Being" party because its members implicitly or explicitly demand that people should make choices between good and evil. Meanwhile, he sympathizes with the "Man is Irrational Being" because its proponents, whether they expouse violence or self-pity, make no demands upon the Neutralist's ethical system. In the four-page vignette "The Neutralist Settles a Dispute," the character, wearing some sort of "compromise cop" uniform, settles a dispute between a holdup man and his victim by giving half the honest man's wages to the thief. The vision of the hordes of "have nots" who then arise to pillage the honest worker of his wages is one of Ditko's most mythic meditations on the victimization-tropes favored by the American Left, particularly in the form of Socialism (also a very big bug up the rear of Ditko's mentor Ayn Rand). The most one can say in the Neutralist's favor is that he may be one of those who is "unknowingly" working to benefit evil, even though he thinks himself above the controversies.



Ditko then introduces one more type, the "Power Luster," and he seems to pull all of the banes together to reign over those who have surrendered their individuality, and who as a result occupy a Dantean hell, under the thumbs of "the Mystic," "the Humanitarian," and so on.





On page 19 Ditko announces that he's on "Part 2" (though no "Part 1" was established earlier). After some more shots at the immorality of compromise, Ditko depicts one of the many "everyman" types he used to depict in all of his horror-stories, both previous to and following the artist's famous Marvel works. Whereas the horror-protagonists were forever enmeshed in suffering terrible occult dooms, this poor sap suffers for his own irrationality: his desire to "satisfy his emotions, to do whatever he feels like doing." For Ditko this philosophical step takes the poor sap into the abyss of non-meaning, while a supercilious World claims that, "Every man must be the protector of his own rationality!" There follows another Dantean image of doomed souls moving along pathways leading nowhere, including one with the swastika and one with the hammer-and-sickle.



The best stand-alone page in AVENGING WORLD reduces all the participants to geometrical circles, in which a collective of hostile spheres try to prevent Circle A and Circle B from doing something of which the collective does not approve. As to what the activity is-- yes, my mind went there too, but the activity could be a lot of things, including a few things that most people would agree should be prohibited by law. But though Ditko's screed might not apply to many practices-- one of which involves a partner without the "age of consent" that would make "mutual consent" possible-- the artist is indubitably correct about the hypocrisy of the collective" We have rights! But you have no right to X!"



AVENGING WORLD then concludes with a three-page vignette, "The Deadly Alien," in which a whole community rouses itself into a lynching mood because a new child is born, a child who may someday threaten their way of life. (I note in passing that the mother is holding up one hand with upturned thumb, which looks like a reference to the "thumbs up/thumbs down" verdicts seen when fictional Roman emperors preside over fictional gladiator-games.) This sequence too is another jeremiad against collectivism, but it does allow Ditko to come full circle to his original statement; that people are responsible for the sad state of The World. This assault on irrationality, though, ignores the paradigm of persons committing irrational acts for sheer gain, the way thieves, dictators and religious pundits do: knowingly. Ditko would seem to be saying that the most insidious form of collectivism stems from an unknowing violation of other persons' rights simply to make certain that one's own priorities get first consideration. Ditko even asks the reader about his own process of socialization: "How well did they succeed with you?" All that said, though, if The World actually contains the Light of Rationality as Ditko depicts on the cover, the author doesn't succeed in making his case. Often Ditko's ideals are negatively defined. He rails against the use of violence to gain one's ends, and such offenses are an affront to Rationality, the essence of man. So far so good. But is not the same law enforcement brought into being to restrict acts of knowing violence extremely vulnerable to being manipulated by the proponents of irrationality who "know not what they do?" And does that not make the law enforcement just as vulnerable to the accusation of Irrational, Collective Rule as any group of individuals who let others do their thinking for them.

But if Ditko's screed fails as rigorous philosophy as to how one should live one's life, WORLD is nonetheless valuable for its very qualities of expressiveness-- which Ditko ironically opposes to the Rationality he favors.

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