Body and Soul

Is skin of a tale more important than the flesh and bones that lie beneath? Is the body of a tale more important than its soul?

Bardelys had been reading the book summing up Steve Ditko’s career as writer and artist in comics from the early 1950s into the new millennium, Strange and Stranger: the World of Steve Ditko. He found a strange turn in the artist’s career beginning in the 1970s. And it caused Bardelys to reflect on what was most important in comics and tales.

In one of Ditko’s rare interviews (one done by mail), the artist had mentioned his first independent works, most likely referring to ‘Mr A’ and ‘The Avenging World,’ both of which had been published in Wood’s prozine Witzend. Ditko had said that he believed that his luscious, finely-rendered tales and essays had probably distracted the readers from their essence, that is, what he was trying to communicate. In future, he indicated, he meant to cut back on the fine finish and detailed rendering, so that the meaning of the tales and essays would take its rightful, pre-eminent, place.

This interview was not quoted in Strange and Stranger, but author Blake Bell did mention Ditko’s fall from popularity in the 1980s, as new artists came on the scene who excelled in eye-popping details and surface rendering, even to the extent of creating ‘cluttered’ and ‘overworked’ compositions that might confuse the eye and leave the story hard to follow.

This was an odd parallel with one of Ditko’s most admired artists in the field, Mort Meskin. Meskin had vied with Jack Kirby for the title of King and Quickest in the Joe Simon and Jack Kirby shop where Ditko had worked in the early 1950s, at the dawn of his career. Meskin had gone on to sink in fame and popularity in comics, and did not partake of the superhero boom of the ‘Silver Age’ of the 1960s. He was reduced to minor tales in scare- and fantasy-anthologies at DC Comics, until he left comics entirely to finish his career as storyboard artist at ad agencies.

Meskin too had been a master at compositional storytelling, at pace and leading the reader’s eye gracefully and lucidly through the panels from page to page, and Ditko had even written a salute to Meskin in a small fanzine in the mid-1960s (1965, as Bardelys recalled, but he would have to look it up in Strange and Stranger to be sure about the date). It seemed as though Ditko and his master and on-the-job instructor were following parallel paths.

Ditko’s self-published independent work had, from those first tales of Mr A and the Avenging World first essays, been drawn in a style simpler than his commercial work. It was clear that the words were more important than the art, which was a strange position for an illustrator to be taking.

But then, the artists in comics have always been as much talesmen as draftsmen, and the ‘pictorial’ style of Alex Raymond, Hal Foster, and Burne Hogarth was not always to be admired as pure comics, even if their individual panels were to die for. In the world of comics, Milton Caniff had the pictorialists beat all hollow. At least that’s how Bardelys saw things, and he was probably right. He did have to admit, however, that he loved Raymond’s women, and Foster’s detailed recreations of history, and Hogarth’s intricately-patterned jungles, as much as anybody. But they were only illustrating the story, and not telling it, and there was all the world of difference between those two.

Ditko had always been an excellent talesman even if not the prettiest draftsman. Nobody would ever mistake a Ditko panel for something done by Alex Raymond. By the time Ditko hit 40, in 1967, he was both a master talesman and drawing knockout panels; this, many critics contend, was his high water mark.

But was it?

Ditko went on to produce many hundreds of pages in commercial comics for Charlton, DC, and Marvel, as well as other publishers. He never again drew with the same intensity or intricacy of detail either commercially or independently. His storytelling remained impeccable, but his pencils were closer to rough panel breakdowns than any other artist’s pencil work, and after a time, he refused to ink his pencils any more unless he did the whole job — writing, penciling, lettering, and inking. Sometimes he enjoyed a high quality inker to finish his breakdowns (either in the inker’s own style, à la Wood, or in a pseudo-Ditko style, the way P. Craig Russell worked). Sometimes he was given an inker who didn’t know what to do with the pencils as Ditko had left them; some established professionals of great standing refused outright to touch them.

But Bardelys was more concerned with the tales where Ditko did it all. Here it seemed that Ditko had made the conscious, deliberate choice to shift his rendering to a simpler level, not abstract, but almost diagrammatic. The panels told the story, excellently. There was never any confusion as to what was going on. But there was no passion, either. The artist did not seem to have his heart in his illustrations. Instead, he seemed to Bardelys to have turned all his focus to the words.

Comics fans (most of whom are, Bardelys reflected, young) preferred the elaborate renderings. Bardelys knew himself, from his own amateurish drawings, that when you couldn’t get a line right, the thing to do was to sketch in a half dozen approximate lines, and hope the reader would pick out in his own mind where the line ought to go. Or else, put in lots of rendering, feathering and spotting blacks, and (if you had color at your disposal) violent color shifts, with knockout ‘effects’ like speed lines, ‘Kirby dots,’ explosions with lines shooting out from a center.

In panels like this, the words didn’t matter so much. Instead, what became the rage was either to put in one word, in big letters like a shout or cry of pain — or else several panels of captions, representing the stream of consciousness ramblings of the point-of-view character. Experience was what they were aiming at, getting across the us readers the experience of being there, feeling pain, concentrating, or the like. The thoughts of the characters were rambling, an attempt to capture what we all think when the river of our false selves and automata control our deeds, to put us in the hero’s place.

Ditko’s heros also had thoughts in captions, but these were always rational: philosophizing, moralizing, or puzzle-solving. Ditko’s heros in his independent work had hardly any personality the way Bardelys thought of personality or character. They were almost robotic, caricatures of Spock-like Vulcans in the old Star Trek series. And yet there was something quite gripping and engaging in the Ditko tales, something hypnotic, something that would not let you go.

Bardelys could only think that it was the master storyteller at work. Even when he eschewed just about everything we all think makes a story involving, Ditko could grip you.

The soul, Bardelys concluded, was more important after all.

The flesh and the bones trumped the skin.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday, August 7, 2008)