Mysterious Travelers: Steve Ditko and the Search for a New Liberal Identity by Zack Kruse (review)

Steve Ditko, as Zack Kruse rightly puts it at the start of Mysterious Travelers: Steve Ditko and the Search for a New Liberal Identity, was "an enigmatic figure whose work presents a difficult challenge" for comics readers and scholars alike (4). Co-creator of Spider-Man, and sole creator of Dr. Strange, the Question, Mr. A, and many more, Ditko's works are widely recognized, but often lumped together as "Objectivist" or "Randian," with little attention paid to their intellectual heft or to the continuity of Ditko's creative and philosophic expression. In Mysterious Travelers, Kruse sets out to clear away the "misinformation and lore" that surrounds our narrative of Ditko's work and establish instead "an intellectual history for Steve Ditko, positioning his work and philosophic perspective as a means for understanding some varietals of twentieth-century American political consciousness and the evolution of that consciousness" (8, 16).

Attempting to establish this intellectual history while also demonstrating how it shaped (and was shaped by) Ditko may seem a daunting task, but Kruse streamlines and connects the various moving parts of Ditko's intellectual framework as much as may be possible. Early in the book, Kruse introduces a useful term, "mystic liberalism," which stands in for the intersection of at least three systems of thought that shaped Ditko—Theosophy, New Thought, and Objectivism—that "all draw on arcane, forgotten, or rejected ideas and beliefs; manipulate them in a way that services each movement's own ends; and implement those revisions as truisms" (103).

These simultaneously competing and overlapping systems are a thicket of named advocates and thinkers, including (in no particular order) Madame Blavatsky, Henry Steel Olcott, Max Stirner, Norman Vincent Peale, Ayn Rand, and Nathaniel Branden, that frankly can be hard to distinguish. While working through these figures and their claims may be necessary for the book's main argument, which hinges on "the function of this particular variety of liberalism in the American ideoscape of the twentieth century," readers should note that the early portions of Mysterious Travelers are denser than the latter, which turn more fully to Ditko's comics (60). This depth may be necessary, though, to dislodge the common shorthand used for Ditko's thinking: that he was solely a Randian Objectivist. As Kruse ably demonstrates, this misperception is the result of these layers of thought:

Because Objectivism became the top layer, and the one more readily perceivable by his readers, it became understood as the defining element of his work—also making questions about conversion possible—when, in reality, he had simply added new words to an existing lexicon. So if the question is "Is Steve Ditko an Objectivist?," the answer is no.

(64)

I thought it important to foreground the rich intellectual history on offer in Mysterious Travelers to give a sense of the shape of the book, which is somewhat weighted by the decision to trace these threads at length. Mysterious Travelers contains eight main chapters, proceeding through a rough chronology of Ditko's comics and essays from his early works in the mid-1950s through the mid-1980s (though Ditko continued work in comics until his death in 2018). The book's first two chapters trace Ditko's biographical and socioeconomic origins, as well as the growth of "mystic liberalism." The third chapter focuses on how Ditko brought his specific implementation of mystic liberalism into comics, via (also Kruse's terms) the notions of "dark karma" and "cosmic intraspace." The next four chapters treat Ditko's prominent creations and recognizable works: in order, Dr. Strange, Spider-Man, Blue Beetle, the Question, Mr. A, and some of his work beyond the Silver Age. A final chapter, mostly focused on Ditko in the 1980s, argues that other creators like Alan Moore and Frank Miller began incorporating Ditkovian characters and tendencies into works like Watchmen and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, solidifying Ditko's works as a reference...