Dave Sim's blogandmail #73 (November 23rd, 2006)

The Mystery of STAROO Revealed!

STAROO is something that I have a lot of pride in: the fact that of the seventeen volumes Aardvark Vanaheim has on the Diamond Star System, eight of them start with the "Double Zero" designation, STAR 00, because they were early additions to the Star System when Diamond was starting it up in the early 90s (the lowest number is the Cerebus TPb which is designated STAR0070!)

Every once in a while, I'm just going to run all of the Diamond order codes for the Cerebus Trades for an entire week.

If you're a retailer, I hope you'll take it as a friendly reminder during "Listing Week" to take a few minutes to go and check your shelves and see if any of the trades are missing and order them from DIAMOND while you're still thinking about it. The Trades sell a lot better when you have them all in stock than they do when there's just volumes 2, 4, 7, 10, 11 and 16 sitting there.

If you're a potential customer I hope you'll use Listing Week to call the Comic Shop Locator Service

888-COMIC-BOOK

OR CLICK ON

comicshoplocator.com

and find out where the comic book stores are in your area

and if they don't have a volume you want in stock, you can give them the Star System order code right over the phone!


VOL.1 CEREBUS…………………….STAR0070

VOL.2 HIGH SOCIETY……………..STAR0071

VOL.3 CHURCH & STATE I……...STAR00271

VOL.4 CHURCH & STATE II.........STAR00322

VOL.5 JAKAS STORY………….....STAR00359

VOL.6 MELMOTH…........................STAR00431

VOL.7 FLIGHT……………………..STAR00543

VOL.8 WOMEN…………………….STAR00849

VOL.9 READS………………………STAR01063

VOL.10 MINDS……………………..STAR01916

VOL.11 GUYS………………………STAR06972

VOL.12 RICKS STORY……………STAR08468

VOL.13 GOING HOME……………STAR10981

VOL.14 FORM & VOID…………..STAR13500

VOL.15 LATTER DAYS………….AUGO31920

VOL.16 THE LAST DAY………….APRO42189

COLLECTED LETTERS 2004…….FEBO52434

The book—we're discussing Steve Ditko's 160 Page Package if you're tuning in late—is a mixed bag but I don't mean that in a pejorative sense. It's very hard—and always has been—very hard to see what it is that Steve Ditko sees or what it is, specifically, that he's trying to communicate and I suspect that that's because so much of his work centers on (or appears to center on) the profound level of self-deception which most people perpetrate against themselves, the intrinsic level of dishonesty and the consequences of that. And that's a difficult vein to mine—as I can attest—because there is a nearly automatic hall of mirrors quality that kicks in for the reader. "He's talking about me" and an immediate consequence of withdrawal and resentment. "I'm not really like that and even if I am like that what business is it of his and who is he to pass judgement on me" etc. etc. Woody Allen experienced the same thing with Stardust Memories. The closer you get to absolute accuracy the more offensive the vast majority of people are going to find what you are saying. He attempts to stay within the confines of genre most of the time in what appears to be an attempt to retain the comic-book genre fan. The super-hero or science fiction elements are the bait and Ditko's perceptions are the hook. The more obscure the metaphors, as on "Faces" or "The Animal" or "Starters" or "Starter and Finisher" or "Lift My Veil" or "Shocker" the further he gets away from something that can be appreciated in a strictly comic-fan populist sense and the more he begins to resemble Kafka in combining otherworldliness with an archetypal template open to wide interpretation: "I can see that Ditko sees the subject of this story as archetypal, but what is the archetype exactly?" And, of course, the less sharply clarified the archetype, the more accurate it is and the more sharply clarified, the less accurate it is—Orwell's Animal Farm wouldn't be the classic of its type that it has come to be if the metaphors were more sharply clarified into specific communist analogues or specific fascistic analogues, as an example. But the borderlands shift uneasily around all suppositions when you move beyond the universally acclaimed work like Animal Farm or Kafka's The Trial and into the area of their less universally acclaimed works. There it becomes permissible to ask: is this actually a less sharply clarified archetype or just a badly-done story? And there everything circles back to the fact that everyone is aware of the high level of integrity—in every sense of the term—that Orwell and Kafka…and, yes, Ditko…brings to his work.

There is no such thing as a throwaway story. If Steve Ditko sat down and wrote and drew it, it is because he had something he specifically wanted to say. Even his choice of words and phrasing is obviously laboured over in order to get as close as he can to what it is that he is trying to communicate. And then there's a story like "The Blinder" which is one of the best stories in the volume visually, in my opinion, and the best at making use of the costumed protagonist archetype. Except in this case, the costumed protagonist is actually a criminal who is undone by…well, you'd really have to read it for yourself. What is it that Ditko is trying to tell me through this story? I've re-read it twice just trying to get a handle on it. The otherworldliness—both in layouts and designs—that he brought to the table with Dr. Strange has crept into his dialogue and his narration. In several places he has contracted the iconic comic-book curseword (!@#%!) into a single icon (#). Can you do that? He just did.

There are two entries from Ditko's "Avenging World" canon which point up the difference with the rest of this collection in that the title page is composed of the classic Mr. A dichotomies and intermediary dichotomies which (we all assume, perhaps wrongly) reflect Ditko's own beliefs. Most of the pieces here are far less direct than that, far more narratives which illustrate the consequences of choice rather than the choices themselves. "If…Then" is particularly good in this regard, combining a texture/contour means of inking that I've never seen Ditko do before with a narrative that intrudes upon the otherworldly but only at the story's climax and with a mystical narrator cut from the classic Mr. A/The Question cloth. Steve Ditko, irrefutably, is a very literate man and yet his phrasing in places is awkward to the point of incomprehensibility. "The `No!' Because one didn't want to know!" is the concluding line of dialogue in "If…Then". It is as if the story itself has come from another world and couldn't wait until "End" to get back there. What is it that Ditko is trying to tell me through this story?

"The Void vs. Burner" is the best in terms of conventional expectations, having a sort of combined Spider-man and Doctor Strange flavour to it and was the story that made me want to devote a couple of days of the Blog & Mail to this remarkable artist/writer, particularly with my agreement to do Sean M.'s Dr. Strangeroach commission. This is the sort of pure Ditko narrative that makes me want to participate IN Ditko, even as I realized that that's an inherently false ambition when you are talking about someone who is scrupulously fully integrated in and within himself and his self-chosen context. What would Ditko even think of the idea of a "jam"? Presumably it would be just another false trail of the many that he's had to avoid, another means of the outside world attempting to lead him astray. And even if he could be persuaded what could I do? No one else can do Ditko layouts quite the way Ditko does them; no one draws people the way Ditko draws them; no one inks the way Ditko inks. All a collaborator can do is obscure what is there and there are few things that could be considered more inimical to what Steve Ditko represents in our field than to do anything to obscure his pure expression.

The Mystery of STAROO Revealed!

STAROO is something that I have a lot of pride in: the fact that of the seventeen volumes Aardvark Vanaheim has on the Diamond Star System, eight of them start with the "Double Zero" designation, STAR 00, because they were early additions to the Star System when Diamond was starting it up in the early 90s (the lowest number is the Cerebus TPb which is designated STAR0070!)

Every once in a while, I'm just going to run all of the Diamond order codes for the Cerebus Trades for an entire week.

If you're a retailer, I hope you'll take it as a friendly reminder during "Listing Week" to take a few minutes to go and check your shelves and see if any of the trades are missing and order them from DIAMOND while you're still thinking about it. The Trades sell a lot better when you have them all in stock than they do when there's just volumes 2, 4, 7, 10, 11 and 16 sitting there.

If you're a potential customer I hope you'll use Listing Week to call the Comic Shop Locator Service

888-COMIC-BOOK

OR CLICK ON

comicshoplocator.com

and find out where the comic book stores are in your area

and if they don't have a volume you want in stock, you can give them the Star System order code right over the phone!



VOL.1 CEREBUS…………………….STAR0070

VOL.2 HIGH SOCIETY……………..STAR0071

VOL.3 CHURCH & STATE I……...STAR00271

VOL.4 CHURCH & STATE II.........STAR00322

VOL.5 JAKAS STORY………….....STAR00359

VOL.6 MELMOTH…........................STAR00431

VOL.7 FLIGHT……………………..STAR00543

VOL.8 WOMEN…………………….STAR00849

VOL.9 READS………………………STAR01063

VOL.10 MINDS……………………..STAR01916

VOL.11 GUYS………………………STAR06972

VOL.12 RICKS STORY……………STAR08468

VOL.13 GOING HOME……………STAR10981

VOL.14 FORM & VOID…………..STAR13500

VOL.15 LATTER DAYS………….AUGO31920

VOL.16 THE LAST DAY………….APRO42189

COLLECTED LETTERS 2004…….FEBO52434





A review of Steve Ditko's 160 Page Package. I have to admit that I completely bypassed this one when it came out and I doubt I ever would have picked it up if Sandeep Atwal hadn't brought it over. Best known for his work on Spider-man (the first 38 issues) and Dr. Strange, I first knew his work at DC on The Creeper and The Hawk & Dove both of which I bought off the newsstand back in the late 1960s (Hawk & Dove are probably overdue for a revival since the US victory and/or defeat—depending on your perspective—in Iraq). His Moral Absolutist themed work, Mr. A and The Question tended to leave me cold because of my liberalism back in the day when I was a liberal. Beautifully drawn but just too severe in (repeatedly) hitting that shrill high note of Moral Absolutism. I really think a definitive Mr.A volume is called for at some point but I have no idea what Mr. Ditko would think of the idea. I hope he's in good health and I hope he still has strong connections with Robin Snyder (who published this book) and others who either share his philosophy or whom he trusts with his legacy and that there exists filing cabinets or at least A filing cabinet with correspondence and notes on his various creations and so on. And, of course, I sincerely hope that he isn't a Franz Kafka type who wants everything destroyed when he dies or that Robin Snyder (or whoever would be charged with the task) would just ignore the instruction if that was the case, as Kafka's executor did.



Mr. Ditko and I tend to get lumped together in The Comics Journal's context and we were the first two candidates to be subjected to their murderous roundtable (the multiplicity of reviewers allowing for a dramatically magnified version of the standard Comics Journal ratio of nine parts literary homicide to one part grudging admiration—Alan Moore just went through it with Lost Girls) but, personally, I've always felt more a kinship in the sense of "to thine own self be true". There are any number of roads that Steve Ditko might have taken from the decision to quit Spider-man just as it was going through its first wave of near-phenomenon stature. You can fault his decisions if you want (and many do—they want their Ditko Spider-man) but the fact that he ended up doing what he thought was right—both on the printed page and in his personal life—and suffered the career and income consequences of that—in my eyes marks him out for Greatness. Between the time he left Spider-man and when he (finally!) got the big payday with the release of the first Spider-man film you would be hard-pressed to see any point where he compromised with his personal sense of right and wrong. It would be nice if that on-going process could be documented someday. He's also one of comic books' greatest mystery men (Ghastly Graham Ingels was a distant second). The extent of that mystery can be conveyed by the fact that it wouldn't surprise me if he possesses every scrap of paper related to his career back to the 1940s and it wouldn't surprise me if he regularly purges his own past and has one neat folder that contains only twelve sheets of paper that have survived those purges. Obviously in either case, whatever he has on hand would be of profound interest, particularly to comic-book fans of the Baby Boom generation who were weaned on Marvel Comics. I just loaned Sandeep Ken Viola's Masters of Comic Book Art videotape which both Mr. Ditko and I are on



Sandeep: He's actually got him on tape?!



Me: Just the audio, he wouldn't allow Ken to film him.



There's a good example. Who else would draw that distinction between audio and visual recording? As I recall it took a lot of negotiating. Ken had known Mr. Ditko for years and was one of the (handful? dozens? Hundreds?) who regularly visited (visits?) him or attempted (attempts?) to visit him. That he would even allow Ken to record his voice was a signal honour for those of us familiar with the Ditko Legend. There was trust there, at least of a kind. Did that trust survive the recording or survive Mr. Ditko's first viewing of Ken's film? All interesting questions, circling warily around the central mystery of Steve Ditko.



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If you wish to contact Dave Sim, you can mail a letter (he does NOT receive emails) to:

Aardvark Vanaheim, Inc
P.O. Box 1674
Station C
Kitchener, Ontario, Canada N2G 4R2

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Or, you can check out Mars Import:

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Or ask your local retailer to order them for you through Diamond Comics distributors.