Bitten by a Radioactive Ayn Rand

DC Archives: Action Heroes Volume 2, written by Steve Ditko, Roger Stern, Steve Skeates, and others; illustrated by Steve Ditko, Alex Toth, Frank McLaughlin, John Byrne and others (1965-68; collected 2007): This collection contains a pretty clear moment at which comic-book great Steve Ditko, co-creator of Spider-man and Dr. Strange for Marvel, crossed the line into Ayn Randian propagandist. It occurs towards the end of the Charlton Comics 'Action Heroes' line from which these archives take their name.

It's a mind-boggling moment because it marks one of the few times that mainstream Ditko and self-published Ditko would merge into one angry, Objectivist loudspeaker. Ditko's two streams of output -- one for himself and one to pay the bills -- would pretty much permanently diverge after the demise of the Charlton superhero line, and others would pretty much handle all the scripting on his mainstream superhero titles.

Ditko helped revamp or create most of the always lame-duck Charlton Comics' superheroes, co-creating Captain Atom, Nightshade, and The Question and revamping Golden-Age crimefighter Blue Beetle into a nifty mix of Spider-man and Iron Man. This archive collects his later work on those Charlton superheroes. Captain Atom is a lot of fun, especially once inker Frank McLaughlin comes on board, and it's mostly free of cant. Blue Beetle is also jolly, zippy fun until the aforementioned Rand Moment, at which point the Blue Beetle becomes a Ditko mouthpiece. Not for long, mind you -- cancellation of the entire superhero line loomed.

And then there's the Question, a visually inspired Ditko creation whose main costuming as a superhero was a face made perfectly blank by a special mask. Alan Moore would base Rorchach in Watchmen on this guy, and you can see why. While the Question begins life as a fairly normal urban vigilante (albeit one wearing a suit, tie, and hat), he rapidly turns into Ditko's spokesperson for his Ayn Rand-derived ethics.

And boy, does he speak. A lot.

The Question's only book-length adventure from the 1960's, from the pages of Charlton's Mysterious Suspense, is one of the wordiest slogs you'll ever encounter in comic books of this or any other time. The sheer volume of verbiage crowds out much of Ditko's visual dynamism, leaving us with talking heads and the Question demonstrating that, for a brief time, he was the stuffiest of all stuffed shirts on the superhero scene. And his hatred of hippies was positively Cartmanesque.

The Blue Beetle also develops advanced Randitis and, in a memorable two-story team-up, he and the Question battle both evil, non-heroic Art and an evil, non-heroic Art critic. I kid you not. It's like Philosophers at Work played straight. Fascinating stuff. Come for Ditko's visual excellence, stay for the interminable lectures. Recommended.

Beware the Stare

Village of the Damned, written by Stirling Silliphant, Wolf Rilla and Ronald Kinnoch; based on The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham; directed by Wolf Rilla; starring George Sanders (Gordon Zellaby) and Barbara Shelley (Anthea Zellaby) (1960): Dandy adaptation of John Wyndham's even dandier novel. A mysterious force knocks out everyone in the small English town of Midwich for several hours. After they awaken, they eventually discover that every woman of child-bearing age is pregnant.

The pregnancies advance far too quickly to be normal. And the children that are born, who mature far too quickly -- well, they're a bunch of blond-haired, super-intelligent beings with strange, menacing, and rapidly increasing powers of telepathy and telekinesis. Earth has been invaded through a form of cosmic rape. What will the outcome be?

John Wyndham was Great Britain's best-selling master of the apocalypse in the late 1940's and 1950's, though in The Midwich Cuckoos the (near) end of the world is implied but not observed as it was in other Wyndham novels like The Day of the Triffids or The Kraken Wakes. Rilla and his army of screenwriters do a solid job here of condensing the character list and the timeline for a short, tense film -- a lot of things are left out, but you wouldn't note their absence unless you had read the novel.

George Sanders and Barbara Shelley are solid as protagonist Gordon Zellanby and his much-younger wife, who gives birth to David, the leader of the 12 quasi-alien children born in Midwich. Sanders's character is a high-profile scientific consultant to the British government, so he has a seat at the table as debates occur about what to do with the children.

The representation of the children has become something of a pop-cultural icon, even for people who've never seen the film. They're blond, they're eerily well-spoken, and their eyes glow when they're using their mental powers. Zellanby believes they can be educated about human morality and become a boon to mankind. Pretty much everyone else watches in horror as the body count mounts -- like Texas, these kids don't like being messed with. Followed by a lackluster sequel and a pointless 1995 remake starring Christopher Reeve and Kirstie Alley. Highly recommended.