Category: The Atlasphere

The new Guardian article “The unsung hero behind Spider-Man” by Jonathan Ross contains some interesting background on Steve Ditko, complete with obligatory snide remarks about Ditko’s admiration for Ayn Rand:

[After he left Marvel comics], the mystique surrounding Ditko began to grow. His refusal to give interviews or to state why he bailed out just as Spider-Man was on the verge of becoming the biggest-selling comic in America only increased the fans’ curiosity. He went first to Charlton Comics, a small outfit based in Connecticut, and then surfaced at DC comics, where he created two of the weirdest books of the period. The first was The Creeper, about an oddball maniac whose costume came from a fancy-dress store and was finished off with a red rug on his back. The second was The Hawk and the Dove, a strange peace-v-war debate dressed up in superhero tights, which was presumably an attempt to appeal to the newly politicised students of the Vietnam era, but came from a right-of-centre perspective.
Neither was a big enough hit to keep Ditko at DC or to keep the books in print, and since then he has bounced around from publisher to publisher, creating books and intriguing characters, then suddenly leaving. Small independent companies published several of his characters, and it is in those books that you can most clearly see Ditko’s world-view expressed. As an advocate of the philosopher Ayn Rand, Ditko is a believer in objectivism, that peculiar school of thought that promotes hardline capitalism and the pursuit of individual, self-serving goals and personal happiness as the only legitimate and rational way forward for the human race. Hence such characters as Mr A, for example, a Randian vigilante dressed all in white and doling out a brutal, uncompromising form of justice. In the universe that Mr A inhabits there is good, there is evil, and there is nothing in between. Mr A not only perfectly illustrates the nutty extremism of objectivism but also perfectly sums up why Ditko is such an anomaly in the world of comics. If compromise is an unacceptable evil, how on earth can you work for big companies that are always going to insist on doing things their way, regardless of what a character’s creator wants?
I continued to buy Ditko’s work, and continue to love it, even as he bounced between the borderline lunacy of his small-press political rants and the slowly diminishing return that his superhero work provided. Because once you begin to absorb his drawings, once you fall in love with that beautiful line-work, the shading, the anatomies and those remarkable faces, well, you never really stop. And part of me loves him just as much for his extreme take on the world – his refusal to do things any way other than his way, and his decision never to talk about the past in print, never to press his association with those early characters even if that means missing out on the mountains of cash they now generate.

See the full article for more, including the story of Ross’s attempts to interview Mr. Ditko.
And then savor Ditko’s Henry Cameron-like response. Heh.

Alan Greenspan’s new memoir is titled The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World and will be released this Monday, September 17, 2007.
If you would be interested in writing a thoughtful review of this book for the Atlasphere, please contact us ASAP.
It sounds like Greenspan discusses his friendship with Ayn Rand in the memoir. He posted the following comments about the book at Amazon:

I started thinking about what was to become â??The Age of Turbulenceâ? two years ago. My nearly two decades as Federal Reserve Chairman were coming to an end – a remarkable experience. After a lifetime observing how the world works as a business economist on Wall Street, it was exhilarating to be at the center of international monetary policymaking. Sure, Iâ??d been President Fordâ??s White House economic advisor in the mid-1970s, but nothing fully prepared me for what I faced when President Reagan nominated me Fed Chairman in June 1987. So, in the waning months of my Fed tenure, I started getting excited about having time to stand back and think about all Iâ??d been through â?? the frightening stock market crash of 1987, the boom of the 1990s, the trauma of 9/11, the climactic end of the Cold War, all told, a cascade of events propelling a new world forward at warp speed.
There was also a personal story to tell. Iâ??d known every president from Richard Nixon to Reagan, Ford, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. And what about all those other assorted characters from my childhood in New York, my years as a jazz musician, my complete career switch to economics â?? and my friendship with Ayn Rand? I wanted to make the leap from writing economic analysis to writing in the first person about what Iâ??d experienced. And after years of talking â??Fedspeakâ? in carefully calibrated congressional testimony â?? I could finally use my own voice!
As I wrote â??The Age of Turbulence,â? I tackled the personal part first, but then started unraveling the detective story about the economy: what did all the economic shifts we began to detect in the late nineties mean? At the Fed, I had at first focused primarily on monetary policy â?? interest rates and the forces that determined their appropriate levels. But as the years rolled on, it became increasingly clear to me that we needed to understand an entirely new range of factors to implement policy effectively. I had had inklings of this new world, of course, but as I raced from one policy meeting to another, I never had time to sit back and think about all this. Was this a permanent change or just another technological evolution that would, with time, come to an end? Would the growing income inequality that seemed to be associated with this new paradigm create a backlash to the forces of globalization? And wasnâ??t this a dangerous trend for our democracy?
My term as Federal Reserve Chairman ended at midnight, January 31, 2006. The following morning, I started to write. You would think after all those years at the Fed and my earlier decades as an economist that I would have learned about as much as I could. But halfway through the book I realized that the story was leading me in surprising directions. I needed to refocus much of what I had written in my original drafts.
The final chapter was to forecast how I thought the world would work in the year 2030. But until I spent a year researching and writing and thinking about â??The Age of Turbulence,â? I had little idea how it would turn out. In fact, I was having so much fun rethinking some of my earlier assumptions, I was as anxious to read it as I hope my readers will be. In the end, I can confidently say writing that final chapter brought meâ??and the bookâ??closure. It is not the grand finale of Beethovenâ??s Ninth, but for me, it hit the right chord.

And Amazon provides the following description:

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, in his fourteenth year as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan took part in a very quiet collective effort to ensure that America didn’t experience an economic meltdown, taking the rest of the world with it. There was good reason to fear the worst: the stock market crash of October 1987, his first major crisis as Federal Reserve Chairman, coming just weeks after he assumed control, had come much closer than is even today generally known to freezing the financial system and triggering a genuine financial panic. But the most remarkable thing that happened to the economy after 9/11 was…nothing. What in an earlier day would have meant a crippling shock to the system was absorbed astonishingly quickly.
After 9/11 Alan Greenspan knew, if he needed any further reinforcement, that we’re living in a new world – the world of a global capitalist economy that is vastly more flexible, resilient, open, self-directing, and fast-changing than it was even 20 years ago. It’s a world that presents us with enormous new possibilities but also enormous new challenges. The Age of Turbulence is Alan Greenspan’s incomparable reckoning with the nature of this new world – how we got here, what we’re living through, and what lies over the horizon, for good and for ill-channeled through his own experiences working in the command room of the global economy for longer and with greater effect than any other single living figure. He begins his account on that September 11th morning, but then leaps back to his childhood, and follows the arc of his remarkable life’s journey through to his more than 18-year tenure as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, from 1987 to 2006, during a time of transforming change.
Alan Greenspan shares the story of his life first simply with an eye toward doing justice to the extraordinary amount of history he has experienced and shaped. But his other goal is to draw readers along the same learning curve he followed, so they accrue a grasp of his own understanding of the underlying dynamics that drive world events. In the second half of the book, having brought us to the present and armed us with the conceptual tools to follow him forward, Dr. Greenspan embarks on a magnificent tour de horizon of the global economy. He reveals the universals of economic growth, delves into the specific facts on the ground in each of the major countries and regions of the world, and explains what the trend-lines of globalization are from here. The distillation of a life’s worth of wisdom and insight into an elegant expression of a coherent worldview, The Age of Turbulence will stand as Alan Greenspan’s personal and intellectual legacy.

The book is available for preorder through Amazon.
UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal offers a review of the book, noting that Greenspan’s memoir is critical of Bush and the Republicans.