A cultural icon! And Ditko's obscure follow-up to that icon!

Blue Beetle- Spider-Man

Or, “one of the most recognizable fictional characters of the 20th century” and “a similarly-inclined but fairly obscure character developed by the eccentric and disaffected half of the creative axis behind the former”…

Particularly in light of recent and unprecedented ret-conning, I don’t think the netweb needs excessive Spidey commentary from me. So let’s talk BB!

One of the few facts we know regarding Steve Ditko’s exit from the Amazing Spider-Man in 1966 was that he disagreed with a plot point devised by Stan Lee. Ditko wanted the Green Goblin to be revealed as an anonymous criminal, and not, as per Lee’s diktat, the father of Spidey’s best buddy. Seeing as Lee was not only Ditko’s collaborator but also his editor and thus his boss, he got his way.

So Ditko took his ball to Charlton Comics, a third rate comic book publisher, and did things his way, without any appreciable editorial interference. One assumes that Charlton was happy to let the co-creator of the decade’s breakout comic book character do as he wished.

Ditko revamped Blue Beetle and Captain Atom and then created the Question. These characters were each square-jawed and completely convinced of the correctness of their actions. One can infer from this that Ditko, who by this time had become besotted with Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, tired of the morally conflicted Marvel status quo, of which Spidey is the prime exponent, and made his good guys at Charlton REAL GOOD and bad guys REAL BAD.

The Action Heroes vol II Archive Edition I referred to in the previous post contains all (I think) of Ditko’s post-Marvel Charlton work. Although each story is striking for the art and the fact that Objectivist Dogma was finding its most high-profile outlet in children’s comic books (this topic will be revisited in a post devoted to the Question), the resulting stories are mostly one- and two- dimensional and lack depth. Ditko’s Blue Beetle, Ted Kord, is a scientist and inventor of unimpeachable morals and indomitable integrity who, like all of Ditko’s protagonists, must still persist against the unthinking herd: this is almost certainly what Peter Parker would have been like without Lee’s influence.

Here again, we see that Lee’s collaborators needed him: Jack Kirby’s Fourth World, for all its greatness, is often ponderous space opera without Lee’s human touch, and Ditko tips over into one-dimensional agit-prop without Lee’s attention to every character’s often troubled interior. He may have grabbed too much credit from Kirby and Ditko, but those who say that Lee is rip-off artist and that K & D did everything are full of shit.

But Charlton’s Action Heroes line folded in 1967, and the Blue Beetle lay fallow until DC bought the characters in the mid ‘80s. I didn’t read any of Blue Beetle’s DC comics at that time, but I seem to remember writer Len Wein saying something along the lines that he intended the series to evoke the kind of Spidey stories Marvel was not publishing any longer. Ted Kord did however become a fan favorite via Keith Giffen and JM DeMatteis’ Justice League—he was written here as a bit of an underachieving (but still brilliant) goofball…hence the pairing. I quit collecting around this time, but I remember liking the Kord character, who infamously met his demise in 2005 via a bullet through the brain.

Commonalities
Apart from taking their arthropod-ic guises, both are very bright bulbs: very handy with inventions and all manner of scientific know-how. Both are nonetheless supposed to be the likable regular guys of the super-hero set (or at least BB has been written that way since 1986) and are beset by regular guy problems. And both are acrobatic, “hurtle around willy-nilly and make short work of several thugs” kinda combatants.

Differences
Spidey has the extra-normal abilities that BB lacks. And Kord was written as a wealthy scion of “Kord Industries,” as opposed to the decidedly middle class Parker.

Alternate history:

BB: Scientific prodigy Ted Kord takes on the identity of Blue Beetle on a lark, but the death of a family member makes him apply his heroic duties with more gravity. Over the years, his visibility as a crime-fighter increases —he’s beloved by some, hated by others—but he resists associations with other superhuman organizations, and joins the Justice League of America only briefly. In his personal life, he takes on a number of jobs and dates a number of women—please forget that he was married, that was a terrible dream…

SM: Scientific prodigy Peter Parker takes note of a boom in meta-human activity and gives himself extra-normal abilities based on that of a spider. He works alone for some years, but eventually joins various iterations of the Avengers; his reputation in those organizations as a wiseacre masks his insecurities. Immediately after discovering a plot to decimate the meta-human community, he is assassinated.