BBC’s “In Search of Steve Ditko”
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Go ahead and skip past the clunky first part of this otherwise highly engaging BBC documentary (or, for more specific instruction, skip ahead to 8:17, right around the point Alan Moore introduces himself as a magician), and delight in your growing Nerd Nowledge Center: you just got a Steve Ditko expansion pack!
Focusing on the mind-stunning weirdness of comicdoms’ randiest right-wing/Objectivist, the documentary gives a nice backdrop of the shadowy figure that doesn’t ever seem to penetrate the heart of Ditko’s weirdness (a weirdness the narrator alludes to time and time again). Was he a weirdy because he rode on the backs of busty Amazonian femalia? Was he secretly suffering from a severe morphine addiction? Or did he just hate the Jews? Drugs are touched on briefly, though examined more as cause than effect.
Thankfully, the examination stays away from hideously overwrought tropes and themes of a whole host of shallow, sedentary comic book documentaries (Superman is the first immigrant of the American Dream! Alan Moore and Frank Miller grew up comic books! Spiderman is the Everyman, as Marvel Heroes are Relatable!), and instead takes a more responsible, tenured tone of unspoken complexity of the human condition (the concept of “tension” existant throughout). That is not to suggest that the sins of the doc are totally absolved, but at least it chooses the creators, not the creations, as the central engine of interest and investigation (After more than Seventy Years, Batman-ia doesn’t show any signs of Slowing Down!)
In conclusion, Mr. Moore derives His power from His beard and, akin to Sampson, will wither and feebilze without its firm, graspy attachment.
