1. As Spider-Man leaps to top of box office charts, worth remembering so popular a character was created by a true eccentric. Steve Ditko, the primary creator, shunned the spotlight (unlike credit-hog Stan Lee), living in overlapping covert worlds of fetish porn & libertarianism
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2. As I discussed earlier, from 1958-1968 (which encompass years he created Spider-Man) Ditko shared a studio with Eric Stanton, a specialist in fetish art. The two artists influenced each other & a fetish flair shaped Ditko's character design.https://jeetheer.substack.com/p/the-sexual-subtext-of-spider-man?r=bh54&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email …
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3. During the years where he collaborated with Stanton and co-created Spider-Man (not just drawing the art but plotting stories, designing characters & providing first draft of dialogue), Ditko became Ayn Rand devotee. Which reinforced the fetishist proclivities.
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4. Ditko's Randianism is usually talked about in terms of Mr. A and other characters he did for small-press (stories he owned & which were not commercial). Those do provide stark black & white morality of productive heroes versus parasitespic.twitter.com/r1z5aZR8Ev
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5. Spider-Man is usually not seen as so bluntly Randian, but if you read the Ditko created stories closely, what comes through is an emotional libertarianism: not so much an economic doctrine but a vibe: the lone individual genius besieged by unappreciative society.pic.twitter.com/X7BefiNJEZ
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6. This emotional libertarianism (sense of being unappreciated, scorned, disdained by the unthinking mob while possessing secret gifts) is the true appeal of Randianism, more than the cod anti-statism (which is superstructural). For more on Ditko & Rand:https://jeetheer.substack.com/p/podcast-spider-mans-libertarian-roots?r=bh54&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email …
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