Good Article on Ditko

It's in Salon, so you have to put up with an ad to read the whole thing, but it's worth the effort.

Sixties hipsters thought that Ditko's urban realism and trippy visions meant that he was one of them. They couldn't have been much more wrong. Around the time that Ditko fell out with Marvel Comics in 1966, he became fascinated with Ayn Rand and objectivism, and his work started to take on a severe and increasingly strident right-wing tone.

Not sure how old Douglas Wolk is, but he's probably not remembering how left-wing everything seemed to be getting in America in the late-1960s. Ditko's comics were indeed a little strident, but they were a lone voice of sanity in a youth culture that was increasingly flirting with communism, moral relativism and nihilism. I have some scans of Ditko's work in this period including the terrific Blue Beetle issue that might as well be a primer for the works of Ayn Rand.