Remember Mr. A, true believers? Unless you’re a serious comics geek or fairly well steeped in the wacky world of Ayn Rand, odds are you don’t. Legendary comics artist Steve Ditko is best known as the co-creator of Spider-Man and Doctor Strange. But after falling out with his Marvel collaborator Stan Lee, Ditko, well, went round the bend a little, and began churning out turgid, nigh-unreadable comics devoted to expounding Rand’s Objectivist philosophy in tedious, rambling lectures punctuated by the odd fistfight. His primary mouthpiece was the costumed avenger Mr. A—as in “A is A,” the tautology from which Rand purported to derive an elaborate system of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy. Along with another Ditko creation, The Question, Mr. A would serve as the model for Rorschach in Alan Moore’s seminal Watchmen.
Well, it turns out that Mr. A is now the unlikely subject of a new song by Brit rockers The Hoosiers. It’s not exactly brilliant—hell, it’s a hair’s breadth from being a cover of an old ELO track—but it’s nevertheless pretty damn catchy, with a video inspired by the campy 60s Batman TV show:
4 responses so far ↓
1 Teddeh the ninja // Nov 27, 2007 at 2:42 pm
I LOVE that song =DDD
2 R.J. Moore II // Sep 24, 2010 at 6:45 pm
I thought Mr. A was fantastic, not only was he explicitly libertarian-objectivist, but he also broke the superhero trope of not killing people who deserved it – in the 60s!
Mr. A’s tendency to rant philosophy wasn’t really that bad, it was just a character trait. It was worsened by the fact that he never got many full-length stories, so Ditko – being the philosophically minded person he was – had to pack all of the exposition and actions into a half dozen pages.
Lots of superheroes are slightly crazy, at least Mr. A didn’t dress up like bat. And if you’ve read those god awful Green Arrow comics from the 70s, you’ll know that this sort of mouth-piecing is pretty common in the largely liberal comic book establishment. Green Arrow’s secret identity might as well have been Lyndon Johnson.
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