At UnBeige, mediabistro.com’s design blog, Stephanie Murg takes a look at a Fantagraphics tribute to Steve Ditko, the co-creator of legendary Marvel Comics characters like Dr. Strange and Spider-Man who is perhaps best known to comics fans for an idiosyncratic career path best encapsulated in the character Mr. A, a masked vigilante inspired by the philosophy of Ayn Rand—which made him awfully cold-blooded indeed, as in this classic scene from the 1968 story “Money,” where Mr. A catches up to a teenage cop-killer who’s just stabbed the welfare services provider who believes he’s still a good boy at heart:
In the end, he makes the decision for her: “I have no mercy or compassion for aggressors… only for their victims.. for the innocent! To have any sympathy for a killer is an insult to their victims. Even if you weren’t hurt… I wouldn’t have saved Angel!”
(Note: Ditko’s three panels were originally presented in a straight horizontal line; I had to adjust them and add the explanatory arrows in order to fit the blog’s column width.)