Cat Yronwode on her unfinished Steve Ditko biography – “The unexpected core of the book became the issue of how and why an obviously brilliant young boy with great natural art talent was placed in the “industrial track” in a steel mill town while his teachers justified their plans to make him a mill worker — followed by how and why he left there and became an artist in New York and a proponent of Objectivism. Through the yearbooks, i saw Johnstown as the dripping wet “ten-ton doo-hickey” and Steve Ditko as the plucky teenager who somehow finds the inner strength to throw it off of himself and take control of his own destiny.”
After reading through that, you might want to reacquaint yourself with Ditko’s akimbo career via Steve Ditko’s World (including this rejected cover to Amazing Fantasy #15), and the more recently updated Ditko Looked Up. For those of you looking for something a bit more esoteric, there’s Ms. Yronwode’s companion to the Dr. Strange comics, The Lesser Book of the Vishanti.
(Link to the Ditko letter pilfered from The Comic Journal’s Journalista blog.)