Having raised the Question, Ditko then set out to provide the A. -- the Answer -- in the form of brand-new comic books, chock-full of heroes.

Mr. A. is the quintessential Ditko hero. He is meant to embody the highest qualities of humankind – which, per Ditko's emphasis on individual reason and self-sufficiency, results in an unwavering dedication to making hard distinctions between good and evil, white and black, with any grey area between inevitably conductive to the continued survival of evil, and thus fundamentally irrelevant toward the correction of such. With Mr. A., you're either with him or against him, and he doesn't abuse his emotions in mourning the villains whose usage of Force and Fraud -- the twin towers of evil in Ditko's work, representing the perfect affront to personal liberty, and the ultimate frustration of reason -- demand a most permanent outlay of Responsive Force. Here he is 30 years ago:

As you might expect, Mr. A. is also on hand for two of the new comics: ...Ditko Continued... [#3] and Oh, No! Not Again, Ditko! [#4], which serialize a new short story. But something is different:

Well, several things are different. First of all, Mr. A. is no longer so violent a presence. Mostly, he just spooks this guy into defeat with his color-changing cards, representing the pollution of “the white” with “the grey,” and thus the inevitable transition to “black.”

Is this an official superpower? I don't know. It used to be that Mr. A.'s placid white face was a metal mask he'd wear to protect himself from the blows of Force, but somewhere along the line Ditko began drawing it as his actual face. As the Joker might say, why bother taking it off, if that's who he really is?

More importantly, though, the consistency of superpowers isn't all that important to Steve Ditko comics, because superheroes tend to behave less as rounded, literal figures inhabiting a virtual comic book reality than broad metaphors. In other words, when I say this stuff is supposed to be “inspiring,” as far as I know, Ditko doesn't actually want people dressing up in fancy outfits and punching crime until it stops – rather, he's using superhero stories as a means of communicating the manner in which rational individuals comport themselves. It's not kids' stuff. Always, Ditko considered the superhero genre to be a legitimate art form capable of communicating relevant themes to adult readers.

To put things into perspective: Mr. A., if we're breaking out the fandom timeline, is technically a Silver Age superhero. Perhaps he represents the end of the Silver Age. As far as I'm concerned, the only reason he doesn't is because, for too long, superhero fans gauged the entirety of history in terms set down by Marvel and DC. But you can't abide by such limitations forever, if you're meant to think for yourself.

Speaking of limitations, are all of these stories about perfect, grinning superheroes terrifying stooges into submission?

Hey, I'm not gonna sugarcoat anything – Ditko has a very specific set of interests, and every one of these comics serve those interests. Sometimes, reading them is like encountering a series of particularly odd and specific religious tracts (which I'd enjoy anyway); many pages of the Phase 2 comics are taken up by full-page drawings illustrating these favored themes in a manner akin to newspaper editorial cartoons, but charged with Ditko's particular iconography. Here, for example, is a problem:

And here is the solution:

This hero, you'll be pleased to learn, is named the Hero, and he represents many of the visual qualities Ditko presently favors: strong, clearly defined separations between black and white values (get it?) representing Reason vs. the wavy, congealing, intermingling, random lines of all that is negative in the world. The same traits were present in the Mr. A. story above, both in Mr. A.'s card and the ghostly, outline-like figure of Mr. A. himself.

I am fascinated and thrilled and delighted by this stuff. Simple as the plots may be, seeing Ditko work his way through this perfect, intuitive visual system -- panels and pages utterly without fat, where individual lines carry distinct, thematically appropriate meanings, as delicate and personal and immediate as a man signing his name, over and over -- is to witness a master advanced so far in age and skill that crowd-pleasing additions of gloss and finish have been brushed away in favor of the fastest, realist communication of his message that he can possibly manage. Even the words his characters speak rarely cohere into full sentences anymore – instead, they are self-evidently visual elements, aimed not at mimesis of realistic speech patterns (which is the one and only criterion for how "good" dialogue is composed in much of the contemporary criticism) but premised for signals for thought, motivation and action.

There is an entire cosmos in these pages. Ditko once said that he never talks about himself, because his work is him. THIS IS HIM.