Wielding uncanny powers, unheralded and unrecognized by those he shields from harm, he’s what I call “the Hidden Protector.”
He’s often some ordinary-appearing person who defends humanity from equally obscure threats. Sometimes he stays completely unseen and merely lets his influence be felt.
And this mysterious, benevolent figure appears again and again, in various guises, in the work of artist Steve Ditko, in stories he co-created with writer Stan Lee at Marvel Comics and Joe Gill at Charlton Comics.
In many of his fantasy comics compositions, with their several variations on a theme, Ditko sounds two notes repeatedly: deep alienation and isolation, and vast, secret, benevolent power.
Because they are completely alone and isolated, Ditko’s Hidden Protector characters tend to seem even more heroic, and at the same time more estranged, than most superheroes.
Even after Ditko left Marvel, he continued to explore the theme in characters like Charlton’s Dr. Graves and DC’s Shade the Changing Man, a title in which both the hero and the menaces break through our space from a mysterious dimension called the Meta-Zone.
In The Many Ghosts of Dr. Graves 12 (Feb. 1969), Dr. M.T. Graves abandons his ordinarily passive role to function much more like Dr. Strange in the story The Ultimate Evil. Written by Steve Skeates, the tale reportedly reworked a rejected plot idea he’d had for DC’s title The Spectre.
Quoted in American Comic Book Chronicles 1965-69 by John Wells and Keith Dallas, Skeates said that in each story, “…the Spectre and Dr. Graves sensed an evil approaching Earth. They both shot up to confront this being, Graves employing an astral projection of himself just as Dr. Strange would have done, the two of them having to grow, enlarge themselves, to properly battle this giant baddie.”
The story does look very much like a typical Ditko Dr. Strange adventure — effectively the last we’d ever get, given the fact that Ditko had left that character behind in 1966.
The tale’s twist is that Dr. Graves is actually defeated by the cosmic monster, who destroys the Earth. But Graves cansend a message back through time to himself, two days in the past, permitting himself to properly prepare for the coming battle and to trap his enemy. This time he wins, ironically remaining “…unaware that the warning came from himself — and came from a time that now never existed.”
“Ditko’s art did indeed make my story sing,” Skeates said.
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