Regarded by many as a thinking man's Jack Kirby, American comic-book artist and co-creator of Spider-Man, Steve Ditko, has just been announced dead, aged 90.
To be honest, I wasn't a great fan of his work; it was a little too weird for my rather conservative and conventional tastes as a child. But I'm perfectly happy to concede his genius to those who insist upon such and know better than I.
As always when someone dies, I can't help thinking about what happens to the corpse. The immortal soul of man conceived in spiritual-personal terms is of zero interest to me. But, as a thantologist, I'm fascinated by the body's shipwreck into the nauseous and the cosmo-molecular dispersal of atoms and their eventual recycling into all kinds of things, including new life forms.
Interestingly, it just so happens that Ditko was an Objectivist (i.e., a devotee of Ayn Rand), so he would probably have agreed that there is no supernatural or spooky-mysterious aspect to death. There are physical processes and sub-atomic particles, but no heaven, no angels, and no life-after-death as theists conceive of it.
And to imagine that the mind might somehow transcend the demise and destruction of the body is just a ludicrous fantasy. Once your brain has liquidised and dribbled like snot out of your nose, you'll not be able to worry about it. In death, one does not exist; it's not the end of the world, but it is the end of the world for you ...
And so, after a long life of approximately 780,000 hours, Ditko's atoms are in the process of ending their happy affiliation and he's about to get a whole lot skinnier ...
