In a blockbuster season littered with brooding heroes like Batman and Hellboy the superhero who casts the largest shadow may be the one who’s not popping up at multiplexes. When Spider-Man burst on the page in 1962, he revolutionized a comics scene littered with chiseled, preternaturally confident men of action. Here, suddenly, was a bookworm who didn’t fit in at school, looked weedy in his spider suit, wrestled with moral choices, and who, the moment he’d foiled his first criminals, was branded a social menace. Spidey was the first of the troubled, loner superheroes. The man to thank for that, most people would say, is Stan Lee. But behind every great comic by Stan Lee was a thankless artist toiling in the shadows, and behind Spider-Man was his brilliant, and brilliantly eccentric, co-creator, Steve Ditko.

If Ditko has been eclipsed in the historical record, monetarily, too, he was shafted: paid a paltry page rate for work that would generate millions for others. Outside comic-book fandom, where he’s viewed as a legend for works like Spider-Man and Dr. Strange, Ditko is utterly unknown. His pieces are rare on the lucrative art market. Now the handsome Strange and Stranger: The Strange World of Steve Ditko (Fantagraphics Books), the first real retrospective on the artist, by a Toronto author and Ditko authority, Blake Bell, pieces together a magnificent portrait of this elusive genius.

Bell had his work cut out for him. The 80-year-old Ditko isn’t the easiest guy to memorialize. He doesn’t give interviews, and there are few pictures of him in circulation. As prickly as he is visionary, he refused to participate in the book, which, he told Bell five years before its publication, was “a poison sandwich.” (This even though Bell had, for a time, maintained Ditko's first official Web site, developed in conjunction with the artist and his publisher.) He has waged ridiculous wars over the years with collaborators and even fans—all detailed to great effect in this engaging biography. It turns out one reason it’s hard to buy art by Ditko is that he hoards it all. (He has denounced the comics art world as a “thieves market”—which in a sense it is, says Bell, since much of the work was pilfered or withheld from its creators.) Greg Theakston, a cartoonist, tells a story in Strange and Stranger about visiting Ditko in his studio in New York—one of few people to make it past the front door. He noticed Ditko was using as a cutting board something with a “Comics Code” stamp. A closer look revealed it was an original Ditko page from the’50s. Ditko had thousands of them socked away.

Ditko fell out with Stan Lee, too, although he wrested an unprecedented level of creative control from him, and, eventually, credit. By the Spider-Man issue #11, Ditko was not only drawing the strip, but handling most of the plotting and even the dialogue notes, which were then scripted by Lee. He got credit for that work, but not till 14 issues later. By his last year on the strip, the two had stopped talking. He’d draw the strip with no indication to Lee of what he intended to happen, Bell writes. One page of Spider-Man #35 introduces a new super-villain, Meteor Man; by the next issue, he’s called the Looter.

That name brings up a key source of Ditko’s various professional wars. It’s straight from the songbook of the Objectivist movement, the hyper-individualistic, hard-right ideology founded by Ayn Rand. Ditko remains an ardent follower. Capitalist, anti-collective themes emerged ever more stridently in his work starting in the ’60s. In one series of panels, reprinted in the book, Peter Parker is mobbed by hippies. “Another student protest! What are they after this time?” he asks. In 1966 Ditko walked out on Marvel over what he said were unpaid royalties and broken promises. He did most of his subsequent work for smaller houses—“a forerunner of independent comics publishing,” Bell writes. To subsist he inked pages, unapologetic grunt work. His creative output has encompassed the Objectivist vigilante hero Mr. A (and his mainstream counterpart The Question), as well as a mountain of political diatribes in essay/cartoon form.

But his legacy is undeniable. Visually he was revolutionary. Ditko’s world is haunted, evocative, its darkly real cities peopled by gaunt, often grotesque-looking people. Not for him the sleek, cosmopolitan Gotham of Batman; Peter Parker lives in Queens—its alleys and docklands made poetic by Ditko’s cinematic style—with an Auntie May who looks as elderly as she’s meant to be. Pre-Ditko, too, superhero action, had a staccato rhythm, says Bell. “It was all fury, fist-on-fist power. But Ditko’s heroes moved. It was almost like a ballet—they bent and they curved, they were pliable.” His groundbreaking Dr. Strange series invented a whole new, rather psychedelic way of depicting other dimensions. Ditko was fascinated by his characters’ inner lives. “To him what the person does when he doesn’t have his mask on or his superpowers is just as important,” says Dave Sim, the controversial Canadian author of the indie comic Cerebus. The very notion of a complex moral and philosophical overlay in a comic was Ditko’s legacy, one acknowledged by graphic novelists like Frank Miller (Sin City) and Alan Moore (whose series inspired the upcoming Watchmen film).