From the man himself
Alan: Yes, I do. That was another very interesting character, and it was almost a pure Steve Ditko character, in that it was odd-looking. "The Question" didn't look like any other super-hero on the market, and it also seemed to be a kind of mainstream comics version of Steve Ditko's far more radical "Mr. A," from witzend. I remember at the time—this would've been when I was just starting to get involved in British comics fandom—there was a British fanzine that was published over here by a gentleman called Stan Nichols (who has since gone to write a number of fantasy books). In Stan's fanzine, Stardock, there was an article called "Propaganda, or Why the Blue Beetle Voted for George Wallace." [laughter] This was the late-'60s, and British comics fandom had quite a strong hippie element. Despite the fact that Steve Ditko was obviously a hero to the hippies with his psychedelic "Dr. Strange" work and for the teen angst of Spider-Man, Ditko's politics were obviously very different from those fans. His views were apparent through his portrayals of Mr. A and the protesters or beatniks that occasionally surfaced in his other work. I think this article was the first to actually point out that, yes, Steve Ditko did have a very right-wing agenda (which of course, he's completely entitled to), but at the time, it was quite interesting, and that probably led to me portraying [Watchmen character] Rorschach as an extremely right-wing character.
