I didn't realize it until just now, but there may be a little of Steve Ditko's Mr. A in my nineteenth century consulting detective Sandford Blank, who dresses entirely in gray, and whose calling card is a blank, featureless white card. Not that Blank is an objectivist, far from it; if anything, he's a reaction to the kind of philosphy which permeates Ditko's later work.

Blank's a strange character for me. He's not at all the character I thought he was, when I first wrote him a few years ago. As time went on, I gradually began to realize just who he really was, and what he's really about. Very little about him is revealed in the "Nowhere Man" chapter of Here, There & Everywhere, but End of the Century will clear up the mystery surrounding him once and for all.