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maxwell-grant · 2 years

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any thoughts on The Question from DC?

One of my favorite DCU characters, he’s this weird keystone of the superhero who has mostly lurked on the margins of the DCU along with his fellow Charlton brotherhood, all of which might have all faded to complete irrelevancy had they not been, by association, dragged bloodied and beaten into indirectly participating in The Biggest Thing Ever, with The Question having a couple of legs up above his fellow Charlton brothers and sisters not only because of Rorschach, but also because of him being a Steve Ditko character (essentially a Comics Code-friendly revamp of his controversial Mr.A), his revamp by Denny O'Neil, and his practically-protagonist role in the JLU cartoon. Hanging out with Batman sometimes and lending his identity to a Batman side character with a substantial history in her own right (routinely ignored because DC keeps turning her back into a fucking cop) didn’t hurt either.

The Question occupies a unique role in the history of the superhero, and much of that has to do with how thoroughly they test and fray the concept by existing within it. Scenes where The Question buggers and disturbs superheroes far above his weight class like Superman and Batman are common and all-too fitting not only because of the character’s obtrusive know-it-all personality clashing with the other obtrusive know-it-alls who think having superpowers and mansions lets them get in the way of the truth (or his truth, potato tomato), but because they draw attention to how much of an outsider this character is.

I've had a greatly illuminating conversation with @artbyblastweave recently about what is it that really defines The Superhero, when so much of the archetype’s defining traits can be tweaked and varied, to which they pointed out that, once you get past the big Archetypal genre-defining figures like Superman, Batman and Spider-Man, what ultimately defines The Superhero besides the iconography is their proximity to other superheroes, whether it’s their relation to the superhero “genre”, the traits they share in common with the big names of the concept, or their role in a superhero universe, The Ectypes that inevitably form to gravitate around and echo The Archetype. What they said seems to me like as good of a definition as it gets and one that I find prudent to bring up here because of The Question, who endures in comics as a constantly self-reinventing Ectype: to pulp detectives, to Mr.A, to his own Ectype in Rorschach, to Batman, even to himself.

As I’ve pointed out before, The Question is, for all intents and purposes, as much of a textbook pulp detective as a costumed DCU character can be. This is a character who is only even eligible to be called a superhero because sometimes he hangs out with the Justice League and gets dragged into multiverse nonsense. At his weirdest and most superhero-y, he is still about on the same league as powerless-but-strange pulp costumed avengers like The Moon Man and The Crimson Clown, lacking extraordinary resources or hyper-advanced training or strange weapons and abilities common in those. Most of the time, he’s not even on that league, being instead functionally identical to the likes of The Spirit, armed only with a mask, his wits, and his fists as a first and last resort.

The Question, and by extension his prior Rand-influenced works like Mr.A and The Avenging World as well as his later creation The Creeper, was in a way, Steve Ditko leaving the Marvel superheroes behind to create his own and establish his own idea of what superheroes should look like.

Committed to conveying the ordinariness and truth of real life, Ditko made his characters thin, hunched, withdrawn, and plain. He drew them sweating, sobbing and cowering, which only made it more moving when they overcame insurmountable odds to do the right thing.

The reclusive, bespectacled Ditko was preparing the way for elements of the underground alternative comics style, with a measured pace and thematic concerns that led all the way to the politics and formalism of works like Watchmen and beyond - Grant Morrison, Supergods

By Ditko’s own wording, The Question’s (and Mr.A’s) power was “deliberately knowing what is right and acting accordingly” and “choosing to be psychologically and intellectually healthy”, in a way intended to make them stand out from other “self-made neurotic” superheroes. It reads as ironic nowadays considering “self-made neurotic” is as apt of a description for The Question and his archetype as it gets, the kind of character Mr.A was, and The Question’s reputation as “a well known crackpot” but, putting the Rorschach debates of it all aside, whether intentional or not, this is also kind of the whole ethos of O’Neil’s Question as well, even as it radically revamped the character’s philosophy. O’Neil’s Question is a man who has nothing on his toolbelt short of a growing conscience and the ability to decide to do what he thinks is the right thing.

Rorschach doesn’t change anything Ditko espoused. In fact, Moore’s primary aim is to satirically lean so hard into Ditko’s objectivism that Rorschach quite literally melts into a puddle of uncompromising, unresolved trauma. Rorschach, for all his action-hero posturing, for all his belief in a true superhero’s unwavering sense of right, never compromises right into the grave.

Where Moore and Higgins deconstruct Ditko’s objectivist ideals to expose the selfish delusion at the core of the absolutist hero, O’Neil and Cowan literally kill then reconstruct The Question to their own liking. Both versions have to engage with the Randian legacy, but Moore’s is built to destroy, and O’Neil’s is built to live forever.

After Vic’s surprise murder at the end of The Question #1, O’Neil and Cowan are able to rebuild their own version from the ground up, concentrating most pointedly on the inner spirituality and conflicting violence of the character. The recalibration works and sets the stage for a ponderous, enigmatic, reflective Vic Sage.

This Question goes on to grow, to use violence less, to become so open-minded and curious he confuses the Riddler with his amorphous doubts. O’Neil and Cowan’s Vic Sage grows well beyond objectivism, acknowledging the vast pools of gray in the world, and acquiring the self-awareness to understand he doesn’t have all the answers. - ComicBookHerald's article on The Question #17

And it doesn’t get easy, never stops getting harder, even. Throughout O’Neil’s run we get to see him more and more tired, frustrated, cynical, defeated, even to the point he considers letting a LCD-using villain drug all of Hub City just to try and stop the rampaging crime. In respose to the world getting more and more menacing and convoluted, he starts reverting back to his old views to try and make sense of things and needs others to have his back so he can keep going.

This is echoed as well in the JLU cartoon where his ways let him be both correct and righteous in ways other characters aren’t, as well as send him crashing headfirst into disastrous mistakes and defeats others have to pull him back from. Through all his revamps, Vic Sage as The Question has consistently remained a hero driven first and foremost by his certainty stemming from his need to fight corruption, who stands morally apart from his fellow superheroes, for better or worse, and is defined by “knowing what is right and acting accordingly”, even when he is wrong, even in the face of you-know-what.

The Question is far more effective as a mission intent than it is as a disguise or identity and this is also part of why Renee Montoya, a GCPD character growing into contention with law enforcement, taking the mantle was an ideal progression, with the idea of a former police officer quitting the system to become The Question having a great deal of thematic weight behind it on top of it allowing Renee to be way cooler and better off when she’s allowed to be The Question, that is.

(Meme by @questionposting)

Short of Montoya gathering the Multiversal Supermen in Final Crisis, when it comes to The Question, it’s less that they are important as an active character in superhero storylines so much as they, in one form or another, are there when important things are happening on and off the page, whether they are a part of the mystery, guiding us through it or hopelessly lost before it. The Question is fascinating as a character never quite of their own time and place, a mystery crimefighter who hides nothing from the world but their face, a living punctuation mark that lends any story an air of intrigue and mystery just by the fact that they are here partaking in it, through strength of visual design as much as reputation.

Much like his Flex Mentallo counterpart, The Fact, The Question might or might not be everywhere you look, they might be lost in the dark in places where the other superheroes can't find them, and they will get beaten and displaced and made to go away even. But the smoky echo lingers, trailing back to them and their mission intent, even when they aren’t there anymore. They are an Ectype who succeeded in growing into an Archetype in their own right, through the strangest combinations of luck, bad luck, imitation, significance, and being impossible to kill for long.

In the absence of a face, thankfully this Archetype has already been given a name:

“What happened to your face?”

I sold it for secret knowledge. Men call me The Mystery Pilgrim. Well, they used to, anyhow. Now they just call me asshole, if they call me anything at all.

Guess I just lost my way in the dark.

But you're almost there...

#replies tag #dc comics #dc #superheroes #the question #vic sage #renee montoya #flex mentallo #grant morrison #denny o'neil #steve ditko

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