I would like to begin with an ending. Specifically, I would like to begin with an ending for an entirely different series: The final issue of the Mike Grell’s Green Arrow run1 ends with our protagonist sitting in his shabby little room, having just driven away his longtime girlfriend, and crying. Granted, there’s still more story in that particular collection, the flashback miniseries The Wonder Year, but in story terms this is where famed macho-writer Grell chose to finish his defining run – a man crying, having fucked up pretty much everything in his life.
I was thinking about that moment because the final issue of the Dennis O’Neil/Denys Cowan Question run ends on a similarly bitter note 2; and I found it quite laudable, the willingness to end a long-form superhero story in such dour mode. No last minute triumphalism here, The Question is the story of one of the world’s greatest losers. The superhero answer to Charlie Brown.
There are other similarities between that era of The Question and Green Arrow. Both books crossovered with one another several times. They are both prima facia superhero stories whose actual world doesn’t seem to contain any overt supernatural or science-fiction elements; it’s not quite clear if they exist in the same world as the Justice League 3. They both eschew the use of code names 4. They are both heavily involved in the politics of the time 5. Yet there is one major difference that sets the two apart.
Green Arrow, as befitting for Grell’s oeuvre, is all about self-assuredness and manly certainty. Yes, Green Arrow self-destructs throughout, but he does it on his terms; like one of Sam Peckinpah’s protagonists. You have to be violent to exist in a violent world, yet knowing said violence will eventually take you down with it. He is beautifully doomed6. The Question under O’Neil and Cowan is many things, but never certain. As befitting the series name this a story about a man who forever is uncertain if he’s doing the right thing.
Let’s track back, just a bit, to the original Question, the one created by Steve Ditko. It was, like most Charlton creations, a rather short-lived series with an outsized impact for its length. It was also, like most of Ditko’s post-Marvel creations, first and foremost a vehicle to explore his personal philosophy. His Vic Sage was a true Randian figure, a man who knows right from wrong intrinsically, and is never besotted by doubt. The very first issue of the O’Neil/Cowan series starts with this figure getting beaten and forced to-evaluate his life, getting the objectivism literally kicked out of him, and the rest of the series is mostly about a man trying to grasp what he thinks of the world, failing to do so.
It’s one of the best aspects of this version of The Question (among many) – that this is a series fully committed to the idea of a protagonist forever in a search for meaning. This is a portrait of a man lost at sea, a man who thought he knew all the rules only to find out they no longer apply. He then goes out trying to find new rules to supplement what he had lost – and never quite manages.
That first issue also sets the trend of the character getting the shit beaten out of him repeatedly, I am again nearly at awe at the creators’ willingness to make their protagonist suffer for his own physical and mental shortcomings. The Question is closer to one those old-fashioned private detectives, more notable for his ability to endure pain than to dish out punishment. The Spirit, at least, got to have the upper hand (and good looking gal) at the end of most of his outings. The Question just barely gets to have his life, and the more the story goes the more it seems to be a rather crappy reward.
It’s a superhero story with a secret identity, a friend-on-the-force, a city to clean up, and on-again, an off-again love interest, but shorn off all the stuff that became genre staple throughout the years. This isn’t a "deconstruction,"7 this isn’t like Watchmen or Dark Knight Returns. In fact, with the exception of three issues, the series isn’t all that interested in the meta-aspect that made certain 1980s comics pop-out critically. The most in-jokey is The Question #17, collected in the first omnibus, in which our protagonist reads a copy of Watchmen while on a flight and tries, with disastrous results, to play-act as Rorschach. It’s a funny gag, which works well without overtaking the plot. Instead it’s part of the larger character arc of Vic Sage trying define himself and latching into a figure that can offer him the comfort of simplicity once more.
The best of these self-aware issues is, however, The Question #28 (collected in this omnibus), which features Denys Cowan doing a note-perfect parody of Miller’s Daredevil (with Lady Shiva playing the role of Elektra): The faces, the movement, the layouts, the framing of the action … and yet the story never calls attention to itself. It never becomes a story about the fact that you are reading a Daredevil parody. The opening of that issue is just one of these moments that reminds you how good and flexible Cowan can be. The Question doesn’t often call on him to be flashy, but it does call on him to do basically everything – from over-the-top 80s style action, to noir-ish moodiness, to slapstick to actual attempts at social realism.
There’s a world in which The Question and Green Arrow (for all of its sins) become the face of ‘respected’ 1980s superhero fiction and it is, probably, a better world than ours. Superhero comics were already as inward-looking a genre as one can find, especially in the post-Roy Thomas era, and the works we chose to put on a pedestal from that era – good works mind you – were more comics about comics. There were other elements to Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns 8 but by the very element of the culture that gave birth to them, these turned out to be what stuck.
The Question isn’t a comics-about-comics. It’s a story about a person trying to find his place in the world. It’s a comic about the American metropolis in the 1980s. It’s a comics about politics that is both dated and yet hilariously relevant (in one issue the mayor offers to replace the non-existent police force by recruiting mob members –“there aren’t so many differences between a police force and street gang”). O’Neil was always a writer willing to be engaged with the world, a man coming from a journalist background, and in Cowan he found the perfect partner to draw that world.
It’s not always successful. The second half of the second omnibus is not as good as what came before it, the parts not drawn by Cowan feel not only out of place but nearly unrelated to what came before. The various short revivals never quite manage to pick up the seam as much as the ongoing series, and the ongoing series itself sometimes suffers from unsubtly changing directions midstream (the above-mentioned gangs-as-police-force idea is introduced and dropped within two issues).
At its worst The Question mirrors its protagonist – shifting from one thing to another without ever establishing an identity all of its own 9. Yet this is also what it is at its best. The Question would never get to fully redeem himself, never get to save his city in a big dramatic moment, never find that one philosophy that would make him whole. That’s fine, Charlie Brown never got to kick that football.
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Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
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