THE QUESTION, No. 19 (O'Neil / Cowan; DC, 1988)
Every Wednesday morning, I make a blind pull from Siri's (randomized) choice of one of the 20 alphabetically-organized shortboxes that constitute my comics collection, (re-)read it, write about it, and publish whatever emerges. Earlier installments live here.
(Box14): Among the joys of joys in this, the latest phase of my comics collecting, has been experiencing much DC's post-TDKR / pre-Death of Superman (86-+/-92) output for the first time (I was a little young – I doubt six/seven year-old me would have appreciated them as much as the present 42-iteration does though who knows; I did read DRACULA for the first time when I was six): BATMAN: THE CULT; RONIN (though that was '82/'83, but still) DOCTOR FATE; and, most utterly – because I can't come up with a better word for how much I adore this series — O'Neil and Cowan's THE QUESTION.
That this week's blind pull was one of my favorite issues of one of my favorite series of all time featuring one of my top five comics characters (will list them at some point) was nothing short of intellectual manna: everything great about the O'Neil/Cowan run distilled into 28 pages: a done-in-one takedown of topical, corrupt prescience (in this case, plastic guns) by a social justice warrior in both his faced and non-faced identities who takes the time to engage in verbal sparring (more often than not whist in an impressive yoga position) with the best mentor/father figure in comics (I love you Alfred, but Tot will always win out for me), all with a sympathetic Hub City eccentric (Augie Lumberg and Doll – would anyone guess that the most gut-punching moment of the issue would come when a rubber love doll is shot in the head?) – whose connection to the main story becomes apparent only in the moment of utmost impact and danger – stuck in the middle.
One of the things that I've written about over my years of writing about comics is that the best, most enduring characters are those that are what I term "elastic": pliable enough to be molded into who they need to become so that the creative team to do their job as caretakers and shepherds while maintaining the very things that kept made the character so sacred in the first place. The Question, while not a objectively an "A-lister" – though both Vic and Montoya are to me – fits this and then some: in the hands of his creator, he was a less-stark vehicle for Ditko's Randian/objectivist proclivities; in the hands of O'Neil and Cowan, a zen social justice warrior; in Veitch and Edwards's, an all-seeing, weird-ass poet shaman attuned to the chi flowing through Metropolis; in Rucka's, a hard-noir vehicle of redemption; in Lemire's, one of resurrection: the Question's mask is nothing short of a tabula rasa for any type of story imaginable – and O'Neil and Cowan's 36 issues remain, three+ decades on, the bar beyond which all of our imaginations must reach.
