Tag: The Question

A few months ago I told you about my favorite comic book hero, The Question.

At the time, I lamented the fact that The Question went from a man who swore never to kill to a sociopathic killing machine.

This past Saturday, I picked up the final issue in the limited six-issue run of the series. I was more than disappointed. Now he’s a magical sociopathic killing machine.

In the last frame of issue #5, he’s in a port-o-john at a construction site, surrounded by gun-toting evildoers. The evildoers want to make faceless Swiss cheese out of him and shoot up the port-o-john. Of course, when they open the door, The Question isn’t in there.

Did he pull some kind of ninja-like maneuver to evade the evildoers’ bullets? Hell no. He just casually strolled out undetected by said evildoers. So he either now has the ability to turn invisible or he has the power to cloud men’s minds. Kind of like…oh I don’t know…THE SHADOW!!!

Then, to make matters worse, while the gun-toting evildoers were trying to figure out where he went he was whispering in their ears telling them what to do, then they would do it. So now is he not only ripping off The Shadow, he’s also learned in the ways of The Force. With no explanation about how he came to have these powers.

It would be like reading Batman and all of a sudden, for no reason, he can turn into an actual bat. Throughout the series, they hinted that he had some kind of Shamanistic abilities, which I can kind of forgive, but to have full-blown powers just ruins the character.

It’s like Superman said before throwing The Question out of Metropolis, “You have the stink of magic on you”.

Back in the late 80s/early 90s, I was a comic book fan. My favorite comic that I would never miss and move heaven and earth to make sure I could get the next issue was The Question.

Rather than get into a long, boring entry about the history of The Question, you can go here and here.

My using the name TheTrenchcoat is 90% based on The Question. He was the ultimate comic book hero to me. He wore a trench coat and a fedora and wore a mask that made him look like he had no face.

He used no weapons except for his fists and vowed never to kill anyone. (Take note of that, it becomes important later on ). Near the end of his run in the ’80s, The Question did kill someone out of necessity even though he didn’t want to.

Imagine my joy when I found out that a new Question series was being planned. Yesterday, I finally picked it up, and I was a little disappointed in the new direction.

Within the first few pages of the new series, he’s already killed two people. In the 4th issue of the 6 issue series, he pushed two evil henchmen in front of a moving subway. I must have missed something that happened to him between the time I stopped reading comics and now. Maybe one of my readers can help me out with that.

Anyway, since the series is taking place in Metropolis I can’t see the big blue guy taking too kindly to a vigilante that kills. Now I have no problem with comic book heroes that kill, for example, The Punisher. However, that was one of the qualities that endeared me to The Question.

Another more famous comic book character was based on The Question, and that was Rorschach from the legendary Watchmen series. In that series, Rorschach was crazier than a shit house rat and had no problem at all killing evildoers. It seems like to me that the creators of this new series are basing this more on Rorschach rather than The Question. If I wanted a Rorschach series, I’ll read Watchmen again.

All in all, it’s not a bad series so far, it’s just not The Question I remember. It’s things like this that made me get out of comics in the first place.