Big World, Small Town
If you’ve been reading Watershed Voice, you know that it offers an absolutely incredible cornucopia of content. There’s the great news coverage, of course, but there’s also amazing columns like “Tuesdays with Torrey” and thought-provoking podcasts like “The Unapologetics Podcast.” Watershed Voice hasn’t been around very long, but it is fast becoming The New Yorker of St. Joseph County, Michigan. I hear they even recently published the first part of a serialized short story set in Three Rivers.
Because there’s so much to enjoy on the Watershed Voice website, I’ve found myself returning to the site often. Recently, I listened to the inaugural “I can MARVEL all day” podcast with Shan & Hogey as I worked from home. During that podcast, the guys talk about their favorite Marvel characters and listening got me reminiscing about my favorite comic book character.
Due to the influence of my friend Barry, when I was an upperclassman in high school, I got really into comics. But unlike Barry and Shan & Hogey, I was always a DC kind of guy rather than a Marvel one.
I got started reading Superman comics but soon began to branch out into other more mature characters like The Sandman and Shade the Changing Man. One day when I was at the comic book shop, I noticed a new title for sale and picked it up. That comic was called The Question.
While I didn’t know it at the time, The Question had been around for many years by the time I started reading about “the man with no face“ in the 1980s. The Question, or Charles Victor Szasz as he was known when not wearing a mask, was originally created by Steve Ditko in the 60s to espouse the philosophy of Objectivism. Objectivism is a philosophical system developed by Ayn Rand that prizes reason as the highest method of knowing about the world, as well as elevating self-interest as the ultimate ethical standard. As you might imagine, Objectivists really like capitalism and aren’t all that fond of religion.
Ditko, who co-created Spider-Man and Doctor Strange with Stan Lee, initially created a character called Mr. A to be his Objectivist philosophical hero. But according to comics expert Don Markstein, Mr. A comics were a bit too brainy to be mainstream. “Mr. A stories,” Markstein wrote, “consist of nothing more than the villain espousing his reasons for doing what he does, followed by the hero’s lecture on why such actions are evil, ending with the bad guy plunging into an abyss of unenlightenment.”
“The character of The Question has become much like a Rorchach ink blot, an amorphous mass in which our culture always sees what it values most.”
Charles Thomas
Mr. A morphed into The Question because Ditko hoped by creating a more accessible character that had more interesting adventures, he’d be able to find a wider audience for his philosophically focused hero. In Ditko’s original Question comic, Vic Sage is a brave and outspoken journalist in the corrupt Hub City. When a former professor of Sage’s develops an artificial skin called Pseudoderm, Sage uses it to cover the features of his face. This man with no face strikes fear into the hearts of evildoers, fights crime, and lectures all who will listen about the glories of capitalism.
In 1987, DC Comics allowed writer Denis O’Neil to reboot The Question and this second incarnation was when I discovered him for the first time. While the 80s version of the hero was still a tough journalist and deeply philosophical, his philosophy had changed dramatically. Objectivism was long gone, replaced with a philosophy closer to the spirit of the 80s and Eastern religion.
Vic Sage was no longer a proselytizing capitalist. He was now a meditator and a martial arts expert. At the end of the first issue of his comic, O’Neil wrote that he hoped to stay true to Ditko’s vison of The Question being a hero with “a point of view.” O’Neil wrote that his Vic Sage was motivated not by self-interest like Ditko’s version but instead by “his desire to discover.” To that end, each comic ended with recommended reading that aligned with the hero’s new Zen philosophy of life.
As a young man interested in both philosophy and Eastern thought, The Question captured my imagination. I devoured all 36 issues that were produced, and I followed the quarterly stories as well after the regular series ended.
Once I moved and started graduate school, my weekly trips to the comic book shop ended and so too my connection to The Question. For a long time he never crossed my mind. But then, many years later, when I was introducing my daughter to comic books, guess who showed up once again?
But the 2010s were a new era and popular philosophy, like everything else, had moved on. The Question had also moved on and changed once again to reflect the times.
Vic Sage was now dead. But fortunately, before the character lost his fight with lung cancer, Sage was able to train the new Question, The Question for the 2010s. And this third version of The Question reflected the values of the day much like the two previous incarnations had.
With Vic Sage dead, Renee Montoya took over. Montoya was not a brave and outspoken journalist like Vic Sage; instead she was a brave and outspoken detective from Gotham City. A Latina with roots in the Dominican Republic, Montoya was also openly lesbian.
In a time where racial, gender and sexual identity seemed critically important to life, The Question’s protean self-mutated to reflect those values. In our current time, when many are prizing the concerns of their specific identity groups above all other concerns, The Question has become someone who does just that.
Because of the way character has changed, grown, and taken on different skins over the decades, The Question is my favorite comic book hero. The character of The Question has become much like a Rorchach ink blot, an amorphous mass in which our culture always sees what it values most.
For a character from the funny pages, I think that’s pretty impressive.
Charles D. Thomas is a writer and psychotherapist who made Three Rivers his home for over a decade. Feedback is welcome at [email protected].
Any views or opinions expressed in “Big World, Small Town” are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the Watershed Voice staff or its board of directors.
