The Question (1987--1990) and Road House (1989)

 I don't really read comic books. I read a good chunk of ultimate marvel as a child, and then V for Vendetta and Watchmen in middle school. None of it was super fascinating. The dialogue was stilted. The movies were more exciting.

The Question is good. 

There's a particular kind of grandstanding you see in superhero comics, and sometimes in action movies, a kind of moral self-indulgence. Usually you see it when the hero says "I DO NOT KILL... EVER!". I think it's a pretty good idea to avoid killing people. But the debate can't be about "can we sometimes kill" versus "can we ever kill", because that's pretty silly: yeah, we can sometimes kill.

If you've come this far, if you've killed this many people, it's just not psychologically plausible for you to stop here. And it doesn't give you the moral high ground.

I like the movie Road House for an example here. Peak nonsense. Bodhi from Point Break has killed his way through a baker's dozen goons to get to the bad guy. Then, when he gets to him, he fights the guy and almost dies, because he's so messed up from the past 20 minutes of violence. But finally he overpowers the dude, and goes in for the killing blow... and freezes.

The face of a man in deep moral reflection

This is bullshit. Why does he stop here? Why is the rich guy less worthy of death than any of his goons? Is it no longer "self defense", just because he's won the fight? Are you only allowed to kill if you're losing the fight?

I don't need actual answers to these questions, I just need artists to think about them when they're making art about violence.

The people who made The Question thought about them. Some of their answers are silly, too, but some are quite good. And a lot of the time they don't feel like they have to actually give the answer, they don't know either, maybe, the hero is searching for the answer himself.

The start is rocky. The hero is kind of annoying, which is kind of the point, and there's a very objectionable depiction of an Asian woman that takes "tiger lady" to rarely-seen heights. Whatever. This guy, The Question, nearly dies, and when he does, Batman says, "You're a fucking amateur, this is nonsense, get in or stay out". Then we get a year-long training montage, a pretty silly one, but by the end of it things are pretty grim in Hub City and The Question is reborn, a more careful, more spiritual warrior, opposed to all manner of social ills.

There are two great bits from early issues that got me hooked. First, The Question has just picked up a stick of lit dynamite from inside a bus filled with schoolchildren. He tosses it away, as far as he can...

 

Finally, somebody who doesn't yap all through the fucking fight scenes

...and then he stops and berates himself: "Why didn't I just pull the wick out? That was dangerous showmanship." So he can self-criticize.

Th second great bit is the ending montage after a two-issue-long riot envelops the town. (There are going to be a lot of these, and they're usually boring.) The good guys win and the riot ends. But it's not over over, because during the riot, people got injured and died. They're not going to be fixed, not ever.

There's a very effective documentary style throughout the issue, where we follow all these different characters and watch them suffer independently

In this comicbook, harm is real. The city is cancerous and all the criminals -- who are sometimes, but maybe not often enough, highly-placed law-abiding citizens -- are its little tumors.

The comic gestures at root causes for all this, more below, but it owes an overall lack of moral clarity to its own lack of that cause. Hub City is full of petty supervillains all out of proportion. There's a family of professional terrorists for hire. They've been doing it for three generations. They're Italian. It's a bit silly.

I guess people just had a different image of terrorism back in 1987

 There's a fat guy who never stops eating, and before he kills you, he asks you for food. I mean come on.

Not just offensive, but offensively bad

My least favorite arc had the hero leave for Central America, where he fights a military strongman who wants to use alchemy to transmute his own soul. What does any of that have to do with The Question?

What does any of this have to do with anything, in fact?

I think any good hero has to grapple with two questions: what is the source of the problem I'm fighting, and am I actually doing anything about it?

The Question gives various answers to the first question: greed, nonexistent infrastructure, corruption, poverty, trauma, insanity, drugs. (Obviously some of these intersect). I guess I don't have a problem with saying "It's complicated" to a genuinely complicated social phenomenon like crime. But "It's complicated" is a difficult thing to fight. The Question mostly beats up individual thugs. He saves individual lives, temporarily. He is just not competent to save Hub City.

Here's the final answer given to "What's wrong with this place?". Not very convincing. They shouldn't have tried to wrap things up.

The final arc of the story, which is probably the worst written, is also the best, morally. The Question is sidelined for most of it after a car accident. Hub City is enveloped in riots, for the fourth time I think.

He looks like this for the whole last issue. Dude isn't saving anyone.

He realizes he can't do any more here. It's killing him. He leaves. He tries to convince his love interest, the mayor of the city, with him. She won't go. She still has work to do. She doesn't know if she'll succeed, but she's got to keep trying.

Some final miscellaneous notes:

• A lot of media treats race and organized crime kinda funky. Gangs just are racially segregated. But most comicbooks and movies don't want to racialize their villainous gangs. So you wind up with racially-integrated street gangs. I understand the impulse here. I don't have a better solution, if the artists don't want to touch race but do want to show street gangs. But you can't -- it's like trying to talk about poverty or medical outcomes without talking about race.
• Myra, the mayor, is a really poorly written character with a lot of promise. Her husband, also the mayor, and a delusional alcoholic, is a one-note joke dragged on for way too long. She could have been much more interesting if she had a reason to be loyal to him, but as far as we know she was kidnapped and her daughter was held hostage to get her to marry him. So it just doesn't make sense why she stays married to him after he loses his power. Also, she's not a very good mayor -- her three plans are "Deputize a bunch of gangsters to serve as cops", "Deputize a bunch of citizens to serve as cops", and "Blow up a slum". None of them work out well.
• There's an issue where a really racist private eye investigates the murder of a couple of black guys. For some reason he takes a liking to Victor, the real person behind The Question's blank mask. Victor cusses him out and calls him a racist, but he still likes Victor, and takes a bullet to save him. Reminds me of this classic Peep Show episode, give it a watch! (Obviously there's a good amount of racism here so be warned.)
• Most of the issues are one or two issue villain arcs. The individual villains are hit and miss. But some are pretty good!
• Overall I think I recommend it. I read the whole thing, even staying up late to keep reading.