Book-A-Day 2018 #149: The Question, Vol. 2: Poisoned Ground by Dennis O'Neil, Denys Cowan, and RIck Magyar

It's always nerve-wracking to go back to something you remember enjoying a lot, many years later. Is it still worth reading? Or has the Suck Fairy slinked around sometime in between and stolen away everything that was good about it?

(And sometimes it's not just the Suck Fairy -- her nastier sisters the Sexism Fairy and the Racism Fairy delight in rampaging through older stories. I haven't noticed the work of the Transphobic Fairy much yet myself, but the Gay Panic Fairy has also been very active in recent years. Truly, the world of the past just gets worse and worse the longer ago it gets.)

So it was a relief to pick up Poisoned Ground, a collection of a chunk of middle of the 1987 The Question series -- written by Dennis O'Neil, drawn by Denys Cowan and Rick Magyar -- and discover it was only a superhero story by courtesy, that the crime-story aspects were still strong and real, and that the Cowan/Magyar art was just as impressive -- and expressive -- as I remembered.

(It does make me half-wish I'd bothered to dig up all of the other collections of this series first, to read them through -- but I can always do that next.)

The Question is more of a noir character than a traditional superhero, a descendant of The Spirit rather than Batman: just a guy with fits and wits, and one strange device. That device is a mask that turns his features blank and a gas that activates the mask and simultaneously changes the color of his clothing and hair. He was originally created by Steve Ditko, was the inspiration for Watchmen's Rorschach when Alan Moore didn't get permission to use the Charlton stable of characters, and he's been on various super-teams now and then despite not fitting into that role well at all.

And these comics -- the series written by O'Neil and illustrated mostly by Cowan and Magyar, running for almost exactly three years -- are generally considered his high point. Well, by people my generation, at least -- definitely the epitome of the first Question, Vic Sage. (Every major character in a superhero universe has multiple versions and successors. They're all dead at least once. They all pass their names on to young women or minorities or both. They all keep changing until something is actually popular for a while, and then change again once it stops being popular.)

Poisoned Ground is middle, but it's middle from the era when comics stories still mostly only took one issue. The set-up for this series -- resetting The Question's temperament and fighting style somewhat -- is over, with those issues in the first book. And Vic's eventual departure from Hub City is still far in the future. Here, he's trying to fix a corrupt, ruined, beaten-down town, a Rust Belt city (eventually revealed by O'Neill to be based loosely on East St. Louis) that doesn't want to be fixed and doesn't have the materials needed for fixing.

So we start here with two standalone single-issue stories, one that may be supernatural and one that's just about a vigilante nastier than The Question. Then there is a multi-issue plotline, as Vic's mentor/friend Dr. Rodor disappears, kidnapped by unknown forces, and The Question has to find him. Even there, it's that same mix -- a little megalomania, a little philosophy, some science that may shade into mysticism or just into insanity, and a whole lot of The Evil That Men Do.

The Question isn't going to save the world. He's not even going to save his city. And what he accomplishes is almost as much as Vic Sage -- going on the evening news to tell the world about the rot and corruption and evil -- as he does as The Question, punching it. This is one of the few superhero series that really understood the role of the media in letting things get worse or making them better.

And now I definitely need to find the rest of the collections of this series -- and maybe even see if The Question has done anything similar since then.