Mystical Question, Rorschach's Dad

The Question: Devil's in the Details: written by Rick Veitch; illustrated by Tommy Lee Edwards with Don Cameron (2004-2005): Since the late 1980's, the Question has been much less famous than the character modeled on him, Watchmen's Rorschach. It's sort of a shame, especially since the Question seems perfectly suited to a live-action TV show in a way that a lot of superheroes aren't.

Why? Because other than the blank, flesh-coloured mask that hides his identity, the Question's wardrobe is about as basic as it gets -- suit, trench-coat, gloves, fedora. Created by writer-artist Steve Ditko (Spider-man, Doctor Strange) for Charlton Comics in the 1960's and subsequently purchased by DC Comics in the 1980's along with the rest of the Charlton superhero line, The Question has mostly survived on the fringes of the superhero universe. 

A grim and gritty DC version by writer Denny O'Neil and artist Denys Cowan ran for several years in the late 1980's, but other than that the Question has been a creature of miniseries and guest appearances in the comics. His most-seen version, by far, was as a conspiracy-obsessed hero voiced deliciously by Jeffrey Coombs on the Justice League Unlimited cartoon of the early oughts.

Ditko's original version allowed the writer-artist to espouse some of his libertarian beliefs in the guise of a super-hero book. Shock-jock radio host Vic Sage rails against various things on his show; then, with the donning of the mask and a quick spritz of chemicals that change the colour of his clothing and hair, Sage becomes the Question so as to put his beliefs in action.

This version, by Rick Veitch and artist Tommy Lee Edwards, is a much-different bird. The Question now has a mystical, shamanistic connection to cities. Indeed, cities can talk to him. And Chicago warns him that something bad is up in Metropolis -- something aimed at Superman. So the Question goes to Metropolis.

Various shenanigans ensue. Tommy Lee Edwards does some interesting, somewhat avant-garde (for superhero comics) things with the art, using 3-D models and playing with dual-narrative streams and hallucinogenic visions. Veitch offers a number of clever bits and bursts of stream-of-consciousness internal narration, though turning the Question into a vision-guided urban mystic takes a bit of getting used to. The whole plot revolves around a Metropolis-sized plan by Lex Luthor involving the application of Feng Shui to urban planning. How weird is that?

The whole thing is an enjoyable enterprise, and certainly better than an awful lot of superhero comics that get collected into trade paperbacks. This one seems to have never been collected, which is a shame: Veitch is always interesting, even when he's not working at the height of his own powers, or drawing his own stuff. Recommended.

Charlton Chews

Unexplored Worlds: The Steve Ditko Archives Volume 2: edited and with an introduction by Blake Bell (1956-57; collected 2010): This second volume of the Fantagraphics Steve Ditko Archives takes us through a year in which Ditko recovered from tuberculosis and drew like a fiend, racking up over 400 pages of work, mostly for bargain-basement Charlton Comics. The co-creator of Spider-man and Dr. Strange strove to develop a personal style very early on, as this volume shows. The art is distinctly Ditko from the get-go.

But it's also a Ditko experimenting with what works in terms of storytelling. He plays with detailed rendition and exquisite linework, especially on covers and in opening splash panels. And the broad nature of what Charlton was publishing -- very short stories in a variety of genres, all of them terribly written -- gave Ditko pretty much free rein to work on everything from how to draw a horse's legs (he still doesn't have it at this point, though I'm not sure he ever did; Kirby didn't either) to how to draw fantastic vistas of space and time and other dimensions.

A story about a painting that's a gateway to another dimension shows us the Ditko who will be, less than ten years later, on Marvel's Doctor Strange. On that great character's adventures, Ditko would become one of a handful of the greatest depictors of the weird and uncanny in comic-book history. It's a bit of a paradox.

Ditko was (and is) perhaps the most humanistic and normative of superhero illustrators, his characters not puffed up like steroid-addled beachballs, their faces and clothes lived in and life-like. But he also had a penchant for action conveyed through body language and positioning, and an eye for the weird and unusual conveyed in a few simple lines. He was the comic-book world's version of Magritte with his surreal juxtapositions and commonplace elements arranged in impossible ways.

The writing on almost all of these stories is pretty terrible, as noted -- Charlton was the Yugo assembly line of American comic books of the 1950's and 1960's. But the sheer volume of pages required by Charlton (and the sheer volume required by Ditko to survive at Charlton's miniscule page rates) did give Ditko a chance to develop, experiment, and become the artist he soon would be. Highly recommended.

Bitten by a Radioactive Ayn Rand

DC Archives: Action Heroes Volume 2, written by Steve Ditko, Roger Stern, Steve Skeates, and others; illustrated by Steve Ditko, Alex Toth, Frank McLaughlin, John Byrne and others (1965-68; collected 2007): This collection contains a pretty clear moment at which comic-book great Steve Ditko, co-creator of Spider-man and Dr. Strange for Marvel, crossed the line into Ayn Randian propagandist. It occurs towards the end of the Charlton Comics 'Action Heroes' line from which these archives take their name.

It's a mind-boggling moment because it marks one of the few times that mainstream Ditko and self-published Ditko would merge into one angry, Objectivist loudspeaker. Ditko's two streams of output -- one for himself and one to pay the bills -- would pretty much permanently diverge after the demise of the Charlton superhero line, and others would pretty much handle all the scripting on his mainstream superhero titles.

Ditko helped revamp or create most of the always lame-duck Charlton Comics' superheroes, co-creating Captain Atom, Nightshade, and The Question and revamping Golden-Age crimefighter Blue Beetle into a nifty mix of Spider-man and Iron Man. This archive collects his later work on those Charlton superheroes. Captain Atom is a lot of fun, especially once inker Frank McLaughlin comes on board, and it's mostly free of cant. Blue Beetle is also jolly, zippy fun until the aforementioned Rand Moment, at which point the Blue Beetle becomes a Ditko mouthpiece. Not for long, mind you -- cancellation of the entire superhero line loomed.

And then there's the Question, a visually inspired Ditko creation whose main costuming as a superhero was a face made perfectly blank by a special mask. Alan Moore would base Rorchach in Watchmen on this guy, and you can see why. While the Question begins life as a fairly normal urban vigilante (albeit one wearing a suit, tie, and hat), he rapidly turns into Ditko's spokesperson for his Ayn Rand-derived ethics.

And boy, does he speak. A lot.

The Question's only book-length adventure from the 1960's, from the pages of Charlton's Mysterious Suspense, is one of the wordiest slogs you'll ever encounter in comic books of this or any other time. The sheer volume of verbiage crowds out much of Ditko's visual dynamism, leaving us with talking heads and the Question demonstrating that, for a brief time, he was the stuffiest of all stuffed shirts on the superhero scene. And his hatred of hippies was positively Cartmanesque.

The Blue Beetle also develops advanced Randitis and, in a memorable two-story team-up, he and the Question battle both evil, non-heroic Art and an evil, non-heroic Art critic. I kid you not. It's like Philosophers at Work played straight. Fascinating stuff. Come for Ditko's visual excellence, stay for the interminable lectures. Recommended.

Atom Heart Brother

DC Archives: Action Heroes Volume 1, written by Joe Gill, Steve Ditko and others, illustrated by Steve Ditko and others (1961-1966; reprinted 2004): Charlton Comics was pretty much the lowest of the low when it came to American comic-book publishers of the 1950's, 60's and 70's. But the company did have one major asset: artist Steve Ditko (co-creator of Spider-man and Dr. Strange for Marvel) liked working for them because while they paid badly, they left him pretty much alone to do as he pleased.

DC bought the Charlton Comics stable of super-heroes in the early 1980's, a purchase that nearly led to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen series being about those same heroes -- Moore initially pitched his dystopian, revisionist superhero series as being about the newly purchased Charlton heroes. DC decided to instead integrate the heroes into the DC Universe, and Moore revised Watchmen so as to be about new but similar heroes.

Captain Atom (who would become Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen) stars in this first collection of notable Charlton superhero comics of the 1960's and 1970's. With Charlton, 'notable' almost universally means 'Steve Ditko.' Ditko does full art on some of the earlier Captain Atom adventures before being inked indifferently by others on the latter adventures. It's Ditko at the height of his career as an artist, and the early 60's stories look especially good, with fine linework and some lovely, weird cosmic vistas.

Captain Atom gains his powers of flight, super-strength, and nebulous, atomicky other things after getting blown up by a nuclear bomb and then somehow reassembling himself. Now highly radioactive, he wears a containment suit so as not to irradiate everyone around him, and battles a hodgepode of Communist spies and alien menaces. Well, and a space dragon in one off-beat story that seems like it was cribbed from some of the odder adventures of Captain Marvel or Marvelman.

Joe Gill's writing is, for the most part, a combination of lead-footed dialogue, ridiculous scientific explanations, and Silver-Age bombast. Apparently Gill wrote 150 script pages a week for Charlton at his height of production, so one can't expect much. Ditko makes the whole thing sing, however, his normal characters looking extraordinarily ordinary, his action sequences fluid, his weirdness, well, weird. Doctor Spectro is an especially odd villain from the later issues in this volume, a light-wielding mad scientist who gets split into five light-wielding midgets. Riveting and totally ridiculous at times, this is nonetheless a lot of fun. Recommended.