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Picked up the trade (didn't someone up this thread say they were going to do that this week, too? Oh, wait. It was me.) and boy is this book a slight little thing? It looks like an intern was in charge of production: it's skinny and flimsy, the design isn't very distinguished, nothing extra included (couldn't Greg Rucka have banged out a 500 word intro while he was waiting for the manuscript of his newest book to pop out of the laser printer?) and it's $20! But the reproduction of Cowan's art still looks good and the colors are strong and it's got that great Bill Siekniwiczkiwizc ad for a cover and that looks posh.
Re-reading the first 6 issues really made the case that this was a re-incarnation of Will Eisner's SPIRIT, far more than Darwyn Cooke's THE SPIRIT was a reincarnation of THE SPIRIT. Cowan's art has never looked better with beautifully detailed inking by Rick Magyar (whatever happened to?) and the coloring is good, although they keep making references to the Question's outfit changing color when he uses his super-gas and all I could see is that it went from being blue to being...blue. Maybe it's a bit of masterful misdirection?
The first three issues are nice and tight, with Vic Sage's year-long absence barely mentioned between issues 2 and 3 so it's easy to miss at first. The training with Richard Dragon avoids a lot of the fortune cookie stuff by condensing twelve months into one splash page, and the entire time from Sage leaving Hub City, going to train with Dragon, having a rematch with Lady Shiva, returning to Hub City and becoming The Question again takes slightly less than nine pages. That's compressed storytelling. And it works. Cynical and nasty, always trying to slip out of fights ("We don't have to do this," he says over and over again) the Question we get here is really man's man stuff. After a character has murdered someone in cold blood they ask him if he has anything to say about their crime. "Better you than me," he snaps. Ouch.
Issue 5 is the most SPIRIT-esque of the bunch with six characters in overlapping, interwoven storylines on a snowy, rioty kind of day. There's time out for a brief recap of the founding of Hub City, rape, suicide, assault, insanity and all kinds of pulpy goodness. Issue 6 is a return to Issue 3's Musto family, a bunch of heavies with daddy issues. It manages to deal with acid rain wihtout feeling like a Very Special episode of the super-friends and Sage evaporates from the finale' at the last minute to leave the spotlight empty for one of the supporting characters.
That's par for the course in this comic. In these first six issues you've got Vic Sage but he's surrounded by a gallery of characters who'll populate the rest of the series. There are the bad guys like the Musto Family, the injury-prone Jake, Baby Gun and the pathetic Mayor Fermin. There's a supporting cast of Izzy O'Toole the corrupt cop, Myra Fermin the bimbo-turned-leader, Lady Shiva, Richard Dragon and mad scientist Aristotle Rodor. Plus there's a ton of quickly sketched, indelible characters who pop up memorably here and are never heard from again.
There'll probably never be a second trade of THE QUESTION, which is too bad because it only gets better. This, SUICIDE SQUAD, the Grant-Breyfoggle run of DETECTIVE and JUSTICE LEAGUE INTERNATIONAL are the four great, un-reprinted DC titles of the 80's and 90's and they all represent a high water mark for DC's costumes. To think that these four titles, THE SANDMAN, DOOM PATROL, ANIMAL MAN, DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, WATCHMEN and BATMAN: YEAR ONE were all published in roughly the same decade is pretty jaw dropping. Has DC ever been that good again? |
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