The Hero Leaves The City To Save Himself

No post tomorrow or Tuesday. Hopefully there will be one (probably a book review) on Wednesday. Sometime in the evening, assuming my brain's in the same time zone as the rest of me by then.

I finished reading the O'Neil/Cowan Question series, the monthly one, anyway. The city hadn't been improved by the end. There might be fewer dirty cops and politicians, but the honest ones were too few to do any good, the public seemed to know it, and the city was completely broke. Vic Sage, investigative reporter, couldn't help the city, and for the last year of the title, he doesn't really try. Vic opts more and more for the Question's approach of breaking laws - and bones. But that's no good. He keeps beating up the same people over and over again. They don't learn, and getting beat up doesn't convince them to stop committing crimes anymore than being beaten convinces Sage to stop playing vigilante.

By the end, Sage isn't quite what Batman accused him of being at the start of the series. He's not half-doing the crimefighter thing, and he's certainly not using it to bolster his reporting career. But he's still operating on anger and violence, rather than planning or thinking. He only returns moderately to those patterns when Shiva reemerges and demonstrates how far he's slipped since they last met. Even then, it doesn't last, and the Question keeps pushing himself on against all common sense. So, not that different from Batman, in someways.

Ultimately, Vic leaves the city before he falls apart entirely, even as it does fall apart. Which is what surprised me. Not only does he not fix things, he doesn't continue trying to fix things until he's broken himself. I tend to expect the hero will never give up, never surrender, unless they're unable to continue, and maybe that's what happened here, only it was less obvious than the Question being physically broken. He threw himself at Hub City's problems until much of the progress he'd made moving past his anger was gone, until he was emotionally torn open. In that state, he wasn't any good to the city. In the last few issues, he crashes his car from exhaustion, gets stripped and dumped, then some skell puts on the Question outfit, and roams the city robbing and killing. Not much of a legacy for a hero. So maybe he had to leave. "No-Face" wasn't scaring criminals, wasn't inspiring the populace (as they mostly aren't aware he exists), and he wasn't in the proper state of mind to be useful himself.

Still, it's interesting that he leaves, but his sometime lover and friend Myra stays, as does Izzy O'Toole. Myra is the Mayor, but she was all set to leave, before she decided she had a duty to the people who elected her to try and fix things. O'Toole's a bad cop turned good, who is trying hard to clean up the city with a couple dozen clean cops. Both of them had power given to them by others in Hub City, whereas the Question didn't. Vic Sage might have, if you consider that some people turned to him for news on the corrupt and distressing happenings of the city, but Vic hadn't been doing that job very well.

As for the Question, the power he wielded was power he took for himself. Richard Dragon and Shiva taught him some things, but he's the one who opted to use it as he did. His reasons were still ultimately about himself, not others, and that's why he couldn't save things. Or it's that you can't solve vast municipal problems by beating up drug pushers. That doesn't fix potholes or put gas in the fire engines.