Showcase #73: The Creeper Becomes DC's Question

The Hawk and the Dove were only one of the two new projects that Steve Ditko brought to DC in 1968; the other was Beware the Creeper. But in a lot of ways, the Creeper is simply Ditko's Charlton hero, The Question. Consider:

Both Jack Ryder and Vic Sage are both TV talk show hosts who don't care if they offend one of their sponsors:

Both gain their powers from a "professor":

Both are capable of changing identities in a flash:

And both are subjected to the attentions of a gal they cannot stand:

Of the two, I'd say the Question is more interesting, as his character is even more uncompromising than the Creeper, and more of an exemplar of Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism. Ditko was allowed to script his Charlton tales, while at DC his scripters included Don Segall (in the Showcase debut) and Denny O'Neill (in the ongoing series).

The plot in this issue is one of the most common in the Silver Age: Professor has invented something that the communists want. The underworld has kidnapped the prof and are about to deliver him to the reds, but... well, they're going to have a costume party as well at the house where he's being hidden. Because the leader of the mob is also a pillar of the community, the anti-violence crusader and Ryder's sponsor are also at the party:

So Ryder cobbles together the Creeper's costum--a green wig, yellow body paint and a sheepskin rug along with the Sub-Mariner's trunks, and crashes the party. But as he tries to search the house, some guards spot him, and he has to make a dash for it. He's wounded, but discovers a secret room behind a sliding panel where Professor Yatz is hidden. The professor decides to use the Creeper as his guinea pig for a serum that heals people quickly and gives them extra strength. He also implants in Ryder's arm a device that:

Hence Ryder's ability to make the quick costume change. The professor is killed when the guards burst through the sliding panel, and so the Creeper's secret is safe. The Creeper beats up the hoodlums and the cops catch the prof's killer. But all's not well:

The Creeper had only a short run at DC (six issues), although he made several guest appearances in the 1970s and has been a background character (as TV host Jack Ryder) for decades since. He had another short series in the mid-1990s. In 2003, Vertigo put out a mini-series with a female version of the Creeper set in 1930s France.

Single Issue Review: Mysterious Suspense #1

This story was actually published by cover date in October 1968, and thus arguably falls between Blue Beetle #4 (Dec 1967) and Blue Beetle #5 (Nov 1968). What happened? I'd guess that Charlton had issues in the pipeline when the Blue Beetle series was canceled and they decided to put them out anyway. The story in Mysterious Suspense appears to have been intended as a multipart backup story. Charlton added a splash page by another artist to make it look more like a normal issue.

In the story, the Question observes big-time mobster, Max Kroe, palling around with tycoon Jason Ord. It is clear to him that Ord is crooked. Meanwhile, Vic Sage (the Question's secret identity) is losing sponsors for his news broadcasts, thanks to the backstabbers at the studio.



Vic tells the station owner his suspicions about Ord, but can't be more specific without revealing his identity as the Question. His own staff sticks with him, but some of the others urge him to bend a little:



On one level, Vic is talking about the events in the story, but on another he's expressing Ayn Rand's objectivist philosophy at the same time. Rand was a firm believer in unfettered capitalism, and an ardent anti-communist. But she was also opposed to halfway measures like socialism or even liberalism. At one point she was quoted as saying, "There is a right way and a wrong way, but the middle is always evil."

What the men are offering Vic is the middle. He doesn't have to condone Ord's activities, just accept his money. But he's made of sterner stuff than that. Sage is given a two-week deadline to prove his charges against Ord.

And being opinionated, he does not soften his message:



Let me emphasize here that what is interesting about this comic is not Ditko's opinion on political issues of the day. Rather it is the creator of one of the greatest superheroes of all time telling us what he thinks makes a hero. That is a compelling topic and one worth exploring here, not whether the US should be involved in the UN.



In Part II, Ditko ratchets up the pressure on Vic. His assistant, Al, is framed on murder charges by Kroe and Ord.



Some very complex themes are being discussed in this comic book that were almost certainly going right over the heads of any teenage boys reading it.

The Question manages to find the identity of the real killer, but before he can be apprehended, Kroe bumps him off. Reasoning that he has to go to the top on the case, the Question calls Ord and threatens him with blackmail. Ord and Kroe meet in a warehouse, where Vic is captured by a gunman. Things look pretty grim, but Vic manages to hide. By cleverly switching back and forth from the Question, Sage convinces the crooks they're facing two men.

Meanwhile, Vic is about to be fired by the station manager, much to the delight of the loathsome Syd. Nora proves that she's good for more than looking pretty:



Vic manages to find a phone and call the cops for help. He gets Kroe and Ord on tape admitting to their criminal activities, and the cops arrive in time to save him from being killed by Ord, who has already shot Kroe.

Syd quickly rushes on the air to break the story, and takes the lion's share of the credit. What will Vic do?



Comments: As I discussed above, while the political aspects of Ditko's story are entertaining and challenging, the real significance of the comic is the debate over what makes a hero. Ditko lost the debate back then, but in my opinion, time and history have proven him correct. As superheroes lost their purity, their unwavering belief in the righteousness of their cause, they also lost that special quality that made them iconic heroes, a standard that boys could measure themselves against knowing they might never achieve that status themselves, but that it was worth striving to attain nevertheless.

Incidentally, since it has come up that this post is included in the Pennsylvania State Library, my name for attribution purposes is Pat Curley.

Question Mark

With the upcoming Watchmen movie, I thought it might be a good time to look back at the Question, the inspiration for Rorschach in the movie. Charlton Comics had been around for most of the Silver Age, churning out a mostly low-budget line of war and romance comics that apparently sold well enough to continue publication. At times they had brought along some terrific talent, like Steve Ditko, who did some fine science fiction for them in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Ditko went on to co-create Spiderman and Dr Strange, and was one of the major talents at Marvel in the early years. But he apparently never burned his bridges behind at Charlton, and so he made a quick landing after abruptly leaving Marvel after Spiderman #38.

Ditko also brought instant credibility to an effort that Charlton needed in superhero books. Like many other publishers, they experienced a surge in interest for superheroes. But unlike Harvey or Dell which jumped in with obviously inferior products, Charlton, under Ditko's guidance, actually produced some memorable books and characters.

Charlton reprinted a few stories that Ditko had done in the early 1960s featuring Captain Atom, with a backup revival of the Blue Beetle, a character from the very early Golden Age of Comics that Charlton had already tried to resurrect several times in the 1960s. In June of 1967 Charlton gave the Beetle his own title for the third time that decade, and for a backup feature there, they published the Question. Note: According to the Grand Comics Database, while the credits for the stories listed the Scripter as DC Glanzman, in fact the stories were written, plotted and drawn by Ditko.

Who is the Question? Steve didn't leave us in doubt long with a dramatis personae to lead off the first story:



Vic Sage plays Steve Ditko's idea of what a hero should be. Ditko was a disciple of Ayn Rand, a writer who formulated the political philosophy called objectivism. The subject of objectivism is beyond the scope of a post on Silver Age Comics, but suffice to say that the objectivists believed in rugged, uncompromising individualism, and Sage represents this philosophy come to life just as much as Howard Roark, the hero of Rand's The Fountainhead

The first story begins with a raid on a gambling joint. One of the gamblers is a three-time loser, so he shoots a cop in order to escape. Sage reports the manhunt for Lou Dicer, but then indulges himself in a little editorializing:



This establishes a pattern for the series; people are always griping about Vic Sage, but the savvy old man running the station refuses to fire him. Why? Well, maybe it's because he gets people standing around on street corners watching his newscasts.

After the show is over, Sage decides to capture Dicer, and reveals to us the basics of how his double identity of the Question works:



Dicer has an accomplice and the Question tails them and informs the police of the impending meeting of the two. It turns out that the accomplice is an employee of WWB, the station that Sage works for. This will be terribly embarrassing for the station if Vic broadcasts it, but:



In the next issue, a young circus apprentice steals a trick cape that enables one to fly using air currents and helium, and becomes the Banshee. In an interesting twist to what was still common in the Silver Age, the hero does not flinch from combat even when he's in his normal identity:



But some bleeding-heart weenies intervene:



Ditko twists the story here to make more political points. Is it really believable that folks who shied away from the Banshee when he tried to rob them would suddenly intervene to help him when he was still not subdued? But you see what Ditko is doing. The others in the room are liberals who want to coddle criminals while Vic is Dirty Harry.

The Banshee gets away, but the Question keeps alert for the next week and eventually they have a battle. As it happens, the Banshee's costume betrays him:



A fitting end for his kind, anyone?

There are more than a few similarities between the Question and a character Ditko would develop for DC a year later called the Creeper. Both had alter egos who were broadcasters, both transformed into their crime-fighting duds in a mist, and in the third issue, the Question laughed maniacally, a signature of the Creeper:



In the fourth issue we get more of Sage against liberals:



There are several subplots going on. As you can see, several of the people at the station are plotting Sage's downfall. He's dating the blonde (Nora), but the owner's daughter also has her eye on him, although he pointedly ignores her interest. And we can see that he's got himself one courageous and upright gal in this sequence:



She even contributes to her and Vic's escape. Later in the story, we see one very marked difference between the Question and any other hero of the time:



Again, Ditko is using the moment as a lesson in the harsh realities of objectivism, which holds that nobody has an obligation to help anybody else. Ditko makes it fairly easy for us in this instance. We have, after all, seen one of the men hit a girl, and the other was quite prepared to shoot her, and any rescue attempt would be risky for the Question. But a true objectivist would argue that the Question similarly has no obligation to rescue a drowning baby even if there were no risk to himself (although of course he could heroically decide to do it of his own volition).

In the fifth issue, Vic crosses over into the Blue Beetle story, and Ditko lets us know his opinion of pop art:



There was a somewhat similar display of "art" in Amazing Spiderman #22.

Vic doesn't think much of hippies:



Of course, he was swimming very much against the tide on that score in 1967. In this issue, the Blue Beetle and the Question stories both feature that Ebar, the art critic, who is clearly based on the character Ellsworth Toohey character in The Fountainhead. Ebar explains his philosophy here:



Ditko is weaving in a discussion of his philosophy about superheroes as well as heroes. Is he also getting in a sly dig at Stan Lee, who was a well-known proponent of flawed heroes?

In the Question story in this issue, Vic buys a painting for Nora, which Ebar sees. It bothers him that the picture features a heroic pose, and the memory of the picture eats away at him:



Of course, the obsession to destroy a hero was a major motivation for another famed Ditko character: J. Jonah Jameson.

Ebar hires some crooks to destroy the painting, giving the Question an opportunity to smash up a couple of thugs. Realizing that Ebar was behind the attempted destruction, the Question deliberately toys with his mind:



And eventually the art critic makes an attempt to destroy the painting himself, which results in his capture and arrest.

Unfortunately, that was it for the Blue Beetle series. The Question did make one more appearance in the Silver Age (more on that later), but I did want to close this post by talking a bit about the differences and similarities between Rorschach (as characterized in the original Watchmen series) and the Question as characterized by Ditko.

Similarities are obvious: The coverall face mask, the absolute conviction in the righteousness of his cause, fearlessness, great fighting ability and quick wits. Both have a slightly sadistic streak but always directed towards those who have already shown they deserve nothing better.

Differences: Vic Sage is obviously nothing like Walter Kovacs, the alter ego of Rorschach. Sage is handsome, worldly and speaks his mind, while Kovacs is homely, introverted and guarded. And the Question is more prone to explain his actions in terms of his philosophy. While Rorschach has a moral code, he doesn't explain it, he lives it.

Coming Up: A Single Issue Review of Mysterious Suspense #1, the final appearance of the Question in the Silver Age.