In honour of the late Steve Ditko, here are some great episodes from the excellent 2000s Justice League animated tv series featuring his iconic character The Question. (And to think I had to grow up with the dreadful 1970s SuperFriends cartoon.)
Left to Right: The Question; Mr. A; Rorschach
The show’s version of the faceless detective also draws in part on Ditko’s later Randian superhero, Mr. A (hence such Randian lines as “Everything that exists has a specific nature; each entity exists as something in particular and has characteristics that are part of what it is: A is A” – though the show’s Question puts those lines to the un-Randian use of denying free will), and in part also on Rorschach in Alan Moore’s Watchmen, a character who was in turn based on The Question (hence the obsessive mumbling and paranoid conspiracy-mongering in which the show’s Question engages, though he’s rather gentler than Rorschach). [In related news, Alan Grant’s character Anarky appears to have been based in part on The Question and Mr. A, and in part on the central character in Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta.]
Huntress and The Question
The show also placed The Question in a delightfully goofy relationship with Huntress, a somewhat dissident member of the Bat-family.
If you don’t have time to watch all five of these, then just watch the third one, “Question Authority.” (But you should really watch all of them.)
(You’ll notice that some of these videos are reversed left-to-right, while others are inset within an animated border. I assume these are ways of disguising the video from programs searching for “copyright” “violations.”)
