Warning: contains spoilers for DC vs. Vampires: All-Out War #4!The Joker is one of the most chaotic and unpredictable villains in comic book history, but in turning one of its street-level vigilantes evil, DC just identified him as the Clown Prince of Crime’s surprising opposite number.
Victor Sage was a journalist set on exposing the crimes of the criminal underworld, but when he found crimes that he couldn’t report due to lack of evidence, he decided to take matters into his own hands as the Question. Making his home base the eternally corrupt Hub City, Victor did everything he could to expose the criminals of a city much worse than Gotham. After a near-death experience, Vic was saved and trained in combat by both Lady Shiva and Richard Dragon, making Vic one of the most dangerous hand-to-hand fighters on the planet. Armed with new combat experience and an even greater lust for justice, the Question returned to Hub City to take on the criminal element at the highest level of society, not just the crime on the streets.
The Question famously has an incredibly black-and-white sense of morality – someone is either good or they are evil, and there is no in-between. This type of hard-set morality makes Victor almost incorruptible, since there’s little chance of him being sucked into the moral grays that have tempted characters like Hal Jordan. But this objective morality doesn’t save him from mind-altering events, which readers see in DC vs. Vampires: All-Out War #4 by Matthew Rosenberg, Alex Paknadel, Pasquale Qualano, Nicola Righi, and Troy Peteri. When a vampiric Victor Sage confronts Midnighter and his band of human rebels, readers see just how terrifying an evil Question could truly be.
Victor Sage Is A True Agent Of Chaos
Midnighter’s powers make him one of DC’s deadliest men, as an internal computer studies his enemies and predicts their actions, allowing him to respond to moves they haven’t even made yet. However, when he comes up against the Question, Midnighter draws a blank. It turns out that the Question is immune. With his morality stripped from him by the vampiric disease, Midnighter refers to him explicitly as “a true agent of chaos” – a description famously applied to the equally unpredictable Joker. The Question lives by incredibly strict and rigidly defined rules, but it turns out that when freed of his morality, he’s far more like the Joker than anyone ever suspected.
When Midnighter attacked the vampire base, he was able to bring down Prometheus, who is a Justice League-level threat in his own right, but when Midnighter came across a vampirized Victor Sage, he found that the heroic Question is a deep well of chaos. While the Joker may fancy himself the true embodiment of chaos in the DC Universe, it turns out he has a heroic counterpart in the Question, who is just one vampire bite away from weaponizing irrationality even better than Gotham’s premier villain ever has.
