The Question: The Deaths of Vic Sage #3: All Connected

The Question feels most at home in The Question: The Deaths of Vic Sage #3. It’s the 1940s and Vic, now Charlie, is a private detective that feels straight out a gritty noir film or a pulp. This seems like the perfect place for The Question. In a short time, it hits a bunch of noir tropes, including a mysterious woman coming to Charlie to look for someone. What I loved about this issue is how things are starting to come together, or fall apart, depending on how you look at it. The “lives” of Vic Sage that we have seen are bleeding into each other like brain zaps. It starts to feel like fever dreams of interlocking lives and deaths. The book has a horror feel when Vic ultimately finds the strange ruins again with his skeleton. These moments completely disorient and throw off the reader, which makes moments like Maggie turning into a priest and then crawling on all fours down a well like a spider. (41) Vic “wakes up” as the current day Vic and he seems to understand it all. He says, “Its all happened before, Dragon. Everything … and it’s all connected … past, present … All of it. Flowing together.” It all is connected, but how does it lead to the beast with a thousand faces?

This series boasts some huge names. It has been a blast to see this creative team work together. Denys Cowan’s pencils and Bill Sienkiewicz’s inks are a commanding presence. Cowan’s pencils are messy yet intricate, and they are wiry which plays perfectly to the suspenseful nature of the book. Sienkiewicz’s inks improve what Cowan lays down, but they also bring a new and darker grit to the pages that only Sienkiewicz could provide. Chris Sotomayor’s colors are not overshadowed by the inks and pencils. For the most part, this issue was filled with dark and neutral colors, but the little flourishes of color steal their panels, especially the current day’s Vic and his blue suit. The art has been extremely consistent through all three issues, but this issue feels a little bit different. Vic’s confusion and paranoia are building up in this issue, and the darkness of the panels adds to this. The black inks creep and start to swallow Vic as he unveils the truth behind himself.