10. The Question Is Not A Watchmen Fan
DC ComicsTo give an example that's not exactly subtle, but has some layers to it the more you know about the inner workings of mainstream comics: The Question thinks Rorschach sucks. On a surface level, the events of The Question #17 are a fun ribbing of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' classic graphic novel Watchmen, which the fictional anti-hero reads on a plane ride. Inspired by the hyper-violent vigilante's methods, The Question decides to adopt some of them to his own crime-fighting activities - with mixed results. He starts talking to himself, and people begin to think he's crazy. He drinks heavily, and then spends the night curled up on the bathroom floor with his head in the toilet. There's even a non-too-subtle sequences where he leaps through the window of a bad guy's hide out, referencing...well, multiple occasions when Rorschach does the same in the pages of Watchmen. That goes about as well as you'd expect jumping unarmed into a lion's den would, as the villains chase him through the snow and corner him. When asked if he has any last words, The Question replies: "Yeah. Rorschach sucks." So we guess writer Dennis O'Neill just wasn't as taken with the groundbreaking miniseries and its breakout character as most comic fans of the time were? Well, maybe, but actually the whole thing is infinitely more self-referential than that. Y'see, Watchmen started life as a pitch Alan Moore made where he wanted to take the superhero characters DC had recently acquired from Charlton Comics. The company decided they had plans for them, so Moore simply decided to make all the characters in Watchmen analogues of the Charlton heroes: The Comedian stood in for The Peacemaker, Dr Manhattan on Captain Atom, Silk Spectre on Nightshade and Rorschach on...The Question. Except, being Alan Moore, he was going to push each character to their logical conclusion, meaning The Question's amoral anti-hero status became Rorschach's borderline psychopathy. So in The Question #17, the character is literally rejecting this interpretation of himself. So meta, much commentary, wow.