10 Most Tragic Deaths In The History Of DC Comics

8. The Question

The Question was never meant to be a big deal. The invention by Steve Ditko, the man who co-created Spider-Man with Stan Lee over at Marvel, faceless private eye Vic Sage would have indeed vanished into obscurity when his publisher suffered its own untimely demise.

At the eleventh hour, however, DC stepped in to buy up all of Charlton Comics' properties for bargain basement prices and then... kinda sat on them for a while. Briefly it looked like they might let Alan Moore use some of their superhero acquisitions for his Watchmen series, with fan-favourite Rorschach being created to take the role originally earmarked for the Question.

Eventually the character had a resurgence in a series by Dennis O'Neil through the eighties, which cemented his place amongst DC's enormous rotating supporting cast of characters - not strong enough to carry his own book, but cropping up in other character's titles and earning himself a miniseries here and there. No doubt thanks to the Ditko and Rorschach connections the Question built up something of a cult following himself, with readers and within the industry.

Like many of the publisher's lesser-known characters Vic Sage became an important part in the weekly series 52, where the universe tried to deal with the year-long disappearance of its biggest superheroes. This is a different Sage than we were used to, however. Gone was the iffy moral boundaries and unpleasantness of previous portrayals, replaced with a dry wit and sympathy he deployed in training longtime Batman character, detective Renee Montoya, to replace him as The Question.

Vic's relationship with Renee - and his newfound charm - made it all the more hard to take when he dies of lung cancer at the end of the series.