Comic Book / Rorschach (2020)

"A man almost died yesterday. A great man."

"You're the detective. What do you see?"

—Rorschach(?)

In 1985, a troubled man named Walter Kovacs donned a mask with moving inkblots. He fought for justice and against compromise in the face of an impending Armageddon under the name of Rorschach until the day he died.

In 2019, a band of white supremacists called the Seventh Kavalry took the iconography of Rorschach and distorted it for their own wretched agenda. They get horrifically thrown under the bus.

In 2020, during a political rally, an old man took the mantle and, alongside his young female accomplice, tried to assassinate a presidential candidate named Turley, who is running opposite of Redford.

The old man and the young woman both died for their efforts.

Crisis averted, right?

Not exactly. Turley's campaign manager feels that there might be more to this attempt than meets the eye. Namely, who the hell was the guy under the Rorschach mask this time? As such, a detective has been tasked to figure out how deep this rabbit hole goes. But can he handle what he finds out?

Rorschach is a 12-issue limited series by Tom King, illustrated by Jorge Fornés with colors by Dave Stewart and published by DC Black Label, centering around the eponymous vigilante from the Watchmen universe. Or if we want to get technical, it centers around the idea of Rorschach and what his legacy means in a world where the original has long since passed on.

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Tropes:

• And You Thought It Was a Game: It's revealed that a significant chunk of the plot to assassinate Turley was built on this. Frank Miller came in contact with a former government agent-turned freelance security officer named Oates, claiming he came up with an idea for a story for a presidential assassination and requested for insight on how to make it more realistic and plausible. Later, Oates — acting on Turley's behalf — did actually come to realize there was a genuine assassination attempt being planned, but merely assumed that the duo were hopeless crazies whose plot could reasonably be foiled, and in turn would make a good story to incriminate Redford and boost Turley's votes. It's not until they end up getting everything that they would need for the attempt that he realized that they were being completely serious and that he could be implicated for a successful assassination, and attempted to put a stop to the whole mess. He died for his efforts.
• Alternate History: As it takes place in the same timeline as Watchmen, it retains all of the same Cold War-era history, and since 1985, it's deviated even further in a few key places:
  • The series makes several references to real-world comic book creators, although like in Watchmen, pirates took the place of superheroes. It's discovered early on that the Rorschach copycat was a man named Wil Myerson, a counterpart to Steve Ditko, a man who gained popularity through a co-creating a comic named Pontius Pirate (later issues clearly establish him to be a Spider-Man counterpart), but then became disillusioned by the craft, became reclusive, and worked on the uber-Objectivist-driven work The Citizen (an analogue to Mr. A). Frank Miller is also alluded to as having written The Dark Fife Returns.
  • Much like the HBO series, despite it taking place in "the present day" (2020), neither smartphones nor the internet seem to exist, and remote communication is exclusively done through pagers or landline phones.
  • Issue #10 reveals that U.S. Special Forces captured Osama bin Laden in early 2001 and preventing the 9/11 attacks from happening. Saddam Hussein committed suicide in 2006, leading to Iraq falling into disarray and undergoing reconstruction under a joint United Nations mission.
• Ambiguous Ending: While the actual mystery driving the series ends up solved, the series itself manages to end on many layers of ambiguity: the detective realizes the whole assassination plot was hijacked by Turley as a conspiracy to make himself look more favorable in the election, while simultaneously realizing he'd become strung into the same ruthless philosophy of brutal vigilante "heroism" as Rorschach, a combination which ends with him murdering Turley in cold blood. Did he do the right thing as an Anti-Hero in a bleak world where neither sides have good intentions, or is he now just another vile psychopath acting under delusional extremism? Whichever way you slice it, the detective decides to quietly slip away and watch a pirate movie — whether he ends up with consequences for his crime or not will likely never be answered.
• And Then John Was a Zombie: At the very end of issue #11, the detective becomes a Rorschach. He winds up killing Turley and Alan in cold blood.
• Art Shift: The comic turns into incomplete/unrefined comic artwork when the detective reads some of Myerson's work.
• Battle in the Center of the Mind: After several teases about it throughout the story, including instances where he speaks directly to an apparition of Laura, one ends up occurring in the detective in full come Issue 11. He loses.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Zigzagged. It's revealed that the Turley campaign eventually learned of the assassination plan and decided to run with it as a False Flag Operation, hoping to score sympathy votes and damage the Redford campaign by framing them as being responsible. Things went off the rails when their point man learned almost too late that the assassins were a little too good at what they were planning to do, meaning that Turley's life was genuinely in danger. Fortunately for them, however, they manage to stop them in the nick of time. Unfortunately (again), the detective they then hire to get the false flag operation back on track gets sucked in the Rorschach vortex and ends up finishing the job for real.
• Bolivian Army Ending: The series ends with the detective having murdered Turley and his campaign manager, after which he slips out to watch a midnight screening of a Pontius Pirate movie. Given the act took place around security guards who saw him walk out the room where they'll eventually find their murdered clientele, it's greatly suggested that he's not going to make it out without consequences. However, the final panel simply showing him content in the theatre with a tub of popcorn, so his final fate remains unknown.
• Boom, Headshot!: How the new Rorschach goes down. It ends up becoming a plot point because the headshot makes it even harder to tell who the perpetrator actually is. Laura also shoots her father this way in Issue 3. And the detective envisions getting shot in the head by Rorschach in his head in Issue 11.
• Brainwashed and Crazy:
  • Laura "The Kid" Cummings was raised by rural militia who believed that various people were "infected" by the Squid's telepathy. Unfortunately, this belief basically led to them thinking that anybody expressing any sort of dissent towards them was affected, which led to Laura's father murdering her mother and later Laura kills him at his request when he thinks he's also affected.
  • And as of the very end of Issue 11, the detective has lost it as well.
• Broad Strokes: While the series holds the original Watchmen graphic novel in canon, it waffles a bit more on the 2019 HBO sequel series. There are a few minor nods to the periphery surrounding it (issue #1 mentions that something happened in Oklahoma), but none of the major events that occurred are ever alluded to or are relevant to this story. Given how both series were being produced at roughly the same time, it's unlikely Rorschach was originally envisioned with it in mind and simply added the Mythology Gags after the fact. Meanwhile, any mentions to Doomsday Clock and the The DCU at large are completely absent. Granted, the series is published under DC's Black Label imprint, which aside from printing stories containing more mature content than the mainline titles are also typically set in their own continuity.
• Brutal Honesty: Played for pitch-black comedy in issue #1, where the detective interviews a surviving security guard at the hospital. He's very badly wounded, yet lucid enough to vent his annoyance with the overly-patronizing doctors to the detective, leading to this exchange:
  Ron: What'd they say to you?
  Detective: That you're dying.
  (beat)
  Ron: (with resigned annoyance) Shit.
• Call-Back: Muscles was ambushed and overwhelmed by law enforcement when he attempted to confront a target, much like how Kovacs was captured in Watchmen. This happens again with Frank Miller, who even screams at the police to give back "his face" as they unmask him.
• The Cameo: None of the previous costumed heroes seen in Watchmen make a direct appearance (at most, the present-day Rorschach is just an impersonator), but they are alluded to a few times. Issue #4 depicts the previous cast as part of Muscles' retelling of his and Laura's conspiracy theory (that following the ending of Watchmen, they voluntarily allowed Doctor Manhattan to disintegrate their bodies so their souls could be reincarnated), and issue #5 provides a flashback to a young Turley serving in Vietnam and on a mission to rescue The Comedian.
• Chekhov's Gun: Several details that are spelled out in the very first issue don't get answers for a while, and it's only until the very end once the mystery gets completely solved do they get one:
  • The woman (Laura) had a gunshot wound on her shoulder not inflicted by the Secret Service who took her down, one that was stitched up very recently prior to her death. It's revealed that she was shot by Oates, who attempted to put a stop to her and Myerson's assassination plot just before he himself was killed.
  • Laura and Myerson's plan was foiled in part thanks to a mysterious phone caller informing security what they were doing, and the identity of the caller remains a lingering mystery. At first, the detective assesses that it was from Oates' assistant (as she was aware of Oates' involvement in the plot and possibly got worried after Oates mysteriously disappeared just before the rally), but he later finds out this was just the cover-up. The call was actually made from Jacobs of the Secret Service, who — knowing full well of their planned operation — was simply informing the team that their planned targets had arrived.
  • Finally, the most mysterious first-issue revelation is that the Rorschach copycat's fingerprints were a perfect match for Walter Kovacs, the original Rorschach. That's because they were literally just Walter Kovacs' fingerprints that were sent to the detective. Jacobs — a big fan of Myerson — had previously made a deal to replace Myerson's fingerprint information with Kovacs' in exchange for being listed in Myerson's will.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The comic has a tendency to parallel frames of the present and the past (or at least a mental "past" vis a vie flashbacks), and most of the time, they're given a distinguishing Color Wash, such as broad purples or orange. Most of the time; when something deviates and elements of each blend into one, all bets are off as to what exactly is going on.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Rorschach's elevator shaft kill of Captain Carnage, something we never saw in the original Watchmen story, is shown here.
  • Turley mentions seeing The Comedian in Vietnam during V.V.N. Night talking with Doctor Manhattan, something that was explicitly shown in issue #2 of Watchmen.
• Conspiracy Theorist:
  • Laura, her father, and their little miner militia all believed that the squid attack of '85 was all caused by the US government to placate the populous. Believing that the squids can also brainwash people and may strike again, they all planned to take up arms and "free" the US with lots and lots of guns. Disturbingly, once Laura's father reads the morality fable between "The Citizen and The Unthinker" and begins questioning his morals, he immediately thinks the squids have taken him and opts to commit suicide by proxy.
  • A branching theory is presented by Muscles in issue #4: he and Laura believed that following the squid invasion, Dr. Manhattan dispersed the original heroes at their request — including Rorschach, who they erroneously believed survived, and excluding Ozymandias, believing he refused — by destroying their bodies to hide their souls into other people. This led Laura to believe that Rorschach's soul had been reincarnated into Muscles, inspiring him to take up his mantle. While the understanding of events as they literally happened is incorrect, Rorschach really did in fact die by Dr. Manhattan's hand in a fashion similar to their hypothesis, so this theory is played for a little more credibility.
    Muscles: There are blue men who control time and there are squid invaders who kill millions with mind powers. That's the world we live in. Those are just facts. This is another fact. I wasn't crazy.
  • Yet another conspiracy theory weaved into the mix was provided by Otto Binder (partially based on a very real theory the actual Binder believed in). The belief is that Doctor Manhattan secretly embedded instructions for a weapon that could fight the squids, and they could only be deciphered through recording tape static and listening carefully for any messages. The message that the Rorschach copycat deciphered? "Kill Turley".
• Conviction by Contradiction: Issue #8 sees the detective interviewing a trio of suspects previously tied to Myerson, each sharing a story that he invited the three of them to a house with him and Laura in the desert, conducted mundane business with him (settling legal documents, conducting therapy sessions, constructing a range, etc.) over a few days, then sent them on their way. The stories themselves remain extremely consistent between themselves and could plausibly happen... but then the detective reveals that it doesn't line up with what actually got them in custody to begin with, namely definite conspirator Frank Miller having ratted the three out after his arrest, something that would not have happened had their stories been as mundane as they were. He ends up correctly deducing that not only were their stories all faked, but they were in a preexisting conspiracy to keep them as consistent as possible.
• Corruption of a Minor: Laura was indoctrinated into the world of domestic terrorism plots when she was twelve, having been raised by a Conspiracy Theorist father who believed they were destined to assassinate the president and stop future squid invasions. Not only was she taught guns and the will to kill, her first murder was of her father, who requested the act after "realizing" he was being brainwashed by the squids.
• Creator Cameo: When the detective goes to the movie theater in the last issue, he walks by two guys who are clearly drawn to look like Tom King, wearing a Pontius Pirate shirt, and Jorge Fornés.
• Defiant to the End: The series ends on the detective watching a Pontius Pirate movie, capped off with the titular pirate's monologue, which happens to be a fancy way of summing up Rorschach's ideology: never surrender, even in the face of Armageddon.
  Pontius Pirate: Avast, mateys, it appears there may be a tad more of you than there are of me. A hundred to one is it, or do ye have more? Is it a thousand flying swords against my single blade? Hahaha, with those odds, if I fight, I cannot win — you will kill me! By all the wisdom of men and god, I should surely surrender and let you walk me off the plank and take me risks with the sharks! But (...) I never learned to care for the wisdom of gods and men! Have at ye then! Have at ye, bastards! Come and fight! If I die today, I die a pirate!
• Distant Sequel: Rorschach takes place in the year 2020, 35 years after the main time period of the original Watchmen. It's so distant that none of the characters from Watchmen show up; the story instead concerns itself with the periphery of the events that took place, based around the ideals and legacy left behind by the long-dead Walter Kovacs.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • The squid conspiracy theories espoused by Laura echo the kind of conspiracy theories like Q or the “lizard people” conspiracy theory in the real world.
  • The squid invasion of '85 is treated with a very similar air as the 9/11 terror attacks, effectively its analogue since the actual 9/11 event didn't occur in this Alternate History. In addition it broadly being a terroristic event that left New York in horrific devastation, it also drastically shook up the perception held by the American population towards its country and its government, spawning countless conspiracy theories built on jingoism and a fear of the unknown. It's also what sent Frank Miller into a massive ideological disillusionment (and subsequent assimilation into the Rorschach identity), reflecting his notoriously extended Creator Breakdown following the 9/11 attacks.invoked
• Evolving Credits: In issue #1, the opening pages are mostly blank sans for the credits and a few tiny drops of ink here and there. With each successive issue, more and more ink splats are added, appropriately creating series of Rorschach inkblots.
• The Extremist Was Right: Though not in an easily evident, or even consciously correct way. Laura and Myerson's specific belief that assassinating Turley would save the world from being invaded by brainwashing space aliens is played as complete hokum, but their underlying philosophy of acting on a corrective, if cruel form of heroism as being a necessary evil in an already dark world is slightly less disputed with. The story ends up siding with the idea, but only marginally; once it's revealed that Turley and his presidential campaign hijacked the narrative of the assassination plot as a political stunt — effectively just another monstrous abuse of power for a self-centered goal — the detective murders him for real with little to no remorse.
• Expanded States of America: The 51st state of Vietnam plays a pivotal role in President Redford's reelection. It is mentioned that Redford remains beloved in Vietnam for bringing peace and prosperity there.
• Expy:
  • Myerson's creation, The Citizen, appears to be one to Mr. A, a Steve Ditko-original character whom Alan Moore twisted the basis of to conceive Rorschach.
  • Myerson's even earlier creation, Pontius Pirate, seems to be an expy of Spider-Man, whom Ditko created with Stan Lee. In issue #7, we even see a recreation of the cover of Amazing Fantasy #15, as the pirate-themed Astonishing Suspense #15, complete with Pontius Pirate in the same pose as Spider-Man in that cover.
  • Issue #7 mentions that in this universe, Frank Miller wrote a landmark title called The Dark Fife Returns, a Darker and Edgier reimagining of a popular character originated from the 40's named Seaman, effectively the pirate-themed equivalent to Batman and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.
  • Played with by the detective himself, who is drawn in such a way that he visually resembles Columbo and is shown to be sharp and observant, but generally lacks Columbo's quirks and warmth.
• False Flag Operation: Issue #11 reveals that Turley and his campaign had learned of the assassination plot and decided to pin the attempt on the Governor's life on President Redford.
• Film Noir: Similar to how the original Watchmen borrowed heavily from noir tropes and aesthetics (among other things), Rorschach too follows suit, being another dark, political conspiracy mystery (again, among other things, but this time are far more psychological and abstract).
• Foreshadowing: Issue #9 had the detective exploring the house Myerson and Cummings lived in to plot their assassination on Turley. The detective seems to follow the footsteps of Myerson and says "Hm." which reflects Myerson's "Hurm." Cut to issue 11, It's the detective saying "hurm" to indicate that he has become a Rorschach now.
• He Knows Too Much: It's revealed that while the attempt to assassinate Turley failed, there were other deaths directly tied to the conspiracy.
  • After the detective's first summation of the plot in issue #10, one missing thread he had yet to resolve was why Oates — the government contact that assisted Laura and Myerson in their plan to kill Turley — was killed and hidden in a septic tank on their ranch. After realizing later that Oates had been working for Turley all along, he figures out why: Oates merely acted on the plot as part of a False Flag Operation to implicate President Redford to cinch an election, but once he realized the two posed a genuine danger to him, he tried to stop them, and was killed in retaliation as he otherwise served no further purpose.
  • A related and more complicated case of this involved Diane Condor, Oates' personal secretary. Being aware of Oates' involvement in the "story" he and the mystery pair were concocting, and being the only living person to be aware of Redford's supposed attachment to the plot, it seemed that she did this to herself, committing suicide out of fear that Redford's officials would come after her and her family. However, when the detective realizes the entire Redford connection was faked and that she and Oates were working for Turley all along, he instead comes to conclude that the Turley campaign did a much more straight version of this, murdering her and making it look like a suicide to ensure that no one could challenge their Redford-incriminating version of the story.
• Hero-Worshipper: Governer Turley became one to The Comedian of all people after they had previously interacted in Vietnam. Turley keeps a thirty-foot tall portrait of the smiley-face symbol in his office out of reverence, though he admits he's also glad he's dead since whoever attempted to assassinate him probably would've sent him to finish the job.
• I Just Want to Be Special: There's plenty of outside factors at hand, but issue #6 extensively frames Laura and Myerson's eventual path to terrorism were rooted in this. Myerson being disillusioned with his popular, but trite pirate comics and Laura being raised in a setting that she would eventually lead up arms to free America from "the squids" as part of a raving conspiracy theory, both of them were deeply insecure about their seemingly meaningless place in the world (Laura at one point having attempted suicide), and that they could only validate their existence by doing something incredibly drastic. Considering that this is a world where costumed heroes did at one point rise up and fight evil, they just perceive it as doing the same thing, just motivated by the wrong reasons.
  Laura: Just at our worst moment, when an alien invasion destroyed us: POOF. Gone. And we were confronted with two possibilities: One, [the superheroes] abandoned us. The bad of the world was just too mighty for the good they represented. They lost and they hid and they died and hope is nothing next to power. Two, they planned. They passed on their legacy to us. We are the superheroes. There is a chance. A chance for good to overcome, for the righteous to triumph. They didn't retreat. They sacrificed to give us a chance. Personally, I prefer option two.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: Laura never misses. Whether it be with revolvers or a larger rifle, her bullets always find her target, and the only reason she didn't manage to kill Turley as planned was because she was killed before she could fire. This was something Oates took note of as part of setting her up for what he assumed would be a failed assassination operation. He informed her of a sniper perch reserved for security that was effectively never used due to the terrible angle, but upon seeing Laura make deadly accurate Sniper Rifle shots from a mile off, he realizes just how dangerous she really is.
• Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique: In issue #8, the detective ends up beating the crap out of his three parallel suspects to determine their association with Myerson before the assassination plot. He's not played in the best of lights for this since by that point, all of them have been giving succinct, largely innocuous stories that are consistent with each other, but he ends up having been onto something anyway as he correctly deduces that they were still fake.
• Jigsaw Puzzle Plot: The series is ultimately a detective mystery where the criminal has already been foiled, and what's being investigated is How We Got Here. Through his investigation, the detective reverse-engineers everything that led up to their attempt on Turley's life, unravelling a deep and dark rabbit hole of wild conspiracy theories and questionable moral philosophy.
• Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: Similar to how the Keene act and the brutal murder of a child caused Walter Kovacs to go from "unsettling, but firmly on the side of justice" to "Ax-Crazy Vigilante Man", Ozymandias's psychic squid attack of 1985 spurned several people who were already mentally unhinged into conspiratorial delusion and violent extremism, including the new Rorschach copycat. Even Frank Miller — who in this universe was still an ordinary comic creator — was scarred by it, and coupled with the nudging of his former friend-turned-Rorschach copycat, he too was assimilated by the ethos.
• Legacy Character: The identity of Rorschach ends up being copied by several individuals throughout the story, primarily Myerson, the man who died attempting to assassinate Governor Turley. The series ends up approaching the concept of people taking after the original Rorschach synonymously with taking up his superhero identity, believing that they need to finish what he had "started".
  • Issue #4 details that before Myerson, Laura's friend Muscles briefly took the mantle of Rorschach on her behalf, who believed he was a literal reincarnation of the man himself. He ended up jailed for it and was abandoned by her, who presumably found the same belief in Myerson.
  • Issue #7 introduces a really unexpected Rorschach copycat: Frank Miller, who converted to the identity after he was approached by Myerson and Laura and became involved in their assassination conspiracy. This appears to be a largely symbolic conversion as he doesn't directly partake in the killing, but nonetheless, it resulted in the detective stumbling on him wearing Rorschach's mask as he calmly watches the political rallies the duo were supposed to affect.
  • Another symbolic case of this occurs with the detective himself. After getting completely overrun by the extent the Rorschach conspiracies were true and facing a losing Battle in the Center of the Mind, he ends up accepting their truth and finishes the job by murdering Turley for his crimes. The detective doesn't literally don Rorschach's mask or identity, but the figment of his imagination makes the logic very clear:
    Rorschach: When I was a kid, I used to read pirates. All the patterns, I put them there. I am responsible for them. I drew the lines. And looking back... I see only myself.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Laura and Myerson's theories about what happened to the heroes and the nature of Rorschach's "reincarnation" are certainly at odds with what we saw happen in Watchmen, and appear to be just the delusions of two troubled, broken individuals. But there are just enough hints to suggest that there might indeed be an otherworldly presence connected to Rorschach which is present throughout events. Most notably, Laura's theory hinges on all the heroes being dispersed by Doctor Manhattan in the same way that Rorschach actually was at the end of the original story, and everyone who listens to the static EVP recording which purportedly contains Rorschach's instructions seems to eventually get sucked into the cult.
• Meta Fiction: Rorschach (the series) is an examination on the legacy that Rorschach (the character) left behind, and its narrative directly alludes to both sides of the fourth wall. While trying to investigate the origins and inspirations of the new Rorschach (the copycat), the detective ends up tracing him down to a comic writer named William Myerson and his comic, The Citizen, which in everything but name are both Steve Ditko and Mr. A (the character Rorschach's real-world inspirationsinvoked). Trying to piece together this menagerie of quasi-fourth-wall-breaking is quite the puzzle, but ultimately it hinges around discussing Rorschach (a "character" passed around through fiction as the representative of a very complicated mix of conflicted morals).
• Mind Screw: The series begins as a rather straightforward mystery to uncover a potential assassination conspiracy, but the further it goes on, it begins revealing that the degree to which the mysterious Rorschach copycat was inspired by the story of Rorschach is a lot more layered and metatextual than it first appears. It starts getting particularly weird when the Rorschach copycat's identity is tied to a very transparent expy of Steve Ditko... then even weirder when a completely literal version of Frank Miller is tied into the narrative, having been spurned by his former colleagues into becoming another Rorschach copycat.
• Mythology Gag:
  • In issue #1, there's a prominent billboard advertising baked beans, referencing one of original Rorschach's signature scenes of him eating from a can of beans. There's an even older advertisement visible below it for Nostalgia, a brand of perfume formerly sold under Veidt Enterprises.
  • From issue #2, the lobby of Myerson's apartment building features a painting reminiscent of Alexander the Great solving the Gordian Knot, the same painting that Ozymandias once kept in his fortress.
  • In issue #3, a young Laura wears a shirt with the Gunga Diner logo on it. Also, the detective mentions finding Laura's diary using a "hidden panel in the back of the closet trick", the same thing the original Rorschach did in the first issue of Watchmen in Edward Blake's apartment.
  • Issue #6 once again alludes to the death of Kitty Genovese, with Myerson mentioning that he lived in the building where she was murdered. This story is incidentally more in line with the actual events of her death than the sensationalized story passed around during the writing of Watchmen, as Myerson's father heard and almost saw something out the window, but just assumed it was a personal quarrel and was none of his business^note The infamous claim that 38 individuals saw Genovese's murder in plain view was propagated by the New York Times, and while most people (including Alan Moore) took this as fact at the time as there was very little basis for counternarrative, it's been more recently accepted that it was a fabrication by the article's author. Nowadays, it's believed that at best, a few people saw glimpses of a mild altercation, but not enough to suggest the murder that was happening.
  • A brief one in issue #8, where during a flashback showing Frank Miller's capture at the hands of the police, one officer's wristwatch is clearly visible in a few panels, showing it's just before midnight.
  • Very shortly after the detective murders Turley in issue #12, a drop of blood is shown splat onto a "Vote Turley" pin in exactly the same fashion as the famous blood-splattered smiley face. The detective also ends up being told that he's 35 minutes too late... by a box office teller regarding a midnight screening of a movie.
  • References to the 2019 HBO series:
    • The FBI agent the detective teams up with in issue #1 notes how Rorschach masks are still popular "even after Oklahoma." This alludes to the events that occurred in the Watchmen miniseries on HBO, which took place in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
    • There's a billboard advertisement with the words "COME BACK TO NYC" in bold letters. This references to how in the show, New York is stuck in a struggling campaign to convince people to come back to the city after the 11/2 Incident.
    • In issue #8, during an interview with Myerson's former associates, one of them mentions seeing Myerson in a Rorschach mask but not giving it much mind since "there's cops who wear masks in like middle America now," alluding to how the Tulsa police force took up working under masks and superhero codenames to protect their identities.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed:
  • William Myerson, who is suspected to be the new Rorschach, bears similarities to Steve Ditko, who in turn was the creator of Rorschach's direct inspiration The Question. In fact, when the protagonist searches through Myerson's things, the artwork he finds is clearly that of Ditko's.
  • Averted later on, where real-world comic creators end up being wound up in the mix, intertwined with Myerson's fictional biography. Otto Binder is named-dropped, as is Frank Miller, who is even revealed to be a character, radicalized into a Rorschach cultist.
  • Possibly also averted with Turley, Robert Redford's election opponent. He shares the same last name with Jonathan Turley, a prominent conservative lawyer and pundit.
• No Name Given: While most characters will eventually get their name disclosed at some point, the detective protagonist is not one of them. Characters never address him by name, so for the purposes of the narrative (and this article), he's simply known as "the detective".
• Pen Pals: Issue #6 has the detective discovering a series of letters showing that Laura and Myerson were exchanging letters for years up until they met in person. They first began as an amicable fan-creator exchange discussing their interests, then it got more somber as they discussed their shared insecurities and existential fears, then took a turn for the ominous when it led them to meeting up in person, seemingly just before they engaged in their plot to assassinate Governor Turley.
• Pensieve Flashback: The series begins doing this in issue #3, contributing to its increasingly trippy blending of fiction and reality. Generally, frames depicting flashbacks (greatly suggested to be accurate depictions of the past) and the present-day tend to mirror each other location-wise, but the time period of each is very clearly delineated, usually with a color-coded wash. But...
  • Issue 3 begins merging flashbacks of different periods of the late Laura's life together (namely by showing her murdering her father as a preteen per his request, then coming back to visit his still-remaining corpse with the fake Rorschach as an adult), which lets the viewer know that what we're seeing isn't strictly literal, and is more of the detective visualizing Laura's diary as he reads it. The direction is really solidified (and subsequently more worrying) when said flashback figments proceed to talk directly to the present-day detective.
  • Repeated in issue 9, where the detective's investigation of the desert house Laura and Myerson previously operated out of is paralleled by the two's previous interactions. Halfway through the parallel sequences, however, Laura is once again abruptly interacting with the detective in his "present" reality, this time acting more like a voice to his conscience as he begins figuring things out.
• Reconstruction: Despite the character being long dead, the series takes advantage of the three decades worth of knowledge and audience reactions to reevaluate the character of Rorschach, one of the reigning champions of the Unscrupulous Hero archetype, and his very complicated moral legacy, both in-universe and out:
  • The posthumous distance from the real man allows characters to pull bits and pieces of what they preferred about his torrid brand of vigilante justice, and similar to how white supremacists appropriated his bigotry as a manifesto, Conspiracy Theorists here took inspiration from his insane, absolutist view of the world to justify terrible crimes. The series makes it loud and clear that Rorschach/Walter Kovacs is, above all else, an Anti-Hero. He may have genuinely wanted to make the world a better, safer place, but he was also a raging nihilist, a barely-functioning misanthrope, by all definitions violent and insane, to a point that he wasn't even very good at his own job. Rorschach exists on a very complicated edge of good and evil, and the series reinforces that while he fell into becoming as disturbed as he is, it's almost inevitably born of people trying and failing to reasonably cope within a flawed world, and not someone you want to consciously replicate.
  • The series also does a reevaluation of Rorschach's individual morals, inspired by the controversial real-world Misaimed Fandominvoked that seems to genuinely take them at face value. Even while Rorschach's heart was ultimately in the right place, he was also clearly mentally disturbed and only found justification for his continued existence by violent and destructive means. Any people inspired by his actions are played as just as disturbed and detached from humanity as he is, either being murderous Conspiracy Theorists searching for insane means to "save the world", or nihilists who believe nothing except their interpretation of justice is worth saving anymore. Even when the detective succumbs to the mentality by the end, it's not at all played as a cool, triumphant decision despite it being "right" in his mind — he might have been justified, but that still doesn't make him a "hero".
• Reincarnation: Laura believed this to be the case when she recruits Muscles to briefly become the new Rorschach. As he tells it, Laura claimed that Doctor Manhattan took Nite Owl, The Comedian, Silk Spectre, and Rorschach's souls and put them in other bodies so there were still people who could fight off the Squids. Muscles' murder of a former domestic abuser convinced her he was Rorschach reborn but she quickly abandoned him when he was jailed. It's implied she also thought this of Myerson.
• Running Gag: Even in 2020, pirate stories are still all the rage in the Watchmen universe, to the point where there's even upcoming pirate movies.
• Sanity Slippage: Ever since Issue 3, the detective's sanity is put into question. Come the end of Issue 11, it's nonexistent.
• Slashed Throat: Turley and his campaign manager ultimately died with their throats violently slit with a broken beer bottle by the detective.
• Shout-Out:
  • In the tape found on the new Rorschach's body, two of the people identifying themselves are Otto Binder (best known as the creator of Supergirl) and Frank Miller. Frank Miller himself is a character in the story come Issue #6.
  • To hammer in the references to Steve Ditko, issue #7 has a picture of Pontius Pirate for the cover of Astonishing Suspense which replicates the cover of Amazing Fantasy #15, which featured the first appearance of Spider-Man, whom Ditko co-created with Stan Lee.
  • Issue #11 mentions a character doing service in the rebuilding of Iraq in the 2000s after the country's collapse following the suicide of Saddam (the alternate history of the universe in lieu of the real-life invasion of Iraq) and the panel shows him standing under the Victory Arch in Baghdad. This all certainly feels like King making a subtle reference to The Sheriff Of Babylon, the Vertigo Comics graphic novel that became his big break as a comic book writer, in which a murder victim is found near the Arch.
• Spanner in the Works: A really subtle, but really important case of this is revealed near the very end of the story: Just before Diane Condor's presumed suicide, she recorded a long audio tape "confessing" to her, Oates, and President Redford's involvement in a plot to assassinate Turley (which she was cajoled into recording as part of a pro-Turley False Flag Operation before she was murdered as part of the cover-up). This confession tape ends up becoming the singular lynchpin of evidence that would tie the entire plot together (as despite how thorough the detective was at forming the story, there was otherwise little definitive proof), but before the Turley campaign could obtain it, it instead ended up in the hands of Condor's parents, who brought it along with her other belongings back to their home — the detective only managed to obtain it after tracking them down and threatening them for it. If it wasn't for this unexpected exchange of hands, the detective would've had little to no agency in determining how Turley and his campaign would close out their plot, and with it, he uses the opportunity to murder Turley and render it all moot.
• Spotting the Thread: The detective is really good at detecting lies amidst seemingly perfect alibis.
  • Issue #8 has him go over the stories told by the three suspected co-conspirators to Myerson's assassination plot, all of whom present perfectly reasonable stories of having gone to his ranch in the desert to conduct business over a few days, and aside from confusing oddities (Myerson wearing the Rorschach mask at all times and Laura offering the three a go at their shooting range), they ultimately did their business and left. However, this all contradicted how Frank Miller confessed to his role in the conspiracy, as well as the identities of the three suspects he sent money to — their cover stories make no sense as being as uneventful as they were, and with the flimsiness of them needing to be at the ranch in the first place (as pointed out, the lawyer and therapist could've merely talked on the phone), the detective correctly assesses that they're still hiding something from him.
  • Issue #11 unravels an even bigger thread. Issue #10 had the detective seemingly complete his story on the assassination plot, where he discovered that Laura and Myerson found a government intermediary — an independent security contractor named Oates — who collaborated with the two on assassinating Turley, and was himself encouraged by President Redford, implicating him as conspiring to and nearly succeed at murdering his political opponent. However, this all comes falling apart in issue #11 after the detective discovers the fingerprints of Alan — Turley's campaign manager who sent the detective on the case to begin with — are identical to that on a bottle found in Oates' personal safe, contradicting Alan's claim that he never met Oates. Combined with the unresolved issue of why Oates was murdered by the duo, the detective realizes the vast multitude of other lies Alan gave him: Oates was working for Turley all the time, and the assassination plot was purposefully hijacked in a way that — through the independent detective's investigation — would be pinned on Redford, destroying his reputation while benefitting Turley's.
• Two Lines, No Waiting: Issue #8 has a localized version of this, consisting of the detective interrogating three of Myerson's previous associates (a lawyer, a therapist, and a handyman), each explaining their last interaction with him. The issue's visual formatting aligns the story by having each interviewee expositing one third of each page, playing simultaneously and roughly at the same chronological pace.
• The Un-Reveal: We never learn about the exact contents of Diane Condor's "confession" tape that would implicate Redford as being behind the assassination plot. While the detective did retrieve it and was seemingly about to play it for Turley and Alan, he instead taped it over with a recording of Turley's rehearsal speech, something loud enough to cover up him murdering the two without anyone outside the room hearing anything.
• Verbal Tic: Rorschach's "hurm" grunting sound really caught on with the Rorschach copycat, as well as others influenced by the character, including Frank Miller and the detective by the end.
• Wham Line: In issue #11's very last panel, "Hurm." Who says it? The detective himself, signifying his turn into a Rorschach cultist.

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