By
Andy Frisk
March 2, 2009 - 21:28
Walter Kovacs, the man who would become Rorschach, had a childhood that bordered on a nightmare. The unwanted son of a prostitute, subjected to beatings for disturbing his mother during work, picked on and ridiculed by his peers to the point of violent retaliation and ward of a children’s home, Kovacs had it rough to say the least. At 16, he entered the world of the “unskilled manual worker, garment industry.” Here he came across the garment that would help birth Rorschach, “a special order dress in new Dr. Manhattan spin off fabric. Viscous fluids between two layers of latex, heat and pressure sensitive.” After making the dress into a mask and reading about the senseless rape, torture and killing of a young woman while approximately 40 of her apartment neighbors simply looked on and did nothing despite her screams, he dons the mask and Rorschach is born…almost.
Kovacs himself admits, to his assigned psychologist during his jailhouse interviews that the brutal crime he read about really didn’t birth Rorschach, it was the horrific case of Blaire Roche, a six year old child kidnapped because her kidnappers believed she was heir to a wealthy family’s fortune. It was a case of mistaken identity. Finally tracking down her kidnappers and their two German Shepherds fighting in their yard over a human femur…that once belonged to Roche, Rorschach was truly born. It was at this point that Kovacs goes over the edge and quits leaving criminals, rapists, and the like for the police, and decides a more fitting punishment is deserved for these types. After the Keanne Act of 77 outlawed masked vigilantes, Rorschach didn't quit, but continued meeting out justice of his own type.
Like Nite Owl II is the everyman superhero character who most can relate to existentially, and Dr. Manhattan is a super-scientific knowledge powered atomic deity who is both frightening and enlightening at the same time, Rorschach is simply like his namesake test, a blot in which the reader sees what he makes of the blot. Like his ever changing mask Rorschach is completely open to interpretation by the reader, a powerful character in the world of comic book stories in that he involves the reader so deeply, yet yields no definite, nor adheres to any complete or concise, definition of character. Quite simply he is what you see in him and this is what makes him so fascinating a creation.
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So, what does one see in the test blot that is Rorschach? He is the victim of a horrible and abusive childhood, evidenced by the neglect of his mother and the absence of even knowing who and what a father is. He is a right wing fanatic, evidenced by his ideas on the “wrongness” of homosexuality, belief that he is always right even to the point of betraying the secret of the event that saves the world at the end of the tale and his devotion to the right wing publication “The New Frontiersman” and its right wing views. He is a hero of near saintly stature for standing up to the “criminal rights over victim rights” courts by fast forwarding and meeting out lethal justice to the child murderers and cannibalistic sadists who deserve to be burned alive instead of a cot and three squares. He is the latent homosexual evidenced by his, aforementioned, views on the “wrongness” of homosexuality that he marks Ozymandias as possibly “guilty” of, which help him to hide his own feelings, his yearning for a male figure to bond with having had no father, the incredible anger built up in him from his sexual frustrations (as he, as far as the tale relates, never has had sexual contact with a man or woman) and his holding onto of his former partner Nite Owl II’s hand much like Nite Owl II himself held onto Silk Specter’s hand out of attraction when he first welcomed her aboard “Archie” his owl ship in a panel laid out exactly like another, meant to communicate the awkwardness of Nite Owl II’s budding attraction. He is the man’s man who lives a Spartan life of a Rambo-type, eating his meals out of a can and meeting out justice with his fists, breaking fingers and taking names. He is the ultimate figure of honesty, dying for what he believes in, the truth. He is a chemically imbalanced mental case. He is the only true hero as he is the only character who to his own self remains true. His is the only sane reaction to an insane world: insanity. He’s just so darned cool with that moving mask of his…
Putting aside the validity of the political, ethical, emotional and scientific or pseudo-psychiatric views listed above (and many of them are quite invalid-like Rorschach I’ll leave you to figure what you see in each of them) Rorschach is all of those ideas and none. He is what we make of him as we are driven by the matrix of our own beliefs in what is right and wrong, true and untrue. We are called to be creators in his tale helping to define him and in doing so, if we’re brave enough to step back and look objectively at what truths or bigotries we are projecting into him, we define ourselves. Rorschach, just another of the great characters inhabiting the
Watchmen universe, and one who’s tale is perhaps the most revealing, of ourselves.
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