Watchmen

Rorschach is modeled after the archetype of “hard boiled” detectives, such as Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade or Raymond Chandler’s Philp Marlowe. Like his literary forebears, Walter Kovacs is a resourceful and streetwise private detective who has grown cynical from too much exposure to the worst that human beings have to offer. His journal offers the comic’s dark first line, “Dog carcass in an alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face” (9). His manner of writing, and even speaking, mirrors the exaggerated staccato of crime writers such as Mickey Spillane and James Ellroy. Prowling the streets at night in his mask (or as he calls it, his “face”) of ever-shifting ink blots, he also hides in plain sight, walking around maskless with a sandwich board proclaiming, “The End is Nigh.” Many commentators have chosen to interpret Rorschach as an antihero: He regards himself on the side of what is lawful and good, but like many of the characters that inspired him, he is willing to act in an unheroic fashion in order to get results, from inflicting beatings on random bar customers to extract information to badly wounding a police officer in his attempt to avoid an arrest that will put an end to his investigations.

Moore, however, seems intent to convey that Rorschach is an unrepentant killer whose vigilante ethos provides a thin layer of justification for an impulse toward brutal violence. While some of his victims were rapists or child murderers, others were merely masochists playing as supervillains. Furthermore, the act that truly makes him Rorschach is the slaughter of two dogs, who can hardly be called guilty for having eaten the flesh of a murdered girl. His methods as a detective range from ineffective to counterproductive, as he chases down underworld leads until he and Nite Owl arrive in Antarctica far too late to stop a plan that they regard as implausible even when they learn about it. Rorschach is the product of a traumatic childhood, and his psychiatrist fails to treat or understand him. Despite his hatred of his mother, he harbors fantasies about protecting women, but at best he only avenges them after the fact. Still, his absolute refusal to compromise sets him apart, and even after Dr. Manhattan kills him, that commitment lives on in the form of his journal, which the narrative suggests may soon be published.

Adrian Veidt stands in the traditional place of the villain, devising an elaborate plan to kill millions while also enhancing his own power and influence. Like many of villains throughout comics and other popular fiction, he is smarter and stronger than the ostensible heroes, even managing to remove Dr. Manhattan from the equation long enough to carry out his scheme. Whereas the antihero is a well-established archetype, Veidt is an anti-villain who plays the part of a traditional villain while exhibiting few if any of the qualities with which villainy is commonly associated. Having amassed tremendous wealth and power, he uses it for what he truly regards as the benefit of humanity. He is responsible for many deaths, even before the artificial squid monster emerges on top of the Institute for Extraspatial Studies, but he calculates that absolute secrecy is necessary to carry out the plot that, in turn, will prevent an otherwise imminent nuclear war.

However shocking his actions are to the other characters, he confronts his fellow adventurers with the logical conclusion of their own justification. The entire idea behind costumed crimefighting is that the law itself is not sufficient—that people must undertake drastic and seemingly absurd measures to rid the world of its evils. That is exactly what Veidt proposes, but it shakes even a cynic like The Comedian, because “its scale terrified him” (373). Heroes are used to beating up individual supervillains, not grappling with problems on a society-wide scale. Even more importantly, people like The Comedian thrive in a world of anarchic violence, and Veidt proclaims that “the brutal world he’d relished would simply cease to be, its fierce and brawling denizens rushing to join the mastodon into obsolescence…in extinction” (373). A world without conflict is one with no need for masked adventurers, helping to explain why Veidt long ago dispensed with his mask and turned his crimefighting career into a toy line while reinventing himself as a self-help guru promising that “the means to attain a capability far beyond that of the so-called ordinary person are within reach of everyone, if their desire and their will are strong enough” (381). His story of self-creation is meant to provide a model for a newly optimistic world, and by the end of the comic, it appears that he has succeeded.