Rorschach (comics)
Encyclopedia
Rorschach is a fictional comic book
Comic book
A comic book or comicbook is a magazine made up of comics, narrative artwork in the form of separate panels that represent individual scenes, often accompanied by dialog as well as including...

 character and antihero that was featured in the acclaimed 1986 DC Comics
DC Comics
DC Comics, Inc. is one of the largest and most successful companies operating in the market for American comic books and related media. It is the publishing unit of DC Entertainment a company of Warner Bros. Entertainment, which itself is owned by Time Warner...

 miniseries
Miniseries
A miniseries , in a serial storytelling medium, is a television show production which tells a story in a limited number of episodes. The exact number is open to interpretation; however, they are usually limited to fewer than a whole season. The term "miniseries" is generally a North American term...

 Watchmen
Watchmen
Watchmen is a twelve-issue comic book limited series created by writer Alan Moore, artist Dave Gibbons, and colourist John Higgins. The series was published by DC Comics during 1986 and 1987, and has been subsequently reprinted in collected form...

. Rorschach was created by Watchmen writer Alan Moore
Alan Moore
Alan Oswald Moore is an English writer primarily known for his work in comic books, a medium where he has produced a number of critically acclaimed and popular series, including Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and From Hell...

 with artist Dave Gibbons
Dave Gibbons
Dave Gibbons is an English comic book artist, writer and sometime letterer. He is best known for his collaborations with writer Alan Moore, which include the miniseries Watchmen and the Superman story "For the Man Who Has Everything"...

, but as with most of the central characters in the series, he was an analogue for a Charlton Comics
Charlton Comics
Charlton Comics was an American comic book publishing company that existed from 1946 to 1985, having begun under a different name in 1944. It was based in Derby, Connecticut...

 character, in this case Steve Ditko
Steve Ditko
Stephen J. "Steve" Ditko is an American comic book artist and writer best known as the artist co-creator, with Stan Lee, of the Marvel Comics heroes Spider-Man and Doctor Strange....

's The Question
Question (comics)
The Question is a fictional character, a superhero in comic books published by DC Comics. The original was created by writer-artist Steve Ditko, and first appeared in Blue Beetle #1...

, and Ditko's small press character Mr A.

His mask displays a constantly morphing inkblot that is based on the ambiguous designs used in Rorschach inkblot test
Rorschach inkblot test
The Rorschach test is a psychological test in which subjects' perceptions of inkblots are recorded and then analyzed using psychological interpretation, complex algorithms, or both. Some psychologists use this test to examine a person's personality characteristics and emotional functioning...

s. Rorschach was named the sixteenth greatest comic book character by Empire
Empire (magazine)
Empire is a British film magazine published monthly by Bauer Consumer Media. From the first issue in July 1989, the magazine was edited by Barry McIlheney and published by Emap. Bauer purchased Emap Consumer Media in early 2008...

magazine, the sixth greatest by Wizard
Wizard (magazine)
Wizard or Wizard: The Magazine of Comics, Entertainment and Pop Culture was a magazine about comic books, published monthly in the United States by Wizard Entertainment from July 1991 to January 2011...

magazine, and sixteenth again by IGN
IGN
IGN is an entertainment website that focuses on video games, films, music and other media. IGN's main website comprises several specialty sites or "channels", each occupying a subdomain and covering a specific area of entertainment...

.

Before Watchmen

Rorschach, born Walter Joseph Kovacs, is the son of Sylvia Kovacs, a prostitute, and "Charlie" (surname unknown). His mother was frequently abusive and condescending toward her son. In July 1951, at the age of 10, Kovacs became involved in a violent fight with two older bullies, in which he partly blinded one with a cigarette and took a large bite out of the other's cheek in a blind rage. Once his living conditions were finally looked into he was removed from his mother's care and put in "The Lillian Charlton Home for Problem Children" in New Jersey until 1956, where he rapidly seemed to improve, excelling at scholastics as well as gymnastics and amateur boxing
Amateur boxing
Amateur boxing is practised at the collegiate level, at the Olympic Games and Commonwealth Games, and in many other venues sponsored by amateur boxing associations. Amateur boxing bouts are short in duration and fighters wear head protection, so this type of competition prizes point-scoring rather...

.

After leaving the Home for Problem Children when he was 16, Kovacs took a job as a garment worker in a dress shop, which he found "bearable but unpleasant" partly because he had to handle women's clothing; it was here that he acquired the fabric that he would later fashion into the mask he wears as Rorschach. The fabric, created by Dr. Manhattan, contained two heat and pressure-sensitive viscous fluids between layers of latex, creating a shifting black-on-white color effect without mixing to form gray. Kovacs scavenged the material from a rejected dress that had been special-ordered by a young woman with an Italian name. Though Kovacs learned how to cut and fashion the material successfully with heated implements, he soon grew bored with it, as it served him no real purpose at the time. Two years later when buying a newspaper on his way to work in March 1964, Walter read about the rape and murder of Kitty Genovese
Kitty Genovese
Catherine Susan "Kitty" Genovese , was a New York City woman who was stabbed to death near her home in the Kew Gardens section of Queens, New York on March 13, 1964....

 (he later told his prison psychologist "Woman who ordered dress. Kitty Genovese. I'm sure that was the woman's name."). Ashamed by what he read about the unresponsiveness of her neighbors
Bystander effect
The bystander effect or Genovese syndrome is a social psychological phenomenon that refers to cases where individuals do not offer any means of help in an emergency situation to the victim when other people are present...

, Kovacs became disillusioned with the underlying apathy that he saw as inherent in most people. Inspired by Genovese's fate, Kovacs returned home, made "a face [he] could bear to look at in the mirror" from the dress's fabric, and began fighting crime as the vigilante Rorschach. Initially, Kovacs left criminals alive, but bloodied, for the police to arrest. In the mid 1960s, he teamed up with the second Nite Owl, a partnership which proved highly successful at battling organized crime.

In 1975, he investigated the kidnapping of a young girl named Blair Roche after promising her parents that he would return her alive and well. He was given the name of an abandoned dressmaker shop, where he found a little girl's underwear in the stove and two dogs gnawing on a human bone. Convinced that its occupant, a man named Gerald Grice, had killed Roche and fed her remains to his dogs as scraps, Kovacs killed the dogs with Grice's meat cleaver and waited for his arrival. When Grice returned, Kovacs surprised Grice by throwing his dead dog's bodies at him and handcuffed him to a stove. As Grice insisted he had not been involved in the kidnapping, Rorschach poured kerosene around him and gave him a hacksaw, hinting that Grice would have to cut off his own hand in order to escape. Rorschach then set the building on fire and left, noting afterward that no one emerged.

When the Keene Act was passed in 1977 to outlaw vigilantes, Kovacs responded by killing a wanted multiple rapist and leaving his body outside a police station with a note bearing one word: "NEVER!"

By 1985 and the events of Watchmen, Kovacs is the last active non-government sanctioned vigilante. The first character to appear in the series is a red-haired man carrying a sign reading "THE END IS NIGH." A police report describes him as a "prophet-of-doom sandwich-board man seen locally over the last several years." This character appears several times through the early chapters, although it is not until Rorschach's arrest and unmasking that he is revealed as Kovacs.

Events of Watchmen

Rorschach is the only vigilante who remains active after the passage of the Keene Act outlaws masked vigilantes (aside from the Comedian and Dr. Manhattan, who both serve in the employ of the US government). Rorschach investigates the murder of a man named Edward Blake, discovering that he is the Comedian, one of only two government-sponsored heroes. He believes that someone is picking off costumed superheroes, a view that strengthens when Doctor Manhattan is forced into exile and when Adrian Veidt, the former vigilante Ozymandias
Ozymandias (comics)
Ozymandias , is a fictional character and the main antagonist appearing in the comic book limited series Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, published by DC Comics. Named Ozymandias in the manner of Ramesses II, he is a modified version of the comic book character Thunderbolt from Charlton...

, is targeted with an assassination attempt.

Rorschach questions Moloch, a former supervillain
Supervillain
A supervillain or supervillainess is a variant of the villain character type, commonly found in comic books, action movies and science fiction in various media.They are sometimes used as foils to superheroes and other fictional heroes...

 who unexpectedly attends Blake's funeral, who tells him what little he knows. Later, after reading a note written by Moloch telling him to come over for more information, Rorschach visits him again, only to find him dead, shot through the head. The police, tipped off anonymously over the phone, surround the house and arrest Rorschach after a fight, in which Rorschach tries to escape by jumping through a window, but is unmasked.

Rorschach is sent to a prison, where many of its inmates are criminals he put away, including the Big Figure, a dwarf
Dwarfism
Dwarfism is short stature resulting from a medical condition. It is sometimes defined as an adult height of less than 4 feet 10 inches  , although this definition is problematic because short stature in itself is not a disorder....

 crime boss who is hungry for Rorschach's blood. During his incarceration, he is interviewed by the prison psychologist Dr. Malcolm Long, who believes he can help "rehabilitate" him; instead, Rorschach's explanation of his life and his justifications for his uncompromising worldview lead Long to question his own views and wreaks havoc with his personal life. One day during lunch, one of the inmates attempts to attack Rorschach with a screwdriver, whereupon Rorschach throws the boiling contents of a deep-fryer into his face in self-defense. After the inmate dies, the prison breaks out in a riot
Prison riot
A prison riot is an act of concerted defiance or disorder by a group of prisoners against the prison administrators, prison officers, or other groups of prisoners in attempt to force change or express a grievance....

. The Big Figure and two of his associates try to kill Rorschach, but he outwits and ultimately kills them all in rapid succession. Nite Owl and Silk Spectre II, two other vigilantes, begin to take his "mask killer" theory seriously and break him out of jail to follow up on it.

Doctor Manhattan comes back from his self-exile to transport Silk Spectre II to Mars
Mars
Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun in the Solar System. The planet is named after the Roman god of war, Mars. It is often described as the "Red Planet", as the iron oxide prevalent on its surface gives it a reddish appearance...

. Rorschach and Nite Owl enter underworld bars to find out who ordered the assassination attempt on Veidt. They obtain a name, a company called Pyramid Deliveries, and then break into Veidt's office. Nite Owl correctly deduces Veidt's password and finds that he runs Pyramid Deliveries. Rorschach, who has been keeping a journal throughout the duration of the novel, realises that they may be no match for Veidt. He makes one last entry in his journal, stating his certainty that Veidt is responsible for whatever might happen next, and drops it into a mailbox.

Nite Owl and Rorschach fly out to Antarctica. There they learn the true nature of the conspiracy and Veidt's motivations—to unite the world against a perceived alien threat and stop the possibility of a nuclear holocaust. Veidt then reveals that he set his plan into motion well before they arrived. Doctor Manhattan and Silk Spectre II arrive at the base after viewing the carnage Veidt's false alien has wrought on New York City. Despite their mutual horror, Nite Owl, Silk Spectre II and Doctor Manhattan all agree to keep quiet about the true nature of the events when the United States surprisingly does enter into a peace accord with the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

. Rorschach refuses to cooperate and sets out to return to America and expose the truth; ultimately, though, he allows Doctor Manhattan to kill him.

In the final scenes of the comic, Rorschach's journal has made it to the offices of the New Frontiersman, a right-wing newspaper. Outraged by the new accord between the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

 and the United States, the editor pulls a planned two-page story. He leaves it to his assistant Seymour to decide how to fill that space, and Seymour begins to reach for the paper's "Crank File," which contains the journal. The outcome is left to the reader's imagination.

Powers and abilities

Like most characters in Watchmen, Rorschach has no obvious "super powers". He merely has his will, physical strength, and skills. Rorschach is extremely resourceful, adapting ordinary household objects into tools or weapons, such as pepper to blind a police officer and the use of hairspray in combination with a match to set fire to another police officer, during a confrontation at Moloch's house. During the series he is shown to use cooking fat, a toilet bowl, a cigarette, a fork and his jacket all as weapons; he is also shown using a coat hanger as a makeshift measuring device. He owns a gas-powered grappling gun, which he uses to climb buildings (and once as a makeshift harpoon gun against a police officer), as seen in Chapter 1, which was designed and built by Nite Owl II.

Rorschach is well versed in street combat
Street fighting
Street fighting is a colloquial term used to denote unsanctioned, illegal in some countries, hand-to-hand fighting in public places, between individuals or groups of people....

, gymnastics
Gymnastics
Gymnastics is a sport involving performance of exercises requiring physical strength, flexibility, agility, coordination, and balance. Internationally, all of the gymnastic sports are governed by the Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique with each country having its own national governing body...

, and boxing
Boxing
Boxing, also called pugilism, is a combat sport in which two people fight each other using their fists. Boxing is supervised by a referee over a series of between one to three minute intervals called rounds...

.

Despite his mental instability, Rorschach was described as "tactically brilliant, and unpredictable" by Nite Owl, and possesses surprisingly good detective skills, as displayed when he is able to locate the Comedian's costume in his apartment when the police could not.

Personality

During his childhood he was described as bright, and excelled in literature, mathematics, and religious education. Rorschach considers his mask his true "face" and his unmasked persona to be his "disguise". He continues his one-man battle against crime long after superheroes have become both detested and illegal. Moore depicted Rorschach as being extremely right-wing, and morally uncompromising, a viewpoint that has alienated him from the rest of society, even among other superheroes. He is often described as being mentally ill by other characters in the comic.

He has taken on the persona of Rorschach in every part of his life and hates being referred to by his birth name. Rorschach has deep levels of hatred for immoral behavior and is openly derogative of any other vigilante who does not share his unwavering views, deriding them as "Soft". His views on right and wrong are starkly black and white with no room for compromise or exception.

Moore has said that the character's real name, Walter Kovacs, was inspired by Ditko's tendency to give his characters names beginning with the letter K. In an interview for the BBC's Comics Britannia, Moore stated that Rorschach was created as a way of exploring how an archetypical Batman
Batman
Batman is a fictional character created by the artist Bob Kane and writer Bill Finger. A comic book superhero, Batman first appeared in Detective Comics #27 , and since then has appeared primarily in publications by DC Comics...

-type character—a driven, vengeance-fueled vigilante—would be like in the real world. He concluded that the short answer was "a nutcase."

Film

Jackie Earle Haley
Jackie Earle Haley
Jackie Earle Haley is an American film actor. Establishing himself from child actor to adult Academy Award-nominee, he is perhaps best known for his roles as Moocher in Breaking Away, Kelly Leak in The Bad News Bears, pedophile Ronnie McGorvey in Little Children, the vigilante Rorschach in...

 portrays the character in the 2009 film adaptation
Watchmen (film)
Watchmen is a 2009 superhero film directed by Zack Snyder and starring Malin Åkerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and Patrick Wilson. It is an adaptation of the comic book of the same name by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons...

, with Eli Snyder, the son of director Zack Snyder
Zack Snyder
Zachary Edward "Zack" Snyder is an American actor, film director, screenwriter, and producer. After making his feature film debut with the 2004 remake Dawn of the Dead, he gained wide recognition with the 2007 box office hit 300, adapted from writer-artist Frank Miller's Dark Horse Comics...

, playing the young Rorschach in a flashback. The film differs slightly from the graphic novel, mainly in that Rorschach uses the meat cleaver that killed Blair Roche to kill Grice. Rorschach is also shown to openly disapprove of Dan and Laurie's relationship, mockingly stating "Should have known all it would have taken you to come back was nice pair of legs" and being condescending toward Laurie for "being unfaithful to Jon", asking if she "just got tired of being patriotic or did somebody put you up to it?"

Video games

The 2009 video game Watchmen: The End is Nigh
Watchmen: The End Is Nigh
Watchmen: The End Is Nigh is an episodic video game series that serves as a prequel to the film adaptation of the comic book Watchmen. The game was originally announced for release in downloadable installments on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation Network, and Xbox Live Arcade, with the first one...

and Watchmen: The End Is Nigh Part 2 features Rorschach and Nite Owl as partners. The game follows the two during their vigilante acts prior to the Watchmen movie. Part 2 of the game ends with the reason for the end of Nite Owl's and Rorschach's partnership. Jackie Earle Haley
Jackie Earle Haley
Jackie Earle Haley is an American film actor. Establishing himself from child actor to adult Academy Award-nominee, he is perhaps best known for his roles as Moocher in Breaking Away, Kelly Leak in The Bad News Bears, pedophile Ronnie McGorvey in Little Children, the vigilante Rorschach in...

 provides the voice of his character from the movie.

A Rorschach costume is available as downloadable content
Downloadable content
Downloadable content is official additional content for a video game distributed through the Internet. Downloadable content can be of several types, ranging from a single in-game outfit to an entirely new, extensive storyline, similarly to an expansion pack. As such, DLC may add new game modes,...

 for the PS3 video game LittleBigPlanet
LittleBigPlanet
LittleBigPlanet, commonly abbreviated LBP, is a puzzle platformer video game, based on user-generated content, for the PlayStation 3 first announced on 7 March 2007, by Phil Harrison at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, California...

and LittleBigPlanet 2
LittleBigPlanet 2
LittleBigPlanet 2 is a puzzle platformer video game, centred around user-generated content. The game is developed by Media Molecule, published by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe for PlayStation 3 and was originally scheduled for release in November 2010 but was delayed until January 2011...

.
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