Rorschach (Watchmen)

Rorschach is a male comic character who features in Watchmen.

Biography

Walter Joseph Kovacs was a male human was born on March 21, in the year 1940. His mother Sylvia Kovacs was a prostitute who resented his interference in her business, abused him viciously. His father never knew his son, and nothing is known about him other than he liked President Truman and his name was "Charlie". At age 10, Walter attacked two bullies that had cruelly abused him, partially blinding one with the bully's own lit cigarette. Kovacs became a ward of the state and was sent to the Lillian Charlton Home for Problem Children. In high school, he excelled in religious education and literature, as well as in boxing and gymnastics. He also wrote an essay in which he praised President Truman's decision to use nuclear weapons against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, asserting that the bombs helped save lives by stopping the war. During those high school years at the age of 16, Walter was informed of his mother's gruesome murder; her pimp force-fed her a bottle of Drano until she died in agony. Walter's reaction consisted of only a single word: 'Good'. At this time, he found work as an unskilled garment worker; noting later to a prison psychiatrist: "Job bearable but unpleasant. Had to handle female clothing". Working in this capacity, in 1962 he grew fascinated by a new fabric made possible through technologies developed by Doctor Manhattan. Two viscous liquids, one black and one white, between two layers of latex, continually shifted in response to heat and pressure, forming symmetrical patterns like a Rorschach inkblot test while never mixing to produce a grey color. Kovacs learned of the fabric when a young woman chose not to buy a dress which she had ordered made from it; Kovacs subsequently took the dress home and experimented with the fabric. He learned to cut the fabric and maintain the seal using heated scissors. In 1962, 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. (Watchmen v1 #6)

Two years later when buying a newspaper on his way to work in March 1964, Kovacs read about the rape and murder of Kitty Genovese, who he believed was the Italian woman who had rejected the dress. Ashamed by what he read about the unresponsiveness of her neighbors, 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, leaving a calling card in the form of a Rorschach test at every crime scene. In the mid 1960s, he teamed up with Nite Owl II, a partnership which proved highly successful at battling organized crime. (Watchmen v1 #6)

In 1975, an investigation into the kidnapping of a young girl named Blair Roche led to the transformation of the "soft" Kovacs into the ruthlessly uncompromising Rorschach. He tracked the kidnapping to a man named Gerald Grice. At Grice's shack, Kovacs found evidence Grice had killed the girl and had fed her remains to his dogs. Discovering this, Rorschach suffered a psychotic breakdown, killed the dogs with Grice's meat cleaver and waited for his arrival. When Grice returned, Rorschach hurled the corpses of the dogs through his windows, handcuffed him to a stove, and poured kerosene around him. Leaving Grice a hacksaw, Rorschach told him that his only chance to escape would be by cutting off his hand. Rorschach then set the shack on fire and left with no one managing to escape the scene. (Watchmen v1 #6)

Overview

Powers and abilities

Nite Owl had described him to be tactically brilliant and an unpredictable opponent. He has excelled in religious education, political science and literature in his schooling days. He is also able to string weapons out of anything, like a cooking fat spray can and a match.

Rorschach was a brilliant street fighter and has since honed this skill during his years of crime-fighting and his stint in prison. His fighting style largely consists of boxing moves along with traditional karate and taekwondo.

Notes

• Rorschach was created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons where he made his first appearance in Watchmen v1 #1 (September, 1986).
• The character was based on Question from Quality Comics.
• In "Toasting Absent Heroes" (2000), Alan Moore commented on the inspiration behind the characters name, "I noticed, when I was a teenager, that Ditko had got some fixation about the letter K, probably because it occurs in his own name. It's sort of "Kafka," and "Ditko," and there seemed to be a lot of Ditko characters with prominent Ks ... Ted Kord ... Ditko seemed very fond of that sort of sound, so in some half-assed way, that observation influenced me in giving Rorschach the name Walter Kovacs."

Appearances

• Watchmen v1: (1986)
• Before Watchmen v1:
• Doomsday Clock v1:

External Links

• DC Database Entry
• Wikipedia Entry

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