Watchmen

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains depictions of graphic violence, violence against animals, suicide, alcohol addiction, and attempted rape. The source text also contains outdated, racist, and misogynistic language, which is reproduced in this guide only through quotations.

A vigilante named Rorschach (after the mask he wears, which resembles the ink blots of a Rorschach test) walks the streets of an alternate New York City in 1985, his journal narrating scenes of crime, vice, and filth. Meanwhile, two detectives reconstruct the scene of a recent murder, where a man was thrown out of a high-rise apartment window and plunged to his death. They notice that the assailant must have been incredibly strong, as the victim had chained his door shut and himself “had the muscles of a weightlifter” (10). They decide to keep the case quiet, lest “masked avengers”—illegal crimefighters like Rorschach—get involved and make matters worse. When they leave, Rorschach arrives, finding a smiley face button stained with blood where the victim had landed. Rorschach rappels his way up to the apartment and discovers a hidden closet with a crime fighter’s costume (roughly resembling that of Captain America) and a photograph of the victim with similarly dressed people. Meanwhile, Hollis Mason is drinking beer and trading old stories with Dan Dreiberg, who inherited Hollis’s role as the costumed hero Nite Owl. Dan returns home to find Rorschach eating in his kitchen. Rorschach tells Dan that the victim was Edward Blake, whom they both knew as The Comedian, one of the few costumed heroes who chose to work for the government after the 1977 Keene Act banned vigilantism. Rorschach speculates that “maybe someone’s picking off costumed heroes” (20).

Rorschach walks into a seedy bar and begins asking questions about The Comedian, tormenting a patron but not receiving any information. He then visits Adrian Veidt, a former vigilante who leveraged his past into a successful business. Adrian suggests that Blake’s killing may have been politically motivated, as Blake had made many enemies among left-wing governments around the world in his work for the government. Thinking about how so many costumed heroes have met with terrible fates, Rorschach then visits Dr. Manhattan, the only being on Earth with actual superpowers and the other “extranormal operative” (29) to accept a government contract, and his girlfriend Laurie Juspeczyk, also known as Laurie Jupiter, the former Silk Spectre II. Laurie despises Blake, who had tried to rape her mother years before, and when Rorschach downplays that aspect of Blake’s history, Manhattan transports him instantaneously to outside the lab. Laurie then tells Manhattan that she is getting bored in the lab and would like a night out to see Dan Dreiberg. At dinner, Laurie complains about being a “kept woman for the military’s secret weapon” and that she is wasting her life (33). They laugh about their time as costumed heroes, reminiscing about a pathetic villain who liked getting beaten up but ended up murdered by Rorschach. Their laughter stops at this dark turn, but they find it appropriate not to laugh now that “The Comedian is dead” (34).

The last part of the first chapter is an excerpt from the first chapter of Hollis Mason’s memoir, Under the Hood. He discusses how his father fled the Montana countryside to work as an auto mechanic in New York City when Hollis was 12. The owner, Moe Vernon, loved to play opera in the shop and collect gag gifts. One day, Moe was wearing fake breasts and listening to Wagner when he received a letter that his wife had left him for the senior mechanic and taken all their money. He stood there sobbing with his fake breasts and “Ride of the Valkyries” playing, and everyone laughed at the sheer absurdity of the situation. Moe died by suicide that evening. Hollis grew up to become a police officer, inheriting the moral certitude of his grandfather, especially concerning the dangers of cities. When the Superman character debuted in 1938 (as he did in reality), Hollis loved the fantasy of rescuing grateful damsels from wicked villains. He then learns about a man named “Hooded Justice” who rescued a couple from a gang of thugs, and upon learning about “the first masked adventurer outside comic books had been given his name,” he “knew that I had to be the second” (40).