Character Name: Walter Joseph Kovacs
Codename: Rorschach
Alignment: Good
Powers: None; He merely has his will and technical abilities. Rorschach uses any and all weapons that are available at the time, 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, as well as Moloch's house. He uses cooking fat, a toilet bowl, a cigarette, a fork and his jacket all as weapons. Carries a gas-powered grappling gun for scaling buildings. Rorschach is well versed in street combat, gymnastics, and boxing. He has shown the ability to best multiple armed assailants with little difficulty. Rorschach is also relatively indifferent to physical pain and discomfort, shown when he walks through Antarctica in only a trenchcoat. Due to his time in juvenile detention facilities and group homes as a child he is as street savvy as any criminal. Rorschach also demonstrated the ability to break into a variety of locked buildings and homes, suggesting the expertise of a master thief. He is also shown to be extremely strong. This is demonstrated when he shatters a toilet bowl by kicking it once, and easily breaking through a lock that gave an entire team of police officers more trouble. Despite his mental instability, Rorschach was described as "tactically brilliant, and unpredictable" by Nite Owl, and possesses surprisingly good detective skills. During his childhood he was described as bright, and excelled in literature and religious education.
Bio: The son of a prostitute and one of her clients, Walter Kovacs had a troubled childhood, filled with abuse from his mother, who once said that she wished she had aborted him. After defending himself from bullies at age 10 by burning one with a lit cigarette in the eye and biting the other's face, he was placed in a special home by Child Services. He never saw his mother again. When he was told that his mother was killed by her pimp, he only said one word: "Good." After leaving school, he took a job as an unskilled tailor. The idea of handling women's clothing was disconforting to him; the job was "bearable, but unpleasant". While there, he made a dress for a woman named Kitty Genovese, made from a fabric designed by Dr. Manhattan, that used two pressure and heat-sensitive liquids suspended between two layers of latex to create black-on-white shifting color patterns, "always changing, never mixing into grey". When the dress was completed, the customer was unsatisfied with the design, and she refused to pay for it. Kovacs took it home for himself, fascinated with the fabric. Upon reading of Kitty Genovese's murder in the newspaper, he became disgusted with humanity's propensity for crime, and made a mask out of the dress, becoming the vigilante Rorschach. Rorschach himself, however, would disagree with that last bit, as he feels that he was still not Rorschach yet, just Walter Joseph Kovacs PRETENDING to be Rorschach. Rorschach's life as a "masked adventurer" involved fighting gang warfare and "masked villains" such as Moloch the Mystic. His greatest victory was taking down a large chain of gangs, including the Big Figure racket, with his partner Nite Owl II. At this point, he did not yet kill, and only beat criminals unconscious for the police to arrest. This went on until 1975, when he investigated the kidnapping of Blair Roche, a young girl. His investigations brought him to an abandoned dressmaker's shop. After finding the remains of a young child's blanket in the shop, a heavily used cutting board, and noticing two guard dogs chewing on a human bone, he realized to his profound horror what had happened: the kidnapper, Grice, had murdered the girl, dismembered her body, and fed the pieces to his dogs. He claims that "It was Kovacs who closed his eyes. It was Rorschach who opened them again". He takes justice into his own hands and kills the dogs, and then sets the house on fire with Grice handcuffed to a pipe and still alive inside, leaving him with a hacksaw. The hacksaw was not strong enough to cut through the handcuffs in the little time Rorschach would give him, but would allow Grice to amputate his handcuffed left hand to escape. Grice perished in the ensuing fire. Two years later, when the Keene Act outlawed vigilantism, thus ending the era of "masked adventurers", Rorschach left the dead body of a wanted multiple rapist in front of the NYPD HQ, along with a note, a single word: "NEVER!" He is seen as 'paranoid' and 'crazy', even by his former vigilante partner Nite Owl II. In 1985, Rorschach investigated the murder of a man named Edward Blake, discovering that he is the Comedian, one of only two government-sponsored heroes. He believed that someone is picking off costumed superheroes, a view that strengthened when Doctor Manhattan was forced into exile and when Adrian Veidt, the former vigilante Ozymandias, was the victim of an attempted assassination. Rorschach questioned Moloch, now retired along with the heroes, who tells him what little he knows. Later, having received an offer for more information apparently from Moloch, Rorschach visited him again, only to find him dead, shot through the head. The police, tipped off anonymously over the phone by Veidt, had the place surrounded and arrest him after a fight. A psychiatrist named Malcolm Long is assigned to talk to him, who decides that his real reasons for becoming a vigilante was not the death of Kitty Genovese, but rather his repressed hatred towards his mother. The jail is full of criminals who hate Rorschach, since he was responsible for putting them behind bars. He is threatened with beatings and death, but Rorschach is never intimidated, answering only "None of you understand. I'm not locked up in here with you... you're locked up in here with me." During lunch, Rorschach throws a pot full of hot fat at one prisoner who intended to stab him with a screwdriver. After that man dies, the prison breaks out in a riot. Three men, one of whom was Big Figure out for revenge, try to kill Rorschach, but he outwits and kills them. Nite Owl II and Silk Spectre II, another vigilante, begin to take his 'mask killer' theory seriously, and break him out of jail. Dr. Manhattan comes back from his exile to transport Silk Spectre II to Mars. Rorschach and Nite Owl II retrieve Rorschach's spare costume hidden in his apartment and then go into 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 II correctly deduces Veidt's password and finds that he ran Pyramid Deliveries. Rorschach, who has been keeping a journal throughout the duration of the novel, finishes it, stating that "whatever nature of the conspiracy, Adrian Veidt is responsible", before dropping it into a mailbox. Nite Owl II 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 the two heroes are too late to stop his plan, which he has triggered, thirty-five minutes earlier. Dr. Manhattan and Silk Spectre II arrive at the base after viewing the catastrophic damage Veidt's psychic monster has inflicted on New York City. Despite their mutual horror, Nite Owl II, Silk Spectre II and Dr. Manhattan all agree to keep quiet about the true nature of the alien. Rorschach, however, refuses to cooperate and says "Not even in the face of armageddon. Never compromise." Doctor Manhattan follows him outside and vaporizes him after Rorschach yelled, "Do it!"
Extras: Rorschach is noted among other comic book characters for having a distinct moral absolutist life philosophy. Comics historian Bradford W. Wright described the character's world view "a set of black-and-white values that take many shapes but never mix into shades of gray, similar to the ink blot tests of his namesake". Rorschach sees existence as random and, according to Wright, this viewpoint leaves the character "free to 'scrawl [his] own design' on a 'morally blank world'". Rorschach is a very right wing character, and has shown beliefs in economic liberalism, militarism, nationalism, and social conservatism. His nationalism is shown when he ignores The Comedian's many faults, describing his rape of Sally Jupiter as a "moral lapse", since he was a war hero and patriot.
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