There’s This One Line In The First Issue Of Watchmen. This Line In Rorschach’s Monologue- “On

There’s this one line in the first issue of Watchmen. This line in Rorschach’s monologue- “On Friday Night, A comedian died in New York. Nobody Cares. Nobody cares but me.” And it is such a perfect encapsulation of everything good and bad about Rorschach, and about superheroes conceptually. 

Yeah, Rorschach. Nobody does care. Nobody but you cares because everyone who even lightly knew this guy in a professional or personal capacity hates him. By almost every metric you can apply the world is better off without him in it- including by the metrics you apply, Rorschach, because if you were anywhere near as objective in your dispensation of justice as you think of yourself as, you’d have broken into his penthouse and done this yourself years ago. You are very pointedly the only person in the second issue who has no direct flashback involving a formative experience with The Comedian; your investment in him in pure projection. Dare I say, Rorschach-like.

And yet. Blake’s absolute scumminess isn’t why he was killed, was it? It isn’t why the cops are soft-pedalling the case (they claim that they’re afraid of getting Rorschach involved, but I’m personally more inclined to believe that the case just seemed Weird and Hard.) Blake’s death actually is the tip of a monstrous iceberg; Rorschach is completely correct in taking the killing as seriously as he does. But he can’t claim any special insight-it’s a broken clock situation, because he takes everything that seriously. And there’s an impulse to say that’s a good thing- except the fact that he only takes everything that seriously because he’s wrapped up in an insane, self-pitying, self-righteous self-image. It is important to him, that he is the only one who cares about this, because it gives him ground to disdain everyone else who doesn’t.

But at the end of the day, no matter how you arrive at it, the concept of solving every murder- of no death going unresolved, of no murder, of anyone, going uninvestigated- is, full stop, aspirational. It is a good thing to want and a good thing to work towards. And Rorschach, for all his insanity, is actually making some degree of headway. He very pointedly immediately figures out the hidden compartment holding Blake’s costume after being in the apartment for seconds; the cops talked in circles for several minutes and didn’t pick up on the discrepancy. He blunders down false trails, he engages in completely unhelpful violence that stood absolutely no chance of advancing the case, simply because he’s inclined to violence; and he pursues the mask-killer theory above all others because it flatters his self-image, his self-importance, his self-appointed role as the last cowboy. But I suspect that Ozymandias wouldn’t have bothered feeding the fire on the Mask-killer theory if there wasn’t a risk of Rorschach eventually figuring it out what was really going on. He got closer than anyone else just by virtue of trying at all.

Rorschach is the fantasy of someone, somewhere, Being On The Case, whatever the case may be; however tempting it may be to ignore The Case. Someone who cares, someone who’ll fight tooth and nail to get answers that absolutely should be gotten at. But he’s also the dark side of that- an examination of the kind of neurotic who would care, always, about all of it, the ways in which the caring would need to flatter and feed his ego to be sustainable, and the sheer amount of collateral damage all that caring would do to anyone the neurotic considered the cause of the problems he cares about. Here’s the price of a crusader who’ll stop at nothing- you’re stuck with a crusader who’ll stop at nothing. That is not a quality that exists in a vacuum. That is simply not the kind of nice idea you get to have, without an eye for how a person gets that way, how they stay that way, and how much damage they do.