Revenge Of The Blot: Rorschach #1 Review

Considering how I felt about Brian Azzarello’s take on my favorite Watchmen character, The Comedian, I opened Rorschach #1 with my knife already out and sharpened. Considering how many plot and character liberties Azzarello has been taking with The Comedian, I opened this comic book fully expecting to see something like Rorschach battling Blofeld from SPECTRE in Munich while jockeying a rocketpack and firing his laser watch at the angry flying sharks. All while Rorschach weeps moronically while reciting Nietzsche to lolcats.

Turns out it’s not like that. Instead, Azzarello has made the connection that the Keene Act that stopped costumed adventuring in the Watchmen universe was passed in 1977, and New York City, where Rorschach was operating as a street-level crimefighter, was a terrible, terrible place in 1977. It was the New York of Taxi Driver and Son of Sam and a Times Square where a tourist could get fistfucked by a transvestite hooker instead of the retail markup at the Disney Store. It was a New York of grindhouse theaters, and Azzarello has given Rorschach a grindhouse story in which he can star. And God help me, it’s really pretty damn good.

There is no mention of any part of the greater Watchmen universe in Rorschach #1. It is simply the character, living and working alone in New York City circa 1977. There’s a serial killer on the loose, as there was in our New York, but Rorschach doesn’t know that. Instead, he’s on the trail of one of the sources of heroin in Times Square, hunting down and working over street-level dealers to work his way up the chain. Things don’t go as well as Rorschach would like, with a comic book appropriate nemesis making himself known to Rorschach via a savage beating, setting Rorschach up for at least a couple of issues of 70s-style grindhouse revenge story, missing only Uma Thurman in a yellow jumpsuit (that said, give it time. It’s only the first issue).

Where the rubber hits the road, Azzarello has made the choice to pretty much ignore the greater Watchmen universe – again – in favor of giving us what amounts to Death Wish with Charles Bronson in a weird mask. This book gets the grimy feel one associates with late 70s New York, from a Times Square with grindhouse (again) and porno theaters, to peep booths, to grimy alleys. This book plays to Azzarello’s strengths, which are crime stories loaded with a bunch of criminal jargon. This story really doesn’t need Rorschach; it could be any vigilante in an environment that really could use someone to clean up the streets. The only difference between this and Taxi Driver is a taxi, Robert DeNiro, and Jodie Foster in skank makeup.

With that said, Azzarello does one thing in the book that, to me at least, nodded at Watchmen continuity, and in a positive: he gave captions of Rorschach’s journal, similarly to the original book. However, unlike in that book, Rorschach’s journal is shown as typed instead of handwritten. It’s a small thing, but it allowed me to infer that Rorschach in 1977 was in a slightly better life position than when we first met him in Watchmen‘s 1985: he could afford a typewriter rather than a notebook. Again, it’s a small thing, but it made a lot of sense, and had a subtlety that has been missing from Azzarello’s work on Comedian.

Artist Lee Bermejo’s work is generally pretty solid in this book, with one or two pretty serious storytelling mistakes. He draws very realistic figures, with a fine, detailed line with no busy crosshatching to turn a 70s book into a 90s-looking book. The realism, in his figures and in his backgrounds, helps ground the book in a realistic-feeling 1970s New York, and his panel placement and pacing are pretty solid, with the standard panel layout shifting only slightly during one of the fight sequences, giving the action an off-kilter feel without becoming confusing to new readers. With that said, he makes two mistakes that should have been caught by any editor with any street smarts: he has one of the scumbag drug dealers tying off around his wrist to shoot heroin, which makes a lot of sense provided you like to drive a hypodermic needle into your knuckles.

But even worse, Bermejo gives us a sequence where Rorschach is trying to break into a drug store. We see a panel where Rorschach shakes the door from the outside and can’t open it because it is chained and padlocked from the inside. In the next panel, we see Rorschach picking that padlock… apparently for the challenge since he somehow miracled himself inside the pharmacy to even be able to touch the lock. It’s a shame, because these are simple storytelling mistakes that could have been caught and fixed, leaving a damn good-looking book just that, and not a good-looking book one with moments that drag you out of the story by dint of making no fucking sense at all.

Rorschach #1 is not a book that I was in any way expecting. Unlike Azzarello’s Comedian, it chooses not to play around with given continuity, and instead embraces the nature of the character and the era in which he would be living given the original Watchmen, turning it into a story that is era-appropriate and which plays to Azzarello’s strengths as a crime story writer. Again, it is early yet, and we could still wind up seeing Rorschach working as the chief surgeon at a Korean M.A.S.H. unit with his buddy, Trapper Nite-Owl, but as a first shot across the bow? Azzarello has given us a damn good filthy pulp crime story. Check it out.