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.
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