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 The source text also contains outdated, racist, and misogynistic language, which is reproduced in this guide only through quotations.

“Why are so few of us left active, healthy, and without personality disorders?”

As Rorschach visits Dr. Manhattan, he goes through a list of costumed adventurers who died young or experienced debilitating mental health conditions. Among those that remain, they are either ego-driven and self-important like Veidt, or mild-mannered and impotent, like Dan Dreiberg. Rorschach has a point—the text will elaborate on the psychological costs of their chosen pursuits—but Rorschach is at this point unable to see his own profound problems, which his mask prevents him from seeing clearly.

“The atmosphere of the horrific and faintly sinister that hung around the Shadow was nowhere to be seen in the bright primary colors of Superman’s world, and there was no hint of the repressed sex-urge which had sometimes been apparent in the pulps, to my discomfort and embarrassment […] it set off a lot of things I’d forgotten about, deep inside me, and kicked all those fantasies that I’d had when I was thirteen or fourteen back into gear: the prettiest girl in the class would be attacked by bullies, and I’d be there to beat them off, but when she offered to kiss me as a reward, I’d refuse.”

The moment Hollis Mason is describing is where the real world splits from the alternate world of the comic. Superman was such an extraordinary cultural phenomenon in 1938 that Moore and Gibbons imagining it inspiring “real-life” imitators in their fictitious world. Hollis admits frankly that it was not only the moral absolutism of Superman that he found appealing, but its childlike innocence. Superman had all the powers of an adult, without all the murky complexities of the adult world.

“There is no shelter, and the future is bearing down on us like an express train. Blake understood. Treated it like a joke. But he understood. He saw the cracks in society, saw the little men in masks trying to hold it together. He saw the true face of the twentieth century and chose to become a parody of it. No one else saw the joke. That’s why he was lonely.”

Rorschach’s eulogy for The Comedian is not only a definitive statement on that character, but on the overall message of Watchmen. Superheroes are themselves a parody of the 20th century, a way to channel its violence into something digestible and ultimately, marketable.