Rorschach

This is set well after the main Watchmen. Nice curious story that pulled me in. I'd say it's a good stand alone even if you don't really know the Watchmen and/or Rorschach. But elaborating on the story would be massive spoilers. The actual book is well made and feels good in the hands as you read it.

I liked bits of it. I wonder what Alan Moore thinks. But hey, it's post Watchmen and no one forced me to buy it. Had it for Christmas actually. It didn't snow.

Fooled again. Always the same with Tom King stories. Starts off great then about a third in it feels like King forgets what story he is telling and starts to weave in a storyline that that feels like it was meant for a different book. What this has to do with the Rorschach character from Watchmen I don't know. (Read Geoff Johns' "Doomsday Clock" if you want an amazing story on how to do that properly). King had obviously been watching 'Three Days of the Condor" and "The Parallax View" before writing this when he should have been re-reading Watchmen. Bought this with Kings' "Strange Tales". Hope that book is better.Art work and design was brilliant though.

We know, because we saw the movie, what sort of character and person Rorschach was (brutal, but honest), but King, for reasons I will not elaborate upon because they are self-evident, decided to tarnish Rorschach by telling us he was nothing but the personification of King's political animosities. Contrary to most, I expected King to disappoint me (but bought it because I am a completionist). The art is good. If not for it I would have awarded this book one star.

“Rorschach” collects the 12-issue series by Tom King, Jorge Fornes and Dave Stewart (the colourist really needs to be credited on the top line nowadays as the modern-day paper-stock really adds another dimension to the colour artwork and the story-telling).So, here we are again, 35 years or more after the New York ‘incident’, and post-Oklahoma too (the TV series, in case you missed it), though no mention of the Doomsday Clock (unless I missed something, which I could easily have done).We open at a presidential rally for the chap hoping to unseat President Redford (currently closing his fourth term in office), as two costumed characters are up to something involving a sniper-rifle up in the rafters. One of them is wearing a Rorschach mask, but don’t ask me what his connection to the ‘original’ Rorschach is, because you just wouldn’t believe me; honestly, you wouldn’t.The campaign manager calls in a private investigator, to privately investigate the private lives of the two costumed characters; an investigator who must walk down some mean streets, but who is, himself, willing to beat the truth out of anyone who gets in his way. You’ll notice that his jacket is the same colour as Rorschach’s coat, just to drop a hint at where he’s going and how he’s going to get there. “The facts, ma’am; just the facts”.As he works his way back through the story, we get flashbacks telling that story of the two characters we saw at the beginning, along with some violence, much philosophising, and some pirate comics, until we finally confront the mastermind of the long plot in his lair; "Never compromise. Not even in the face of Armageddon."The artwork is excellent. It doesn’t use the nine-panel grid from the original, as the Doomsday Clock did (if I remember correctly), though it is used in some of the flashbacks, and a regular grid is used in most of the extended scenes, even if not always the same one, but the story is well-designed from that aspect, so there is a visual structure here.This is not a ‘sequel’ to the Watchmen, but, like the TV series, it is a story in its own right that takes place in the same universe and is connected to that universe (and to modern-day America, uncannily so in fact).It is heavy going though, but then, I thought that the original Watchmen was heavy going too. This is written by an American , and therefore, like so much “American Vertigo”, goes down a different path to most cynical and embittered British writers working out on the edge of the mainstream.THE SPOILER ZONETHE SPOILER ZONETHE SPOILER ZONESeriously, you wouldn’t believe me.I read Howard Chaykin’s “Hey Kids! Comics!” just before this book, which features, exclusively, the people who created comic books, but, apart from one or two (or five or six if you read up on this stuff), they are ‘amalgams’ of several people and not exact individuals. Here, not so much, though I’m still not saying who is under the mask, but I will say that one of the main conspirators here is actually named Frank Miller, creator of the famous pirate character “The Dark Pipe”. Go figure. Though I didn’t like Dark Knight, either.Coming back to the colour of the jacket referred to above, in the final scene, our anti-hero is wearing a coat. I just went back to check, but no belt.

I approached this read with eager anticipation but could not have been more disappointed. Slow-paced to the point of sending the reader to sleep - with over-convoluted dialogue and relentless flashback scene-swapping (a lot of which made NO sense). Ultimately a million miles away from the genius of Alan Moore. Recommendation: avoid.