Comic Book Character of the Week: Rorschach

This week's Comic Book Character of the Week is no other than Rorschach. Choosing just one of the Minutemen – the stars of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ classic comic, Watchmen – was tough. But from a purely iconic point of view, it had to be Rorschach. Who was in the first picture released from Zack Snyder’s Watchmen movie? Rorschach. Who dominated online casting debates? Rorschach.

Like The Punisher, Rorscach can be easily dismissed as a fascist whose belief in moral absolutes – there are no shades of grey; only black, white, good and evil – drives him to take the law into his own hands.

But in the hands of Moore, the freckled, ginger Walter Kovacs is a taut, tortured, complex creation who, as well as being at the centre of some of Watchmen’s most memorable sequences (the prison riot, for one), ends up being perhaps the most pure out of the graphic novel’s characters, the only one who – SPOILER WARNING – isn’t interested in compromising himself for the greater good. Props to Empire Online.