Polygon Sez:
DEAR TED CRUZ: RORSCHACH IS NOT A HERO By E.C. McMullen Jr.
CAVEAT - This is a rebuttle to a Comic's fan and her opinion. Genre fans of Horror through Science Fiction, Comics through Movies, do this all the time. At its worst, its still a lot spiritually cleaner than politics.
On the other hand, if you are going to use Comics to argue politics, you probably couldn't do better for a baseline than WATCHMEN.
Here is the article I'll be speaking about, POLYGON.
So to the entertainment editor, Susana Polo: (ahem!) Within Alan Moore's dirty universe of the Watchmen, Walter Kovacs aka Rorschach is the tragic hero.
So there!
The Devil In The Details -
In fact, as flawed, damaged, and psychotic as Walter is (and knows he is), he is the only pure soul and moral conscience of the Watchmen: as everything he does is for the greater good of humanity and he expects nothing for himself.
Without exception, all of the rest of the Watchmen are entirely committed to their own vainglorious navel-gazing. Their collectivist moral code of right and wrong drunkenly careens all over the place.
Except for Rorschach, all of them murder innocent people or [SPOILER] innocent people. Some, like The Comedian, murder innocent people for sport (because he "gets" the joke that is life). Others, like Dr. Manhattan, murder innocent people whenever they are inconvenient (granted both later feel guilt - or in Manhattan's case, a kinda type of guilt - and handle it in their own way).
Rorschach's arc takes him into the worst of humanity in his best attempts to rid his world of evil (he's not the only one without super powers or Nite Owl II's super toys to protect himself) . Unlike the rest of the Watchmen (some are paid agents of the government), Rorschach does all of this without expectation of reward in any form. He is the only one willing to sacrifice himself for a better future he knows he can never share.
Rorschach is the only one of the Watchmen who is not seduced by Ozymandias* and Dr. Manhattan's cold-blooded and fascist final solution to the "humanitarian crises" that the rest are ready to embrace.
TANGENT:Here, let me tell you about the game, Poker.
Poker players have an argot of their own and one of those is "The Tell". That is when a person is trying to bluff - trying to pretend to have something or be someone they are not.
END TANGENT
Keep in mind, while you are reading Susana's quote, that WATCHMEN by writer Alan Moore, artist Dave Gibbons, and colorist John Higgins ran from 1986 to 1987. The acronym, LGBT, did not exist until well into the 1990s. The latest acronym, LGBTQ, that Susana uses here, did not exist until the summer of 2015 - This Year. In fact, at the moment "Q" doesn't have a clear definition yet. It's that new!
Here are Susana's "tells" (my comments in parenthesis).
"This early alliance with Rorschach's point of view made later parts of the comic pretty disturbing for me, as Rorschach's extraordinarily negative opinion of women
(First, this is a critique often leveled at Alan Moore as a writer. In Watchmen, the guys drive all the action and the gals are damaged by it or watch helplessly. They have little to no influence over the story except how the other guys think about them.
Second,
Walter Kovac's extraordinarily negative opinion is from his years of mental and physical abuse from his Mother, who despised him. His opinion of other women is more benign than say, Eddie Blake aka The Comedian)
and the poor
(Rorschach is poor - he's homeless and eats out of garbage cans! He also sacrifices himself to defend poor people)
and the LGBTQ community is made known
(which was unheard of in the 1980s. Rorschach has a suspicion about a specific person who could one day be a member of that future community. It's immaterial since Rorschach's issue has nothing to do with that person's sexuality. Also, everyone else Rorschach goes after is ostensibly hetero),
as his intrusive behavior towards his friends arises
(no different from the comings and goings of Batman, Spider-man, etc.),
as he terrorizes a reformed and terminally ill supervillain
(Mass murdering supervillain, Moloch, is not reformed. He pretended to be reformed after prison while continuing his crimes in secret.
Not A Spoiler!
It's an early plot point, gang! In the first issue! The only reason Moloch isn't still hurting people is because he's too weak from disease.)
for taking unprescribed painkillers
(Outright B.S. That's Not why Rorschach went after him, as anyone who read the comic would know),
and as he brutally kills animals for their owner's crimes (the two animals - dogs - were eating a human child. This psychologically harrowing moment was the turning point for Walter when he went from having an alter identity to being that alter identity.)"
What's going on here, is Susana intentionally misrepresenting or fabricating Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's work to fit her phony narrative. Her entire article from beginning to end is one long Strawman. Either that or she has never bothered to read WATCHMEN all the way through (or she filters what she reads through a mental sweatshirt?).
For everyone else, I'm not defending Ted Cruz, I'm defending a concept: a person who risks their life like Mohandas K. Gandhi, Oskar Schindler, Malcolm X, or Benazir Bhutto, to genuinely (not mere lip-service) defend the oppressed is worthy of respect and admiration, in spite of their Politically Incorrect flaws of the hipster trendy pop-culture moment or distant future.
*Susana not only gives an outright, genocidal fascist like Ozymandias a benign pass, she speaks of him in glowing terms! "At the start of Watchmen, Rorschach is the only member of the defunct team who is still fighting crime in the superheroic sense, rather than, say, solving broad humanitarian crises and making scientific discoveries as Ozymandias and Dr. Manhattan have moved on to do."
Holy crap! Anyone who has read Watchmen knows how jaw-dropping ridiculous this is on the face of it. So, to paraphrase Susana, "Well, let's just say it calls her reading comprehension skills into serious question."
E.C. McMullen Jr. is the creator of Feo Amante's Horror Thriller, with work published by Easy Rider Magazine, Charles Scribner's Sons, Harker Press, Crystal Lake Publishing, and Feo Studios.
FEO'S BRAGGADOCIO
Some people think I'm more important than you (I don't, but they do. You know how they are) and this is their (HA!) evidence.
E.C. McMullen Jr.
Author page at Amazon
(Amazon.com)
Listed at GoodReads
Internet Movie Database resume (IMDb.com),
Stage 32 listing (stage32.com),
Listed at Academia.edu and is a
19 year member of the San Diego Comic Convention (SDCC).
Wikipedia 1, 2, 3, 4 Starbucks Cup #118
E.C. McMullen Jr. / Feo Amante is quoted throughout the Internet and print as a resource on,
