Opinion

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, Polygon as an organization. Last week, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz caught some heat for saying that Captain Kirk would have been a Republican, and that Star Trek: The Next Generation's Captain Picard was an incomplete captain, lacking the passion and heart of his predecessor. Source: @AndreuAitch I disagree with that, but it's not what I'm here to talk about. Because what the righteous Trekkie response missed was an addendum to the body text of the article that appeared only in the print version of the New York Times Magazine. It was a list of Ted Cruz's top five superheroes, and nestled at the bottom of it, after the likes of Spider-Man and Batman, is Rorschach. I consider myself enough of a Star Trek fan to have an opinion on how our modern ideas of partisan politics would map onto the utopian, post-scarcity society of the Federation. But by laying out his opinions on superheroes, Mr. Cruz has come into my house. And I do not tolerate people who think Rorschach belongs on a list of great superheroes in my house.

DC Comics

Rorschach, as you may remember, is one of the main characters of Alan Moore's Watchmen. Originally intended as a way to make use of the company's recently acquired stable of intellectual properties from the defunct Charlton Comics, many of Watchmen's characters wound up being amalgams of homage to classic Golden Age characters from Charlton, DC and Marvel. But where Silk Spectre shared some characteristics with Nightshade (Charlton) and Black Canary (DC), where the Comedian owes inspiration to The Peacemaker (Charlton) and Nick Fury (Marvel), Moore himself has established that Rorschach is based very deliberately on the Question and Mr. A (pictured left), two heroes created by legendary Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko. If there's something else Ditko is famous for, it's for embracing Objectivism, and designing the Question and Mr. A explicitly as Objectivist superheroes. Moore intended Rorschach to reflect Ditko's leanings. On those grounds, I can understand why a Republican candidate might become attached to Rorschach. Except that both Moore — and, most people would argue, Watchmen itself — has established that Rorschach is a man who gives plenty of lip service to living by a morally unassailable, black and white code, but who nevertheless picks and chooses much of what he considers to be right and wrong entirely according to his own personal prejudices. Possibly, Rorschach does this to a delusional extent. People like Rorschach because he's the Batman of Watchmen Which wouldn't bear laying out in such explicit terms, except that "liking Rorschach" is, in my experience, the biggest warning sign that a person has completely missed the point of Watchmen. Let's pull back and set a scene here. What follows is a real conversation I had with a young dude I was playing D&D with at my local comic shop around the time the Watchmen film hit theaters. It's not the only interaction I've had like this, but it is the purest distillation of it. "Oh man," he crowed at me, "I’m so excited for the Watchmen movie. My favorite one is Rorschach! Susana, who’s your favorite Watchman?" "Oh, uh." I stammered, rolodexing through all the responses I wanted to give but that were clearly not wanted by this guy — like that I was skeptical of the idea that the helpless fear of mutually assured nuclear destruction at the heart of Watchmen could be made relevant in the late 2000s, or that I was pretty sure from marketing that Zack Snyder was treating it like the superhero story it really wasn't — and chose the one admission, albeit truthful, that would lead to the least further conversation. "...the Comedian, I guess." "The Comedian!" He gasped, scandalized. "But the Comedian’s a murderer!" I was younger then. I hadn't gotten a job that let me express myself on the internet yet. So, if I remember correctly, my brain-to-mouth filter didn't come up in time and I practically bellowed "THEY'RE ALL MURDERERS!"

Look. I get it. I'm a Batman fan. People like Rorschach because he's the Batman of Watchmen. 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. He hasn't sold out to work for "the man," like the Comedian. He's the guy who's still doing classic "hero work" in the streets. He hasn't "lost touch" with the principles that the Minutemen and the Watchmen teams were formed under. It's exactly the role that Batman is placed in in Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns and ever after in stories about the dystopian future of the DC Universe.