Poll a group of Watchmen fans on who their favorite character is, and chances are the majority will answer "Rorschach." There's something endlessly appealing about the dark, twisted vigilante who sets out to solve the world's ills with his fists. No doubt many writers would have jumped at the chance to pen the further adventures of Rorschach, but DC opted for the writer perhaps best suited for his bloody, grimy, nihilistic world -- Brian Azzarello. Unsurprisingly, Azzarello quickly and comfortably settles in with the character in Before Watchmen: Rorschach #1.

Too many of the Before Watchmen books are guilty of retreading material we've already seen in the original series. But not unlike his Comedian series, Azzarello instead opts to explore an unknown period in Rorschach's career. Issue #1 picks up in 1977 and introduces a serial killer known as The Bard with a penchant for carving messages into the corpses of his victims. A perfect candidate for Rorschach's brand of justice, in other words.If you're hoping for Azzarello to provide a radically new take on the lead character or further mine his psychological depths, you may be a little disappointed in this issue. It isn't overly creative or ambitious. That said, it is well executed and very faithful to the tone of Rorschach's scenes in the original series. Azzarello captures Kovacs' harsh, disjointed voice well in both his dialogue and the obligatory "Rorschach's Journal" narration. The narration is slightly more verbose than what we saw in the original series, but perhaps that's for the best. 20 pages of sentence fragments could easily grow tiresome.And again, while Azzarello doesn't reinvent the wheel, his script does show some thematic ambition as it explores Rorschach's troubled past, his relationship with his mother, and his insistence on living among the scum and filth of a city he professes to hate so much. We know by now why Rorschach does what he does, but that doesn't mean there isn't compelling material to be had in attacking the character from a slightly new angle and in a new time period. My only real complaint about the first issue's script is that it feels a little brief. Rorschach barely embarks on his manhunt before running into a wall and regrouping for issue #2. With the series being only four issues long, I was hoping for a slightly meatier debut.The series also has the distinction of reuniting Azzarello with artist Lee Bermejo. Unlike books like Luthor and Joker, Bermejo sticks entirely to his more cinematic, textured style rather than switching between styles. The downside to the hyper-realistic approach is that the storytelling flow isn't as strong as in some of the other Before Watchmen books. While Bermejo seems to make some adjustments to his style in terms of page layouts, in general the book is more about big, static images. On the plus side, Bermejo expertly captures the grit and general sense of hopelessness in this world. The book is almost pretty in its ugliness. In particular, Bermejo's depiction of the shadowy Bard and his victims really helps sell the danger of the villain in a way the sparse writing alone wouldn't have.The lettering deserves special mention as well. Rob Leigh resurrects the old-school typewriter approach for Rorschach's captions. The intentional spelling errors and other mistakes go that extra little bit towards convincing the reader they're peering into an undiscovered portion of Rorschach's personal history. It's a shame the same effect couldn't be achieved with the lettering in the Crimson Corsair backup feature (which is as unremarkable this month as it's been since the beginning).Before Watchmen: Rorschach delivers exactly what you'd expect when this creative team pairs up for this particular character. It doesn't break new storytelling ground, but it offers an enjoyable read that doesn't rely overly much on material we've read before. If any Before Watchmen book could be read and enjoyed with no knowledge of the original Watchmen, it's probably this one.

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