Was the ink still liquid? I vaguely recall that it was so… Or rather does it have to be? I remember when I went to university, there were “mood shirts” introduced into the marker that never quite took off. The t-shirts changed colour depending on body heat. They sort of looked like tie-dye shirts which is one reason they never really became popular (and the other big reason is when you were wearing them in the club and got really hot, they changed color mostly around your arm pits and where you were sweating most to make the average “sweaty pits” look like Technicolour horrors.)
I remember Rorschach stealing a chunk of fabric from the dress and explaining how it worked. I thought he could see through the membrane where there was no ink. You could also argue that as his brow and cheekbone kept the fabric from ever touching his eye directly, the ink never actually covered the area of his eye socket.
With the exception of Dr. Manhattan, they’re supposed to be normal people with exceptional skills, with Ozymandias a little beyond the edge of that. (Of course, ‘normal’ in a comic book is sort of a dicey proposition.) Rorschach’s a great detective, Nite Owl II has a lot of money and engineering skills, etc. Nothing superhuman, which is much clearer in the comic. It was sort of an important point.
For example, When Rorschach jumps out the window, for example, he doesn’t successfully fight off a group of cops with karate-type moves - he sprains his ankle upon landing, falls to the ground, immediately gets kicked and slammed with nightstickets and is captured and hauled off to jail. And while Nite Owl II and Silk Spectre II do fight off a small gang in the movie, the violence isn’t so over-the-top.
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[li] Why doesn’t everyone recognize Silk Spectre? She doesn’t wear a mask, and she’s famous as Sally Jupiter - famous enough to be painted on the Enola Gay. Shouldn’t she have been wearing a mask?[/li][/quote]
Nobody cares about her. By the time the movie takes place, the fad for ‘costumed adventurers’ (they’re always called this in the book) has been over for about 40 years. So people might recognize her, but nobody gives a damn. She was pretty much only in it for the publicity, retired before she had her daughter, and public sentiment is strongly against them, so she wouldn’t be fending off admirers or anything.
There were a lot of problems with the movie but here’s one trivial issue. There was a scene in the book where Laurie was inside Dan’s Owl Ship and wanted to have a cigarette. She was looking for the cigarette lighter and saw a button with a flame icon on it. But when she pushed it she discovered it was actually a flamethrower and she set the hangar on fire.
They tried to use it in the movie but modern standards forbid any protagonist from being a smoker. So the movie scene just had Laurie hit the flamethrower button by accident. Which totally ruined the point of the joke. They’d have been better off just skipping the scene entirely but I guess everybody was too excited about having a flamethrower set a building on fire to consider cutting it just because the context was gone.
Those were “hypercolor” shirts. I had a couple of them.
As to Rorschach’s mask, it seems to me that if it’s sheer enough for him to see through it well enough to fight even in low light, then it’s sheer enough for his enemies to see his face. And the book does show the ink spots often over his eyes. I think we’ll have to write this off to comic book magical realism.
Another question: How did Rorschach make a living, at the time of the book? He had no job, right? He spent his days picketing. And he doesn’t seem like a guy who would accept public assistance.
In the book, Dr. Manhattan has changed the world very significantly from the one we knew. The political dimension of this is covered in the movie, but the sceintific progress was largely dropped. For instance, citiscapes in the book are illustrated with blimps all over, because new technology Dr. M worked on has made them efficient enough to work as commuter vehicles. The internal combustion engine is a relic, almost completely replaced with Manhattan-derived clean electric cars. Genetic engineering is greatly accelerated, Bubastis being the most obivous example, but when Dan and Laurie go out to dinner, they eat a chicken with four drumsticks.
Rorschach’s mask is yet another Manhattan-derived innovation. As sketched out upthread, Kovacs was working in a dressmaker’s shop when a woman (who Kovacs later determined was Kitty Genovese) custom ordered a dress made with the new fabric, made of blobs of some heat-sensitive ink in between two sheets of sheer material. The super-science part is that the ink moved around symmetrically, instead of just pooling at the hem of the dress like it would in the real world. The woman didn’t like the dress when it was completed and refused to buy it, but Kovacs found it beautiful and took the dress. (I don’t think it was a theft – the dress didn’t sell, and so the tailor had no use for it anymore.) After Genovese’s murder, Rorschach used it to make a mask and began his career as a costumed vigilante. However, in the book, it’s made clear that Rorschach was still mostly sane at that point; it wasn’t until a later brutal case (the one with the dogs which I think is depicted in the movie as Rorschach’s first case) that he became the loveable sociopath we’re so familiar with.
The book shows him committing petty theft against everyone he meets. He helped himself to food and a few other items from Dan’s house, and likewise from Moloch. I expect he also picks up a few dollars here and there from the suspects he questions. Note that he lives in a single room in a dive, and he’s behind on the rent.
As for seeing through his mask, think of it like a stocking mask, which robbers supposedly wear. It allows them to see, while obscuring their features enough to make recognition hard.
On reflection, it doesn’t really matter if the characters (aside from Manhattan) pull off superhuman stunts, because the real point of the movie isn’t that these people are superheroes, it’s how the world reacts to superheroes. If such characters existed for real, do they intervene in America’s wars and win them, practically single-handed? Does law-enforcement resent their presence? Do they get along with each other or are there violent rivalries? These are elements that had been missing from DC comics for decades - that while Superman had the power to move planets in 1968, he never intervened in Vietnam. Batman could foil criminals left and right, yet the Gotham Police were (mostly) okay with his activities. And Superman and Batman, despite their differing personalities and styles, were uniformly portrayed as best of friends through decades of stories.
The significance of Watchmen is that some attempt to portray the real-world impact such characters would have. Whether or not Rorschach can casually jump 15 feet doesn’t really matter.
That was a bit clumsy – if they didn’t want to have her smoke, it would have made more sense for her to notice the “lighter” button and ask why Dan installed a lighter (since he doesn’t smoke) while triggering it.
Yes, Kovacs was mostly sane when he was working with Nite Owl (I think the “dog case” occurred after the anti-vigilantee laws had passed). There’s a nice followup to that in the novel - “Big Figure” wasn’t as afraid of Rorschach as he should have been in prison: the mob boss had been put away by the relatively sane Kovacs, not the completely loony Rorshach who was created by the “dog case”.
The dog case was before the Keene Act. He tells the prison psychiatrist (paraphrasing from memory) “Was still Kovacs back then. Soft on criminals. Let them live.” Implying that the guy in the dog case was the first one he killed. His response to the Keene Act was leaving the corpse of a multiple rapist on the steps of the police station with a not that said “Never!” - so it must have been after the dog case, otherwise he wouldn’t have mentioned being “soft”.
One change they made – at Veidt’s Watchmen meeting, Rorschach talks the same as he does in the rest of the movie. While at the Crimebusters meeting in the book, he’s like a completely different guy. Normal word balloons, full sentences. Gibbons even draws him gesturing like any business professional discussing a proposed course of action. I missed it the first time around because I believe that scene appears well before we learn Rorschach’s history. But in review, it’s plain as day.
You must be using a special meaning of the word loveable. None of the major characters are even likable, except for Dan & Laurie. Admittedly, Manhattan’s unlikeability is not entirely his fault.
