How did Walter Kovacs tolerate Eddie Blake?
Walter Kovacs…Rorschach…slew a murdering pedophile with a meat cleaver when he found out what he had done.
Is Walter unaware that Eddie…The Comedian…is a rapist, let alone a killer of women and children?
It’s a binary worldview: Everything is either black or white, evil or good. Therefore everything that opposes good must be evil, and everything that opposes evil must be good. The Comedian kills evil people, therefore he must be good, just like Rorschach himself. To admit that he’s evil would mean admitting that someone can be a mixture of evil and good, which is inconceivable.
The world may be black and white, but the whole point of the Rorschach metaphor is that the boundary between the two is constantly shifting.
Moreover, Rorschach and the Comedian barely worked together, as I recall, particularly after Kovacs went off the deep end. I don’t think he had any reason to know what happened between the Comedian and the first Silk Spectre, or to see Blake as anything other than a soldier.
Rorschach’s reply – when the second Silk Spectre mentions what Mason relayed in his book about the Comedian and the first Silk Spectre – is that he’s “not here to speculate on the moral lapses of men who died in their country’s service.”
Rorschach appears to have an “uneven” approach to sexual behavior thanks to his upbringing. Child abuse is a very personal issue, but rough or violent sex between adults is an area harder to parse for him (consider the incident where he interrupts his mother with a client). And as noted, it does appear that the Comedian gets a pass for “serving his country” - Rorschach is after all a staunch patriot.
That said, at one point in the book he leaves a dead serial rapist outside a police station so he clearly had a line somewhere that shouldn’t be crossed.
He didn’t just tolerate Blake. He admired him, and praised him for being uncompromising and clear-sighted. In the psychiatric sessions he narrates how Blake broke up Captain Metropolis meeting, with the burning of all the diagrams and bulletpointed lists, and finally marching off. Immediately after he tells of the meat cleaver incident, the true birth of Rorschach. Blake was Kovacs sensei.
Was he aware of the raping and killing of innocents? Well, he was probably aware of the accusations thereof, and was careful not to look too closely for proof.
That was to me one of the most interesting points in Watchmen, how extreme morality, personified in Rorschach, wraps around and meets amorality, personified in the Comedian.
At that: how did he, as it were, fight crime when he was in costume?
Well, he did something that resulted in Big Figure getting locked up – you know, by the authorities – for maybe twenty years. And, like you said, he found a rapist who I’d guess was already wanted by the authorities; and he killed that guy. And, to bring this back around to the OP: he tracked down a kidnapper before the authorities did, and then he killed that guy before the authorities got there.
For all I know, his view is “if the authorities would punish a guy for his crimes, I’ll gladly handle things if I’m on the spot and they’re not; but if they know what I do about him, and they already know where he is – because a medic is treating him at an Army base, or because the VP is at that banquet in his honor – well, then, they can already handle the guy as they see fit, right? I hunt down criminals they don’t already have in their sights, because there’s no shortage of those.”
There’s also the difference in approach between Kovacs and Rorschach. If I recall the timeline correctly, before the kidnapping case Kovacs was a person wearing the Rorschach costume, who actually delivered bad guys alive to the police (including Big Figure) with the help of Nite Owl. After the kidnapping it was all Rorschach and uncompromising violence.