A Late Night Third Installment of Thoughts About Watchmen

Final thing I want to say about the drawings/art in general before we move on to the panels and the text/image interactions--here we go.

What color is Walter Kovacs hair? WHAT COLOR IS IT?

It's red. He has red hair.

That will be important later. Hold on to it.

So, when Walter Kovacs is talking to the psychiatrist/psychologist man he finally decides that he will tell him about Rorshach and how he came to assume that identity. The first thing he explains is how he (Rorshach) came to split the dog's head open. We go into a flashback that is told completely through images of Rorshach breaking in to a house where he suspects a kidnapper has taken a little girl. As Rorshach is walking around the house, finding things, looking at stuff, everything is MAJORLY BROWN. The wood, the house, Rorshach's coat. Everything is brown. Then we turn the page as Rorshach discovers a knife in a cupboard filled with knives. And Rorshach notices a cutting board with deep meat cleaver cuts in it.

As you read the panels on the page the colors get continually more red until Rorshach notices dog's outside in the yard fighting over and gnawing on large bones. The last panel is an extreme close up of Rorshach's mask colored only in shades of blood red. In the next page the panels return to brown as Rorshach steps outside with the knife. The middle panel of the page is a close up of a hand with a raised knife colored with dark shadows and deep reds. Cut back to Walter Kovacs who says that at this moment he closed his eyes and felt a jet of hot blood on his chest and it was Rorshach who opened his eyes again. The final panel is another close up of the Rorshach inkblot colored in the same deep red as the final panel on the previous page.

What does this color tell us about Rorschach/Walter Kovacs? To me, its representing his transformation into Rorshach. We know what he stands for, we know what he projects on to the world, and then we finally get this tinting of the images. Red can represent blood, anger ,madness, rage, passion, everything that motivates Rorshach's actions. What I really like though is the progression of color. That growing dominance really shows the transformation that takes place when Rorshach discovers what has happened to the girl. And on the following page we see another progression of red as Rorshach attacks the dogs and re-inflicts that pain. Again there is that symmetry in the color and Rorshach's response to evil. Or what he sees as evil anyway.

The color shows Rorshach's mental state and even provides a commentary on the scene that words and images could not convey as well. We know Rorshach discovers that the bones are the girl's bones because of that bright red that has been building in the previous panels. And then it comes back again later in the story as a way of symbolizing both the world Rorshach inhabits and his reaction to it.

Playing with your brain to create meaning. It's pretty cool.