Rorschach #2 Review

Follow The Blot

Writer: Tom King
Artist: Jorge Fornes
Cover Price: $4.99
Release Date: November 16th, 2020

The year is 2020. Walter Kovacs (AKA Rorschach) has been dead since November of 1985. Yet William Myerson, an artist who lived in isolation since 1973, was just killed attempting to assassinate President Redford's political opponent, dressed up as Rorschach. Myerson was accompanied by a young woman named Laura Cummings. During the autopsy it was found that his fingerprints and Kovaks' match.

I still don't believe the name of our main character, a detective has been given. I've read both issues several times but maybe I still just missed it? Anyways, even though it's 2020, most everything looks like we're still in the mid-1980s. Even when he's trying to piece together how Myerson and Cummings met, there's no mention of texts or emails. It was about the fact that no letters were found where they wrote to one another. How an old man who rarely left his apartment and a 19-year-old woman like Cummings met is a complete mystery.

While the detective goes through Myerson's apartment, we look into the past of Myerson's life. When he starts going through Myerson's art supplies and empties a drawer of pens and pencils right out, a name tag from an apartment mailbox falls out. It says "Alma Adler". With Alma Thompson in the very same apartment building, he pays her a visit. We find out that it is the same Alma and Adler was her maiden name. Her husband Carl had just passed away. When she was single she had gone on a date with Myerson, and we get to see how that went... not very well. Even with Alma clearly not interested, he still asked to kiss her. Awkward! She said no, of course, and soon after she was married to Carl Thomspon. Carl poked fun at Myerson often in the hallways.

The detective talks to the security guard, who was in Myerson's apartment once after he walked by recently, the door was open, and he saw Myerson bleeding on the floor. It looked like he had been beaten up, but he said he was okay, so the guard helped him get up into his chair. Then Myerson just started drawing like nothing happened. So the detective goes back to the apartment and found papers with the same blood splatter that we saw in the flashback. Myerson had drawn a comic on it about a hero called the Citizen, who looked very much like Rorschach without the ink on the mask. Here he's fighting what looks like a Nazi baboon, and as they fight the baboon does the whole "you and me are alike" thing and the Citizen kicks his ass while explaining how they're not. The baboon has "14B" on his helmet, so the detective goes to apartment 14B.

The resident there talks about the only experience he had with Myerson, where he acted strangely trying to get on an elevator. It turns out that this man had lived in the apartment building for quite some time but had just switched apartments with an older lady. He needed more room, and she needed less room after recently losing her husband. So guess who lived in 14B when Myerson made that comic? Carl and Alma Thompson.

The detective goes back to Alma, and he tells her that he thinks Carl beat up Myerson the night the security guard found him on the floor. So what really happened when Carl died, Alma? She lights up a cigarette... and through a flashback Rorschach returns.

Bits and Pieces

With only two episodes in, the connection between Kovacs and Myerson is still a mystery as it should be, but should our detective's name still be a mystery? What's going on there? That can't be an accident. Even though I still have a feeling this tale might not land in the end, I really enjoyed this issue. The way it connected you to Myerson as a person was very well done, the way the panels flipped between the past and the present was well executed, and the art is great and fits the story perfectly. It's a good read and I hope King keeps that up!

8.5/10