Rorschach #1 script: Trying to be different and also the same

Tom here!

Time to post another script!

Today we have Rorschach #1 written for that genius artist, Jorge Fornes!

(As a side note, this is the hardest to spell super hero in the history of hard to spell super heroes. In 12 issues, I never once got it right. If it wasn’t for autocorrect in Word, I really wouldn’t have finished this series. There’s the real super hero.)

The key for me to this issue was how not to just do Watchmen and still follow in the path and also pay tribute to Watchmen, to be influenced without being determined, if that makes any sense, which it maybe doesn’t, but it does to me.

What I mean is, I was never going to write something as good as what Gibbons and Moore had done. That was out. And if I just did all the things they did in their work in mine, it would read like a bad cover of an excellent song. One of the great joys of Watchmen was its innovation in terms of both realistic themes and in complicated story telling techniques. I couldn’t then use those same themes and techniques, because if I did, I wouldn’t be innovating, which in the end was the whole point!

So out went the cool titles. Out went all 9 panel grids. Out went a haunting quote at the end. Out went the nifty/punny scene transitions. Out went the back matter. Out went the embedded comic. And on and on. All the stuff I’d already ripped off and used on Omega Men (which we’ll get to), I didn’t use here.

Instead, we tried to make it new and see what patterns people might see in what we were doing. Let the book itself become a…

You get it.

Anyway, here it is, the beginning of something I’m very proud of. A script Jorge transformed into something beautiful and eery, something—hopefully—innovative and weird.

(Unlike our comic, Love Everlasting, the script itself is behind the paywall. If you’d like to subscribe, we’d be grateful, and here’s a button for that:)