Walter Joseph Kovacs
Real name/ Alias:
Rorschach
Age:
35
Occupation:
Detective
Powers:
Excellent athlete; highly skilled boxer, gymnast, and street fighter; can improvise weapons; ruthless, intuitive detective
Equipment:
A .45 Colt Pistol, A grappling gun, clothes, mask, cellphone, switchblade
Personality:
During his childhood he was described as bright, and excelled in literature, mathematics, and religious education. Rorschach considers his mask his true "face" and his unmasked persona to be his "disguise". Rorschach is extremely right-wing, and morally uncompromising, a viewpoint that has alienated him from the rest of society. He is often described as being mentally ill by other characters.
History:
Rorschach, born Walter Joseph Kovacs, is the son of Sylvia Kovacs, a prostitute, and "Charlie" (surname unknown). His mother was frequently abusive and condescending toward her son. At the age of 10, Kovacs became involved in a violent fight with two older bullies, in which he partly blinded one with a cigarette and took a large bite out of the other's cheek in a blind rage. Once his living conditions were finally looked into he was removed from his mother's care and put in "The Lillian Charleton Home for Troubled Children" in New Jersey until the age of 16, where he rapidly seemed to improve, excelling at scholastics as well as gymnastics and amateur boxing.
After leaving the Home for Problem Children, Kovacs took a job as a garment worker in a dress shop, which he found "bearable but unpleasant" partly because he had to handle women's clothing; it was here that he acquired the fabric that he would later fashion into the mask he wears as Rorschach. The fabric contained two heat and pressure-sensitive viscous fluids between layers of latex, creating a shifting black-on-white color effect without mixing to form gray. Kovacs scavenged the material from a rejected dress that had been special-ordered by a young woman with an Italian name. Though Kovacs learned how to cut and fashion the material successfully with heated implements, he soon grew bored with it, as it served him no real purpose at the time. Two years later when buying a newspaper on his way to work, Walter read about the rape and murder of Kitty Genovese (he later told his prison psychologist "Woman who ordered dress. Kitty Genovese. I'm sure that was the woman's name."). Ashamed by what he read about the unresponsiveness of her neighbors, Kovacs became disillusioned with the underlying apathy that he saw as inherent in most people. Inspired by Genovese's fate, Kovacs returned home, made "a face [he] could bear to look at in the mirror" from the dress's fabric, and decided to help those who suffered under the heartless as the vigilante and private sleuth Rorschach.