Trivia / Rorschach (2020)

• Creator's Oddball: Rorschach is very unlike a lot of Tom King's usual work. Some of his most recognizable quirks — such as the nine-panel grid format and his stuttering, repetitive dialogue — are absent, and while the story is a deep deconstruction of the dark psychology of a superhero (or whatever the character of Rorschach counts as), said analysis is objective and detatched, with the actual protagonist being a total Blank Slate without a backstory or even a name. King even stated that he consciously avoided using a lot of his usual tropes as a sort of personal challenge, inspired by how Alan Moore broadly approached Watchmen by greatly discarding usual superhero comic conventions.
• Reality Subtext: Tom King makes no bones about the fact that — just like how Watchmen was very politically influenced by the world of the 1980's it was made in — Roschach is very politically influenced by the world of 2020 it was made in. Not only does it directly ruminate on the moral legacy of Rorschach (the character), it's also heavily influenced by modern American paranoia, including the proliferation of destructive hard-right conspiracy theories like Qanon.
  "We’re so angry all the time. And we have to do something with that anger in order not to go insane, and so that’s this. I mean, this is about an attempted assassination, it’s about people who got so angry, they tried to kill someone. And it’s about how they got to that place. And the whole mystery of is what motivated them to do that."

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