Good Things Come In Twos John Logoyda

In comics, it’s never hard to find a good villain to go with every hero: Superman has Lex, Batman has the Joker, and Space Ghost has Zorak. In fact, it’s difficult to find a classic comic in which there is not a clear protagonist and antagonist. Traditionally, there has always been one hero to combat his or her arch-nemesis. However, in Alan Moore’s Watchmen, there is no clear opponent for the heroes to contest. Instead, we are set up with six central characters who spend most of the novel searching for the villain. While each of the six is almost totally unique, the main heroes of Watchmen are presented in paralleling pairs: Rorschach with Ozymandias, Dr. Manhattan with The Comedian, and Nite Owl II with the second Silk Spectre.

The most surprising of these pairs is that of Rorschach and Ozymandias. While it would most certainly appear that the two heroes—or more properly termed anti-heroes—are in every way different, they share one strikingly similar trait. Rorschach is raised in the slums of the city by his mother, a prostitute. He is an ugly, poor, private, and almost worthless man. Not even able to pay his rent, he spends his days roaming New York City as a vagrant mute doomsday prophet holding a placard reading "The...