Spoilers ahead for Doomsday Clock #4, on sale now.
Who is the new Rorschach in Geoff Johns, Gary Frank, and Brad Anderson’s Doomsday Clock? Well, prior to this week we only had a few, scattered pieces of evidence and clues…but now, we have a firm answer.
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Once it was revealed that Rorschach would return in Doomsday Clock after his death in Watchmen, fans wondered how it would be handled or justified.
In the first issue of the series, though, it was revealed that Rorschach was in fact not Walter Kovacs (who did indeed die at the end of Watchmen), but another individual wearing Rorschach’s costume and carrying on many of his odd quirks.
When the character almost immediately revealed himself to be African-American, many fans wondered if it would somehow be Malcolm Long, Kovacs’s psychiatrist from Watchmen.
This led a pretty decent number of fans to think that it could be not Long but his child, never seen on the page in the original story. At one point, Long had a “world’s best dad” coffee mug — and that was enough to set imaginations racing.
Turns out, they were right. That mug, along with Long’s Rorschach files, made a return appearance in Doomsday Clock #4 as it was revealed that Reggie Long, a college student who witnessed the “alien” attack on Manhattan firsthand, had gone on to replace Kovacs as Rorschach after spending some time in a mental hospital with Mothman, an original member of the Minutemen team of vigilantes whose death was revealed in a previous issue of Doomsday Clock.
Mothman, real name Byron Lewis, could still fly even when he was locked up in a psych hospital, and occasionally fashioned wings out of items on the ward so that he could escape and go get contraband. It was during one of these trips that he stole not only Long’s files and mug, but Rorschach’s “face.”
The mask would inspire Reggie when, after escaping the asylum, he would set out to murder Ozymandias, only to find that the “world’s smartest man” was daying of an inoperable brain tumor and needed an assitant to save the world.
Doomsday Clock #5 hits the stands in May. In the meantime, Doomsday Clock #4 is on sale today at comic book stores and online.
