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Special Agent Laurel Jane "Laurie" Blake, born Laurel Jane Juspeczyk, is a retired masked vigilante formerly known as Silk Spectre II, taking up the mantle from Sally Jupiter, her mother and the original Silk Spectre. After the events that transpired in 1985, Laurie adopted the moniker of Comedienne, paying homage to her late father, Eddie Blake. Following her capture in 1995, Laurie gave up being a crimefighter and became a leading agent for the FBI's Anti-Vigilante Task Force.

Biography[]

Childhood[]

Laurie Juspeczyk was the daughter of the two Minutemen heroes Sally Jupiter and Eddie Blake. Though her father attempted to rape her mother in 1940, the two heroes had consensual sex and conceived Laurie eight years later.

Laurie grew up without the knowledge that the Comedian was her father, instead being raised by mother and her stepfather Larry Schexnayder. Laurie, from a young age, had suspicions that her mother's one-time Minuteman boyfriend Hooded Justice was her real father, but Sally would reveal years later that the relationship was only for show and that she had never even seen Hooded Justice's real face.

Silk Spectre[]

When Laurie was a young adult, she became a vigilante herself as the second Silk Spectre, taking her mother's old alias. For a short time, Laurie operated with a short-lived group of heroes called the Crimebusters.

Laurie developed a deep relationship with her fellow crimefighter Doctor Manhattan.

After the Keene Act made masked vigilantism illegal, Laurie retired from her costumed career and continued her relationship with Doctor Manhattan.

Following her breakup with Manhattan, Laurie became close with the hero Nite Owl as they longed for the escape of heroism together. They became lovers for a time, though Laurie would resent others calling their relationship that. At one point, Nite Owl and Silk Spectre donned their costumes again and broke Rorschach out of police custody.

Laurie was unable to stop Adrian Veidt's plan to end the Cold War by faking an interdimensional squid attack on New York City on November 2, 1985.

Comedienne[]

Sometime after 11/2, once Laurie had learned the truth that the Comedian was her father, she retired the alias "Silk Spectre" and became "the Comedienne" in his honor.

Laurie and Dan Dreiberg continued their romantic relationship but, because he felt that Laurie still longed for her ex-boyfriend Doctor Manhattan, built her a large, bionic, blue dildo to use as his replacement.   The dildo's prototype name was titled "Excalibur", and Laurie kept it with her closely in a briefcase.

Laurie and Dreiberg's relationship at some point fizzled out. In her words: "He wanted kids, and I wanted guns."

After foiling the Oklahoma City bombing, she and Dreiberg were arrested by the FBI due to being in violation of the Keene Act. Dreiberg refused to cooperate and is given a thirty-year prison sentence. Though she was snarky in her interrogation, Laurie was cooperative s she confessed the truth about how Rorschach died, Doctor Manhattan leaving the planet, and the details about Adrian Veidt's hoax.

Once the FBI learned the truth about the events of November 2, 1985, the federal government helped maintain the cover-up. Because of her cooperation, Laurie's struck a deal to partner with the FBI as a member of their Anti-Vigilante Task Force, utilizing her lifelong expertise to help the government hunt down the new wave of costumed vigilantes operating in violation of the Keene Act. She eventually changed her name to Laurie Blake, her father’s surname.

Tulsa[]

In 2019, as a favor to Senator Joe Keene, in an effort to get Dan Dreiberg pardoned from prison, Laurie began an investigation into the death of Tulsa's police chief, Judd Crawford. Laurie picked Dale Petey to be her partner for the mission, assuming he wouldn't get in her way.

Attending Judd's funeral, Blake kills a member of the white supremacist militia the Seventh Kavalry who attempts to take Keene Jr. hostage. Tensions rise between Laurie and Judd's coworker Detective Angela Abar, who operates under the identity Sister Night.[1] Suspecting Angela's knowledge of events, Laurie bugs the desk of Angela's friend Detective Wade Tillman aka Looking Glass. After recording Angela admitting to Wade that her grandfather, Will Reeves, was Judd's murderer, Blake then arrests Angela, but she swallows a whole bottle of Nostalgia belonging to Reeves and subsequently loses consciousness whilst in a jail cell.[2]

While hallucinating on Will's memories, Blake records Angela talking and learns that Will is the true identity of Hooded Justice, the first costumed adventurer, and his investigation into a KKK offshoot called Cyclops that hypnotized African Americans into attacking each other. Blake also learned that Will had stolen the hypnotism technology and used it to force Chief Crawford into killing himself, having learned he was a member of the Seventh Kavalry. Blake confronts Judd's widow Jane Crawford, who reveals herself to also be part of the Kavalry and takes Laurie captive. Laurie is bought to Keene, the true leader of the Seventh Kavalry, who declares that they intend to take Doctor Manhattan's powers for himself to enforce white supremacy.[3]

Manhattan (who had been living as a human in the guise of Angela's husband Cal) is captured, but it is revealed that the Kavalry had been manipulated by Lady Trieu, a Vietnamese American trillionaire who is secretly Adrian Veidt's daughter, to capture Manhattan so her involvement would not be suspected. As Trieu prepares to take Manhattan's powers, Manhattan teleports Blake, Veidt, and Tillman (who had infiltrated the Kavalry) to Karnak. Although too late to save Manhattan, Veidt manufactures another squid attack that kills Trieu before Manhattan's powers can be transferred to her body. In the aftermath, Laurie arrests Veidt for the original squid attack; when he protests, Wade knocks him out and the two drag him aboard Dreiberg's old ship Archimedes to return to civilization.[4] Laurie manages to return safely to America and is debriefed in secret.

Personality[]

Laurie Blake is liberal-thinking and said to be a modern woman. Laurie may be proud of her Polish heritage, which could account partly for her insistence to be called by her real last name, but she was not inclined towards crimefighting initially and she seems to have bitterness for the 'Miss Jupiter' christening. She is vocal in her feminist and humanitarian concerns and is quite a conditioned fighter, and at the start of the story is shown to have a strained relationship with her mother, another reason for her to not like the Jupiter name. Driven by the memories of her own experience, Sally tried to keep Laurie from knowing some of the harsher realities of the crime-fighting life; for example, she didn't allow her to read Hollis Mason's autobiography Under the Hood, which included the Comedian's sexual assault on Sally, something Laurie knew nothing of at the time.

After taking up her father's moniker for some time, she also becomes a government agent with a misanthropic philosophy and a shoot-first-think-later mindset, just like him. In her later years, Laurie expresses contempt for "masks" in general, telling a cruel joke in her message to Doctor Manhattan showing this in contrast to her once proudly being Silk Spectre. She embraced being Edward Blake’s daughter sometime back, after having initially been very distraught that he turned out to be her birth father, calling him "my dad" and adopting his last name. It's also clear she's taken up a lot of his dark personality and nihilistic worldview, contrasting to how generally optimistic and upbeat she was previously.

Behind the Scenes[]

  • Laurie Juspeczyk/Silk Spectre II in Watchmen is the second live-action incarnation of the character, following a previous incarnation portrayed by Malin Akerman.

References[]

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