The Rorschach Journal

The Rorschach Journal is a bookazine based on the journal originally owned by Walter Kovacs. The journal chronicles the events in his life, as well as that of his fellow costumed vigilantes.

History

Rorschach's journal entries date back as early as October 1985 when he began investigating the murder of former colleague Edward Blake, aka, the Comedian. Rorschach kept his journal in shorthand, which oddly enough, also reflected the way that he spoke to other people.

When Rorschach was arrested after being framed for the murder of Edgar Jacobi, his first journal was confiscated by the New York City Police Department.

The police report when Rorschach is arrested described it as, "one notebook, pages filled with what is either an elaborate cipher or handwriting too cramped and eccentric to be legible" - leading to the further ironic implication that the fate of the world's future rests not only on Rorschach's single journal but on his bad handwriting.

Following his breakout from Sing Sing, he traveled to his apartment to pick up an extra costume, mask, and another copy of his journal containing the exact text entries from his previous journal.

Rorschach's final entry in his second journal was in November 1st, 1985 and took place just prior to his ill-fated mission to Antarctica to confront his former colleague, Adrian Veidt. Just before leaving, Rorschach mailed the final draft of his journal to the New Frontiersman office for safekeeping, in the hope that even if he dies, the information within his journal will one day help expose Veidt.  

On March 3rd, 1987, New Frontiersman began to run excerpts from Rorschach's journal along with a summary of its contents. Rorschach hoped that his journal would expose Veidt as the criminal mastermind he is. However, it was largely dismissed by the general public and the mainstream media. Most people regarded the New Frontiersman as a little more than an ultra-conservative tabloid, making any story it published immediately suspect. Its editor, Hector Godfrey, had a well-known grudge against Veidt, and so allegations reeked of bias. Finally, Rorschach was declared clinically insane by the late Malcolm Long. Because Godfrey never proved that the contents of Rorschach's writings were factual, it was hard for people to take Rorschach at his word.

In 1995, the NYPD ceded custody of the first journal to the FBI's Behavioral Sciences Division. It is currently in the possession of the Anti-Vigilante Task Force. Despite their best efforts, the journal remains illegible.

Rorschach’s journal nearly faded into obscurity if not for two events, the “Blue Wave” of 1992 that ushered Robert Redford into the White House, and the arrest of Dan Dreiberg and Laurie Juspeczyk in 1995 for violating the Keene Act after stopping the Oklahoma City bombing. Their capture re-ignited cultural fascination with masked vigilantes, and to capitalize on that curiosity, New Frontiersman published Rorschach's journal in its entirety and was eventually retitled The Rorschach Journal.

Veidt was interviewed by the Nova Express about the publication and was asked about the allegations against him. He brushed them off as conspiratorial and a failure to engage in terrifying truths and declared the journal “fake news”.

The bookazine became a best-seller and a counter-culture classic that has appealed to a wide variety of people, including right-wing conspiracy theorists and extremists. Some take it as a history book, others, devotional literature. For them, The Rorschach Journal—and Godfrey’s interpretation of it—challenges the new, heretical orthodoxy that makes them feel marginalized and obsolete, written by a revolutionary they revere as a saint. It rationalizes their conviction that Redford is an illegitimate president, brought to power because of the Dimensional Incursion Event, which was essentially believed to be an insidious false flag operation concocted, financed and designed by Veidt and the embittered "liberal elite", as the ramifications of the Dimensional Incursion Event paved the way for the Blue Wave of ‘92. This belief is the justification for any number of anti-social behaviors, from the formation of drop-out communities known as “Nixonvilles,” to domestic terrorists like the Seventh Kavalry, who protest the president by committing violence against symbols of the executive branch, including law enforcement.

Trivia

• In Episode 3 of Watchmen, two pages of The Rorschach Journal can be seen in of the slides during a FBI briefing.
• Its reputation and influence as a bible for far-right extremists (as well as its front cover as depicted in "She Was Killed by Space Junk") is loosely based on The Turner Diaries, a 1978 novel by American Neo-Nazi and white supremacist William Luther Pierce, published under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald. The Turner Diaries depicts a violent fascist revolution in the United States which leads to the overthrow of the federal government, a nuclear war, and, ultimately, a race war which leads to the systematic extermination of nonwhites. Like The Rorschach Journal, The Turner Diaries is probably the most widely read book among far-right extremists and has inspired numerous hate crimes and acts of terrorism enacted by white nationalists, including the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the 1999 London nail bombings, and the 1984 assassination of Alan Berg.
• The Seventh Kavalry's usage and appropriation of The Rorschach Journal is similar to the alt-right's use of the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche picked out of context to dilute them and pervert them into something that the original author would've likely been completely against.