10 Superheroes You Didn't Know Had Shameful Origins
3. Rorschach
Hero. Antihero. Defining a superhero can become a fussy venture. Rorschachs unwavering commitment to moral absolutes marks him as one of the only Watchmen willing to do dirty deeds to get good things accomplished. Even after the government gave up on him. With a masked vigilante so vehemently committed to matching evil acts with his own style of savagery, there had to be something egregious in his past.
Rorschachs humble beginnings on the streets of New York as a rapscallion with too much time on his hands, saw the poor lad on the periphery of some damn evil acts far too often. Going by his birth name Walter Kovacs, he was hired to investigate the kidnapping of a six-year old girl named Blair Roche. Following up on a lead, Kovacs made his way to an abandoned dressmakers shop and discovered the girls underwear burning away in a stove - and two dogs gnawing on a human femur.
His vitriolic outrage, building inside for years, finally snapped when he realised the stores owner Gerald Grice had killed the young girl and fed her to his dogs. He killed the two animals with a meat cleaver. When Grice came home, completely denying his involvement in the murder, he threw their bloody corpses at him, handcuffed him to a pipe, doused him in kerosene and left him with a saw in his hand.
Then, he lit a match.
Brutal... and whether or not Grice deserved it was one thing. But the dogs? Come on!