The inkblot-masked Rorschach puts his mile-wide mean streak to work as he tracks down the killer of his old partner, a vigilante known as the Comedian.
There is the America whose history you've lived through, and then there is the America guarded by the Watchmen, founded in 1940 as the Minutemen. In this parallel nation, in the Times Square revelry on V-J day, a nurse was kissed by the slinky superheroine Silhouette. J.F.K. greeted Dr. Manhattan, the preternatural, irradiated blue man, at the White House and was gunned down by the splenetic, cigar-chomping Comedian. A U.S. astronaut walked on the moon and found Dr. M. waiting for him. In 1971, President Richard Nixon sent Manhattan and the Comedian to Vietnam; the war was over within a week,...
