Watchmen Characters

Meet the Cast

Rorschach (Walter J. Kovacs)

Tell Us About Your Childhood, Mr. RorschachBorn on a mountaintop in Tennessee, greenest state in, no, our bad, that’s Davy Crockett. Walter J. Kovacs is born in New York City in 1940 to Sylvia Ko...

Adrian Veidt (Ozymandias)

Golden Boy, Orphan EditionThe son of extremely wealthy immigrants (fleeing Nazi Germany on the eve of WWII, perhaps?), Veidt ends up an orphan at 17. He’s an unusual kid, to say the least. Instea...

Dr. Manhattan (Dr. Jon Osterman)

Repeat, Lather, RinseMost of us think time moves one way, past -> present -> future. Not Dr. Manhattan. For him, everything happens all at once. Because of that, we’re going to analyze his charac...

Dan Dreiberg (Nite Owl 2.0)

The Dork Knight ReturnsWhen Alan Moore models you after the Blue Beetle, you better have other positive traits. What we’re saying is, young Dan was probably not one of the cool kids. What? Don’...

Laurie Juspeczyk (Laurie Jupiter, Silk Spectre 2.0)

Mom, You Don’t Understand Me, I’m Nothing Like YouOf the eight main characters in Watchmen, Laurie Juspeczyk is the only one without her own chapter, you know, one of the mini-ones. She is the...

The Comedian (Edward Blake)

The All-American AntiheroTo discuss Eddie Blake is to take the best and the worst of the 20th Century and stuff it into one man. No wonder he sees life as a joke, where the only punch line is there...

Sally Jupiter (Silk Spectre 1.0)

Mamma MiaIf we treat the superheroes in Watchmen as one big, dysfunctional family, then Sally Jupiter is the mom to Hollis Mason’s dad. His presence might kick start the book (thanks to Under the...

Hollis Mason (Nite Owl 1.0)

The Old GuardFor Hollis Mason, Watchmen is a tale of two stories. For the first half of the book, his excerpts from Under the Hood are like a life raft for the reader. Without them, the flood of na...

Captain Metropolis (Nelson Gardner)

The ultimate team player, this former marine is the founder of both the original Minutemen and the later, short-lived Crimebusters. Thought to die in a car crash in 1974, there is some evidence tha...

Dollar Bill

After spending his college years as a star athlete in Kansas, this friendly bro gets hired by a chain of banks, and in 1940 becomes America’s first sponsored superhero. Better make that the last....

Mothman (Byron Lewis)

Mothman ends up in the land of white coats, padded walls and straightjackets. His beginning, however, is much brighter. Not only is he able to glide through the air, but he has pacifist principles....

The Silhouette (Ursula Zandt)

The Silhouette makes her debut one month after the Nite Owl in 1939, when she breaks up a child porn trafficking ring. Eventually, her open lesbian lifestyle proves too controversial for the era, s...

Hooded Justice (Rolf Müller?)

H.J. is the OG superhero, the first one to burst upon the scene. With a black hood and noose around his neck, this giant among men is 100% pure vigilante. After WWII, Hooded Justice disappears rath...

Bernard and Bernie

From here on out, we’ll refer to these two as the Odd Couple. One is old, white, and obsessed with political affairs and the end of the world. The other is young, black, and locked into his comic...

Dr. Malcolm and Gloria Long

Dr. Long is a fancy-pants psychologist who sets out to crack the enigma that is Rorschach. In the process, he wrecks his marriage and loses faith in humanity. He and Gloria try to work it out, but...

Newspaper People (Doug Roth, Hector Godfrey, and Seymour)

Dougie Roth is editor-in-chief at Nova Express, a left-leaning newspaper, and is the first one to accuse Dr. Manhattan of causing cancer to Janey Slater and others. He also interviews Adrian Veidt...

Janey Slater

The onetime flame of Dr. Manhattan, she is replaced by Laurie Juspeczyk, who at the time is only sixteen years old. Slater has a small but critical role in Watchmen, as her interview with Doug Roth...

Max Shea and Hira Manish

Duped into creating Veidt’s giant alien squid (Shea writes the story and Manish designs the beastie) these lovers die in each other’s arms on the Pyramid cruise ship, along with all the other w...

Moloch (Edgar William Jacobi, Edgar William Vaughn, William Edgar Bright)

This pointy-eared supervillain starts his career off as a magician, then segues into vice clubs, and eventually becomes a major crime lord. After spending the '70s in prison, he reforms his ways, b...

President Richard M. Nixon

Tricky Dick, as he’s fondly known, is elected in 1968, both in Watchmen’s world and our own. However, in alt-1985, there’s no such thing as Watergate (Nixon has the Comedian kill the whistleb...

Steven Fine and Joe Bourquin

These two detectives are assigned to the Edward Blake murder case, and are the first characters we meet in Chapter I. Joe is pretty stock, not much going on there, but Steve shows some initiative,...