All that's left is Rorschach.

GMO said:
All that's left is Rorschach.

Well if they were going on the inspiration tree, it would need both Rorschach and Mr. A, who Rorschach is a direct critique of.

Beatman said:
Well if they were going on the inspiration tree, it would need both Rorschach and Mr. A, who Rorschach is a direct critique of.

I remember reading that Rorschach was going to be The Question, but things changed so he couldn't use the characters.

Specifically, DC didn't like that he was going to render half the cast unusable for future stories. They'd just bought Image Comics, and didn't want to throw away any of their new IPs. Moore's solution was to change the setting, and the characters with it.

JBridge said:
Specifically, DC didn't like that he was going to render half the cast unusable for future stories. They'd just bought Image Comics, and didn't want to throw away any of their new IPs. Moore's solution was to change the setting, and the characters with it.

Image Comics didn't exist in 1986. DC owned the rights to several old Charlton Comics characters and Alan Moore was intended to revamp the line. That project eventually became Watchmen.

Don't know if it's ever been confirmed or not, but I've always considered Schwarzwald to have some influence from them.

triangleman said:
Image Comics didn't exist in 1986. DC owned the rights to several old Charlton Comics characters and Alan Moore was intended to revamp the line. That project eventually became Watchmen.

The original comics did retain one small homage to Moore's original idea: In the supplemental material for one of the chapters, we see some documents of Rorschach's troubled childhood, which (among other things) confirms that the orphanage he was largely raised in was called the Charlton Home.

From what I've heard, DC's decision to not allow Moore to use the Charlton characters in this story -- specifically, their reasoning for that decision, which boiled down to DC not wanting to leave the characters in an "unmarketable" state after the miniseries (this was long before Elseworlds) -- was one of the straws that eventually broke the back of Moore's relationship with DC.