Warning! Spoilers ahead for Rorschach #4
Due to how utterly tragic Rorschach’s life was, few believed that Watchmen‘s America could possibly handle another anti-hero who had it any worse than he did. And yet, writer Tom King proves all the nay-sayers wrong in his series Rorschach. The Kid, also known as Laura Cummings, has had it rough, to put it mildly. And the latest issue of Rorschach, featuring art by Jorge Fornés, is beginning to show just how messed up she became as a result of her childhood to the point where she is essentially her alternative reality’s version of the Joker. And this Joker has found plenty of Harley Quinns to manipulate.
In Rorschach #4, the detective who has been on Rorschach’s trail throughout the series interrogates Muscles the Mountain Man, a showman who once worked with The Kid and became the Harley to her Joker. Rather appropriately, Muscles currently resides in a mental ward. The story he tells about his relationship with his former colleague and accomplice, The Kid, is heartbreaking. He was in love with her, but she wasn’t in love with him. And he was fine with that. Everything seemed fine—sad, but fine—until The Kid’s mental instability, along with her anti-hero-like tendencies that would make Walter Kovacs proud, began to emerge.
The Kid later becomes enraptured with the idea of killing a man who’s committed some atrocious acts, and, wanting to prevent her from committing a crime and to spare her a life behind bars, Muscles performs the deed himself. This is where it gets twisted. Upon learning the truth, she comes to the conclusion that Muscles must be Rorschach and—either because she is mentally deranged, a psychopathic narcissist or a combination of both—manipulates him into becoming the masked anti-hero. Her methods are effective. She first ignores him for days on end. This is particularly harmful because he is an introverted man who had, before meeting her, rarely spoken to anybody but has now grown accustomed to it, making the isolation she exposes him to more frustrating. Later, she expresses anger at him for hiding what he has done because, in her twisted mind, he is lying about who he is. She compares this to a betrayal. With their friendship on the line and willing to do anything to save the remnants of whatever they have left, he becomes whom she believes he is: Rorschach. So he dons the domino mask and commits the same grisly murders that Walter Kovacs would have committed.
This is the point in his tale when Muscles’ sanity comes into question because he soon begins to believe her. And he also shares The Kid’s delusions about the squid invasion along with the many correlating conspiracy theories that her father implanted in her head. He also formulates some of his own insanities such as his belief that The Kid is Spectre.
This toxic, highly manipulative relationship fueled by insanity and psychopathic urges shares too many similarities with Joker and Harley’s to ignore as they are essentially one and the same. The advantageous Joker exploits the feelings Harley has for him during his incarceration at Arkham Asylum and tears away all semblance of what little sanity she has left by having her embrace a new twisted and violent persona. But The Kid is worse than Joker because, upon Muscles’ arrest, she sinks her claws into another man who later assumes Rorschach’s identity. Joker might inspire and attract the criminally insane but he has yet to mold a new Harley Quinn…which is something The Kid would have likely continued to do if she hadn’t died.
