"I don't know whether to bite you or kiss you..."

Looks like a found a new "crack pairing," where the universes of Batman and Watchmen collide: It wouldn't work out, of course, but I just love the chemistry between the two — at least, in my head.

They both have similar backgrounds: Walter Kovacs was the abused son of a prostitute and was raised at New York City's Lillian Charlton Home for Problem Children. After leaving Charlton, he found employment as an unskilled manual worker within the women's garment industry. In 1964, he learned of the brutal rape and murder a woman, who commissoned a dress, outside of her apartment building while her neighbours just watched, not calling the police. Angered, Kovacs took the persona of a masked vigilante, "Rorschach," wearing an ink-blot mask which he considers his true face, who leads a one-man battle against crime long after costume vigilantes became both detested and illegal. He is a disturbed, apathetic, vacant-faced, anti-communist, anti-liberal, right-wing paranoid absolutistic and objectivistic alexithymic who sees crimes as clearly defined as either right or wrong, good and evil, black and white; there is no grey area! It does not matter that you stole a loaf of bread to feed your family; you committed a crime and, as a criminal, should rightfully and violently punished!

Selina Kyle was the daughter of an abusive father and a brutalized mother and, after their deaths, was taken to Sprang Hall Orphange and Juvenile Detention Center for Delinquent Girls, but took her chances on the streets and ran away. Amid the crime and corruption of the poverty-stricken East End district of Gotham City, she become an underage dominatrix-prostitute with little success and survived through petty theft, later becoming the slickest cat burglar the Gotham City Police Department had ever dealt with under the guise of "Catwoman." However, Catwoman's status as heroine or villainess is ambiguous. Although a thief at heart, she steals from the wealthy and well-insured and giving it to the poor and unfortunate living in Gotham's East End as a kind of modern-day "Robin Hood", sometimes using her costumed persona to investigate and thwart the many most cruel and violent criminals on its streets. Brash and unpredictable, she has her own moral code and has occasionally teamed up with other masked heroes against greater threats, even saving the lives of Batman and the GPC on several occasions.

Catwoman represents a gray area in Rorschach's (and Batman's) otherwise black-and-white life, where the line between good and evil blurs, which I feel he needs to explore more (whether he likes it or not). She's kind of a female version of himself — another dark creature that prowls the night. I like the strange but delicious sexual tension that rises between an ultra-sexual, flippantly playful Catwoman and a virginal, all-too-serious Rorschach. These two....they just make sense! Can't you feel it?

It looks like, also, that I'm going to have to stick with pencil sketches and doodles until I get them looking right. I feel (and see) my art being rather awkward lately, so I need to practice more on the characters of Rorschach in Gotham before setting out to officially colour them.

(PS: Thank-yous and huggles to everyone for being so supportive of the idea of Rorschach in Gotham! I've been getting so many wonderful responses and I hope I don't disappoint.)

Medium - HB mechanical pencil.

Rorschach in Gotham © Diane N. Tran.
Rorschach and Catwoman © DC Comics.