Watchmen is no stranger to worldbuilding and story development via in-universe documents. Each of the original 12 issues came with back up prose stories done in the style of book excerpts, in-universe comics, police reports, and office memos to help flesh out the strange and upside-down world of Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore’s take on a 1985 where superheroes were real and the doomsday clock was tick-tock-ticking down.
This is a tradition HBO is working hard to replicate with the brand new Watchmen TV show, despite the change in mediums. Sure, an episode of television can’t literally come with a back-up story for viewers to read before the credits roll, but at least now we’ve got the next best thing: the internet. HBO’s Watchmen hub includes a rather inconspicuous link to a page called The Peteypedia, full of various PDF documents chock full of lore and some surprising twists for familiar characters in the post-graphic novel canon.
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In an inter-office memo for the FBI’s Anti-Vigilante Task Force, we learn that Rorschach’s Journal, a major narrative element of the comics, eventually was published by the New Frontiersman newspaper, but whether or not it was actually the authentic document–the ravings of a man with known mental instability–or a hoax altogether was never confirmed. Also, at some point following the squid event in New York City, original Watchmen character Laurie Juspeczyk not only adopted her father’s last name, Blake, she also dropped her mother’s legacy codename (“Silk Spectre”) and began going by “The Comedienne.”
Given Laurie’s well-understood resentment and hatred of her father, something drastic must have happened to flip that particular switch. Either way, now apparently Laurie has given up the vigilante lifestyle all together in favor of hunting them down and arresting them–she’s now a member of the Anti-Vigilante Task Force, according to this Peteypedia document.
Also in the documents are references to a mass technological scare that happened shortly after the squid attack. This would certainly explain things like the presence of beepers in 2019, which we saw Angela use in the first episode and the general lack of things like smartphones and modern cars. It makes a lot of sense if you think about it; if a massive, interdimensional monster massacred thousands of people in a major city right at the advent of things like the internet and personal computers in the mid ’80s, the general public would really have no reason not to conflate those two things, right? And why not blame Dr. Manhattan at the same time?
We can probably expect the Watchmen Peteypedia to be updated each week as episodes roll out, so keep a close eye out.
Watchmen airs on Sundays at 9PM on HBO.
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