The Comedian Disproves a Common Fan Theory about Watchmen

None other than the Comedian has debunked a widely held belief about the fate of one Watchmen character. Before Watchmen: Minutemen #6 showed that Hooded Justice isn’t who fans may have believed him to be, the Golden Age hero.

The acclaimed comic book Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons explores the inner struggles of several heroes. While characters like Nite Owl and Rorschach are given a tonne of information, some heroes’ lives are left largely unexplored.

Hooded Justice, a member of the Minutemen, is the most enigmatic costumed adventurer in the narrative. In actuality, Hooded Justice’s identity is never made known in Watchmen, even though the other heroes are given names. However, further information on the tale has given rise to the widely accepted notion that the true hero was circus strongman Rolf Müller, whose corpse was found off the coast of Boston.

The Before Watchmen prequel series provides a more conclusive explanation for the relationship between Müller and Hooded Justice than the original book. Before Hollis Mason, the original Nite Owl of Watchmen, takes it up; the Silhouette is looking into a child trafficking ring in Darwyn Cooke’s Before Watchmen: Minutemen. Before realising Hooded Justice is responsible for the call, Mason runs into several dead ends in his investigation. The Comedian tells Hollis that Justice is genuinely innocent when he sees him later. It comes out that Eddie Blake was entrusted with locating Hooded Justice for the government after he refused to reveal his name to HUAC.

Blake found Müller after conducting his research. The Comedian concludes that the strongman was unquestionably responsible for the abductions, but he also understands that Müller isn’t Hooded Justice.

The Comedian is correct about Hooded Justice from Watchmen, as Nite Owl accidentally killed the protagonist after mistakenly believing he was the thief behind the trafficking ring. But even after Hooded Justice passed away, his lover Captain Metropolis forbade anyone from taking off his mask. As a result, the hypothesis regarding Hooded Justice’s real identity persisted for a limited time. But the Comedian disproved a theory that has been floated since Watchmen first came out in only a few sentences.

In Watchmen, not much is known about Hooded Justice’s past other than that he spoke with a faint Bavarian accent and openly supported the Nazi party. Granted, Hollis Mason’s memories of his time with the Minutemen provide most of the information for Watchmen’s Hooded Justice. Mason’s opinion that Hooded Justice was Rolf Müller was based on parallels between their physical characteristics and the puzzling circumstances surrounding the discovery of Müller’s death.

It is understandable for some fans only to accept Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ original series as canon. The identity of Hooded Justice is not, however, revealed to fans in Before Watchmen. The only thing the Comedian says is that this Watchmen theory probably isn’t true out of all the others.

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