New Rorschach Teams Up With Legion of Super-Heroes' Saturn Girl

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The New Rorschach Teams Up With An Unlikely DC Superhero

By Kieran Shiach

Published Mar 28, 2018

In order to escape Arkham Asylum, Doomsday Clock's Rorschach has to join forces with perhaps the last DC superhero you'd expect.

SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for Doomsday Clock #4 by Geoff Johns, Gary Frank, Brad Anderson and Rob Leigh, on sale now.

Rorschach is the last place anyone expected him to be, but it might be where he needs to be the most: Arkham Asylum.

Batman tricked the new Rorschach into a cell — possibly once belonging to The Joker — at the end of Doomsday Clock #3 and the new issue spends its time flipping between his time in an asylum in his native universe and the attempts of the Arkham staff to get anything out of him. Unwilling to talk, he's known only as John Doe -- but as this issue reminds us, Arkham Asylum also has a Jane Doe, and she’s a superhero in her own right.

Hearing Voices

The bulk of this issue features flashbacks to Rorschach before he was Rorschach, revealing who he is, how he was driven mad, how he became Rorschach and how he linked up with Ozymandias. However, the issue ends with a neat little trick where we see that those flashbacks were actually Jane Doe using her psychic gifts to sift through Rorschach’s history, confirm his identity, and learn all she could about him.

If you’ve been following her story since DC Universe Rebirth #1, you’ll know that this Jane Doe is in fact Imra Ardeen, aka Saturn Girl of the Legion of Super-Heroes.

A founding member of future-based team, Saturn Girl was shown in the custody of Gotham PD and deemed crazy due to her belief that she’s seen the future. Since then, she’s appeared a couple of other times; she was in Tom King and Mikel Janin’s Batman, and Emerald Empress' reason for being in the 21st century was to hunt down Saturn Girl. Just like the Justice Society of America, fans have been waiting with baited breath to see how and when the Legion of Super-Heroes return to DC Comics, and now we have our first real clue.

Time After Time

Saturn Girl’s appearance in the present day is eerily similar to the last time Johns wrote a Legionnaire with regularity, when Starman was in the pages of Justice Society of America. In those stories, Thom Kallor had come back in time for a reason he couldn’t quite remember. Because medicine for his schizophrenia wasn’t as advanced as it was in his home time period, he was often rambling, cryptic and unresponsive. Saturn Girl’s appearances in the DC Universe post-Rebirth haven’t been quite as detailed, but they have been similarly cryptic.

Starman’s presence in the DC Universe’s present day led to the returns of Wally West, Kon-El and Bart Allen, so it’s possible that Saturn Girl’s presence could possibly tie-in to the return of both the JSA and the Legion. Whatever he plan is, she’s not telling but it’s worth noticing that she spent days in the mind of the new Rorschach and trusts him enough to break out of Arkham with him. Whether that that means he’s inherently trustworthy or she knows how things will go already remains to be seen, but it’s safe to say that Rorschach and Saturn Girl are the most unlikely team-up in superhero comics for a long time.