First look at Watchmen characters

[Klaus]

Well, the Charlton characters that Moore wasn't allowed to use were the direct analogues, but the influence of other characters is also apparent. Nite Owl, for instance, seems at least as reminiscent of Batman as he is of The Blue Beetle.

It's because we're mostly familiar with Blue Beetle II (Ted Kord) through his JLI days. He wasn't a jokester back during his Charlton days. Pretty much everything about Nite-Owl has a Blue Beetle analog, from Archimedes = The Bug to the goggles.

 

[Felon]

Nite-Owl is no more like Batman than Veidt or Rorschach.

In the Watchmen comic, Nite-Owl's costume matches up very closely with that of the 1980's Batman's, basically swapping the blue bat parts--hood, cloak, gloves, boots--for the brown owl motif. And then there's the small matter of Nite-Owl even having a frickin' utility belt--yellow even, IIRC. The resemblance only gets closer when comparing the movie costumes.

So, the question for the aspiring contrarian here is, how do you blot out those details when you try to assert that he's no more like Batman than Rorschach or Veidt? I mean, really, do you think when the movie comes out, the laymen who never read the comic aren't going to regard Nite-Owl as a Batman pastiche (though granted, most of them won't know what the word "pastiche" means...)?

It's because we're mostly familiar with Blue Beetle II (Ted Kord) through his JLI days. He wasn't a jokester back during his Charlton days. Pretty much everything about Nite-Owl has a Blue Beetle analog, from Archimedes = The Bug to the goggles.

I had some of those old Charlton Blue Beetles. Fun stuff. I remember all the little schematics of how his gadgets worked--his special strobe gun that could only be fired using his glove's thumb, the mask that only he knew how to remove, and other cool stuff. But I didn't say Nite-Owl doesn't resemble Blue Beetle,