Before Watchmen: Nite Owl #3 Review

Nite Owl and Twilight Lady take their unusual partnership to the next level.

Before Watchmen: Nite Owl #3

While Nite Owl is helped by Twilight Lady to find the person who’s been murdering a string of prostitutes lately, Rorschach, as Walter Kovacs is working diligently at his church as a janitor ultimately agreeing to help the reverend with some obviously devious “Lord’s work”.  Meanwhile, Nite Owl is able to gather some info from someone who’s been putting girls on the street right off the boats.  Afterwards, he and Twilight Lady get a little action in.  The following day, Hollis gives Dan something that’s been nagging at him.  When Dan nervously opens the envelope, the manuscript for Under the Hood falls out.  Dan’s shocked to find what’s in it.  At the church, the reverend asks Walter to go to the basement, someplace no one is allowed, to bring some boxes upstairs.  There, Walter finds dead bodies piled on top of each other including some of the missing prostitutes.  As Rorschach, he’s shot by the reverend to be made an example of.

This series isn’t technically bad.  However, I do feel there’s a pretty thin plot going on here.  Instead of really getting to see Nite Owl and Rorschach as they were before Rorschach fell off the deep end, we’re given a murder mystery that leads to a surprisingly grotesque conclusion of the issue.  It feels like there was so much more that could have been explored, but either simply wasn’t, or there was some trepidation on the part of all people involved.  It feels the flimsiest of all the stories’ plots so far.  Even Comedian, which is a series in this little event that I’ve found myself really disliking, seems to have more meat to it.

Again, if this was the third or fourth arc in an ongoing series, it’s not bad.  It really isn’t on a lot of levels, but as the only four issue arc we will likely see for the character, it’s missing a punch that all the other books have had so far.  Yeah, I guess you can say this series offers up a fair amount of tits and some Batman-esque adventuring, but it feels like the story is playing out like one of those instructional sheets you put on the floor to learn how to dance.  We have to see Nite Owl and Rorschach doing shit together.  Nite Owl has to meet Twilight Lady.  We have to see her boobs.  We have to see them getting it done.  We have to see Walter Kovacs in the church.  So on and so forth.  It would have been much more interesting to use the reverend that is revealed as the big bad of the series for more.  You could have even built a little version of From Hell where the reverend, seen mostly from shadows, prowls the streets for victims and so on.

Ultimately, this book doesn’t necessarily lack in script, but in plot.  It’s odd because usually the other way around.  However, this would have been ten times more gratifying to see a more straightforward pairing of Nite Owl and Rorschach, or hell, even just Nite Owl on his own, doing some good old fashioned detective work.

Tags: Andy Kubert Before Watchmen J. Michael Straczynski Joe Kubert Nite Owl Slider Watchmen