Spoiler warning: the following story includes spoilers for the 6th episode of HBO's Watchmen. Stop reading here if you haven't watched yet. Seriously!
- In HBO's Watchmen’s sixth episode, we find out Will Reeves is, in fact, Hooded Justice.
- Hooded Justice first donned the hood in 1938, just like in the graphic novel.
- Here’s everything else about the character from the comic.
Well, you probably saw that coming. “That” being Watchmen’s recent character reveal in Episode 6, "An Extraordinary Being," where the old man wearing purple and red in 2019 turns out to be the young man in 1938 also wearing purple and red and going by “Hooded Justice.” Yep, Will Reeves is “Hooded Justice,” and apparently superheroism runs in the family.
Now, before the inevitable flurry of undisguised internet racism (Hooded Justice wasn’t black, why are you politicizing this character, etc., etc.) know that HBO actually didn’t change much about the noose-necked crusader. Hooded Justice appears in the Watchmen graphic novel through inter-chapter excerpts from Under the Hood, the novel-within-the novel, written by Hollis Mason/Nite Owl. And in that novel—the one inside the graphic novel—Hooded Justice is pretty much the same: he wears a hood, rarely speaks, and is presumed dead.
Hooded Justice first appears in 1938, the same year as Superman, making 1938 the “the year they invented the super-hero.” “They” being the press, which reported on a supermarket hold-up foiled by a window-crashing, noose-and-hood-wearing vigilante.
In the next chapter, we find Hooded Justice formally joined beside several other masked vigilantes, including the Comedian and Silk Spectre. In one scene, Hooded Justice intervenes after the Comedian sexually assaults Silk Spectre, forming a kind of filial bond between Justice and Spectre. Later on, it’s pointed out that Hooded Justice never initiated romantic interactions with Spectre. This is assumed to be odd.
It’s also insinuated at multiple instances in the graphic novel (and pejoratively so) that not only might Hooded Justice (sometimes called “HJ”) be homosexual, but that he was romantically involved with Captain Metropolis. Scandalous.
When the masked vigilantes were forced to reveal their identity during the McCarthy era, Hooded Justice refuses and disappears. He never reemerges. However, the body of a circus strongman who many believed to have been Hooded Justice (given that he quit his job at the height of the McCarthy hearings) is found in the sea. Life goes on, and Hooded Justice is rarely mentioned afterward.
That HJ's origins get more love in the HBO series feels appropriate. He's considered by Mason in the comics to be the very first superhero; in many ways, he set in motion everything that culminated with Ozymandias' destruction of Manhattan. It's unclear, however, whether the in-universe portrayal of Hooded Justice, brought to white-washed life in the in-show show American Hero Story, finds reverence or mock scorn. It's hard to know what to take seriously. Typical Watchmen.
