Which established DC characters should have featured in Watchmen?
I once heard Alan Moore had intended to populate his morality play epic with established DC characters, specifically the Justice League, and was wondering which ones? Could you take each character from the book and name their direct substitute? Would they have simply been the members of the league appearing in the monthly at the time? If so, of whom did the team comprise in that era? Rorschach is clearly modelled on The Question, and Nite Owl's costume is reminiscent of Batman's, but would we have believed his letting himself get out of shape? The big question for me, who would have taken The Comedian's role as rapist? Guy Gardner, perhaps?
Your original statement isn't entirely true. Originally Alan Moore wanted to use defunct characters from a former comics company called Charlton Comics, obtained by DC comics in the early 1980s. But when Moore explained he wanted his story to be dark and violent and involve the deaths of these characters, DC said no, so he invented his own characters based off of the Charlton ones. For example, Dr. Manhattan is based on Captain Atom, and Nite Owl is based on the Blue Beetle.
However, the original story involving the Charlton characters was still much less dark than the final Watchmen product we know today, again because of the fact that Moore was originally using characters that were already existing.
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