The series is a sequel to the comic, set thirty-four years later in the same continuity, and Damon Lindelof described it as a remix rather than an adaptation: nothing in the 1986 book is retold, and everything in it is treated as having happened. Carried forward as fact:
- The squid, and Veidt's hoax, with the world still living inside the peace it bought
- Doctor Manhattan on Mars, Laurie as a federal agent, Veidt alive and missing
- The alternate history: Nixon's terms, the lost war, and the consequences of masks having been outlawed
- Rorschach's journal, published, and the movement that grew up around it, which is the show's actual subject
Filed HIGH. The series is unwatchable without the book, and its central argument, that Rorschach's readers became the thing he was, is a reply to the comic rather than a use of it.