The Ozymandias miniseries concludes with a gorgeous cover by Jae Lee. He’s still not — and never will be — my favorite artist. But man, when he nails it, he really nails it! Dave Gibbons was loathe to expose the infamous squid monster that was the centerpiece of Adrian Veidt’s masterplan. Seeing how DC decided to devote six whole issues to focus exclusively on Ozymandias, I was hopeful that the company would be brave enough to devote a little more time to this significant, yet enigmatic beast. Unfortunately, my hopes were dashed. Oh well. At least we got one last incredible cover.
Our variant cover by Ryan Sook is anything but incredible. It’s busy and boring and kind of obnoxious — especially with the question marks on Rorschach’s mask. Why on Earth did he think that it was a good idea to draw something so silly and so contrary to everything Watchmen and Before Watchmen had ever produced?
Like so many of these miniseries reaching their conclusion, this issue reeks of a tone of resignation. It’s as if all the creators involved collectively said, “Well, let’s get this over with.” Why bother straining yourself to create something thoughtful and challenging when the whole project had already been written off as a failed cash grab? Of course, I did really like this miniseries when it seemed like Len Wein was mocking Alan Moore … but in this issue, I couldn’t find anything near as clever.
Adrian begins this issue by confessing that he was bothered by Dr. Manhattan’s knowing smiles he always gave to Adrian’s hidden cameras that were set up to investigate the teleportation process. Dr. Manhattan knew full well that Adrian was spying on him in this regard, but chose to play along with the charade. Nevertheless, Adrian proceeded with his carefully laid plan, counting on his ability to trick Dr. Manhattan with his big reveal at the end.
And that carefully laid plan naturally involved Adrian shoving his assistant under a bus — literally — because she knew too much about his secret island. Of course, he had to immediately replace her with a near-identical assistant, but whatever. When it came to recruiting the artists and scientists to work on that island, Adrian chose to make the invitations in person, relying on his celebrity and inexhaustible checkbook to persuade these people to abruptly abscond to this secret location for an extended period of time. Of course, they all thought they were merely working on a movie — a movie with production costs so outrageous that it could never hope to turn a profit. But they all believed Adrian was an eccentric billionaire who didn’t mind wasting his money.
There is a quick, almost throwaway line to the human brain that was used to create the squid monster. And I’m really sad by that because I think this was one of the biggest opportunities for exploration in this whole Before Watchmen project. I actually consider it a weakness on Moore’s part in that he carefully created this whole world where the only superpowered individual was Dr. Manhattan. But then when it came to Adrian’s squid, Moore contradictorily used the brain of an actual psychic in order to plague everyone caught in the squid’s blast radius with madness-inducing nightmares. I would have loved to see Wein (or someone) expand on that idea so it doesn’t seem to come from out of nowhere in the original story. Spend some time with the psychic child, show how he got his powers and how they worked. Make him an actual, tragic character as opposed to a confusing footnote buried in the supplementary material.
Anyway, Wein spends a few more pages showing us nothing we haven’t seen already, including Ozymandias’ recruitment of Moloch (which I still think was a bad idea because I thought Moloch’s story would have been stronger if he hadn’t realized he was working for Adrian). Then we finally get something new … ish: The Comedian’s discovery of the secret island. Remember, this whole miniseries is Adrian recording his autobiography (and I strongly suspected that Wein intentionally made him a slightly unreliable narrator). Adrian fully admits he doesn’t know exactly how Eddie Blake discovered the island, but he suspects he was flying back from some secret government mission and he just happened to glance out the window at the right time to notice freighters dropping off supplies at an island that isn’t on any maps.
Adrian supposed that Eddie later returned to the island alone and snuck ashore in the dead of night, and gathered all the intel to learn the entire, horrifying truth of Adrian’s masterplan. Instead of trying to sabotage the whole thing then and there, Eddie ran away as fast as he could and refused to tell anyone about it, except for Moloch. At least that’s what Adrian surmised based on his limited understanding of this situation. Obnoxiously, Wein chose to reveal that Adrian had wired Jacobi’s apartment, so he could listen to Eddie’s entire drunken rant, thus completely negating the point of Jacobi telling Adrian all about it in the Moloch miniseries. But hey, we have to show that Adrian was involved in and in control of every single little detail of the story, right? I’m actually a little surprised that Wein didn’t show that Adrian allowed the Comedian full access to the island’s secrets just to torment his old rival.
And we conclude with Adrian going to kill Eddie. In his autobiography, Adrian concedes that he never liked Blake, but he had no choice but to murder him to protect the secret of this masterplan. Of course, I think Adrian is protesting too much, as the overtly violent nature of this assassination indicates a crime of passion in my book. I mean, Adrian could have simply shot Eddie in the head and walked away. But instead he insisted on pummeling him with his bare hands before dramatically throwing him out the window. I would have liked Wein to point out the unnecessary tactics Adrian employed here to contrast with the careful quietness that pervaded all other aspects of the plan, but Wein wasn’t interested in that.
Wein did, however, close fittingly on the Ozymandias poem by Horace Smith. Although, it think it was a missed opportunity to go straight from Eddie Blake’s death to this poem. Smith was writing about the concept of lost and forgotten empires — a more fitting companion to the final image we see of Ozymandias in the original Watchmen series, where he asks Dr. Manhattan in a panicked voice if his masterplan paid off in the end. Oh well. For a miniseries full of missed opportunities, it is only fitting that we end on one more.
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