Before Watchmen: Going through the motions

This cover is a typical example of Jae Lee’s work. Artistic, clean, posed interestingly, yet also hampered by a strange “scrunchiness” and disconnect with the story. I’ve always been curious about Adrian’s beloved cat, Bubastis, but this issue does not feature her — which makes this cover a bit disappointing to me.

The variant cover by Mike Kaluta is fantastic. Beautiful, yet haunting. Poetic and ominous. I’ll admit I don’t fully understand it, though — probably because it also doesn’t seem to bear any connection to the inside story.

Of course, it’s hard to blame the covers for not being connected to a story like this, where nothing happens at all. It’s really unfortunate coming off the rushed ending of Silk Spectre and the rushed opening of Moloch, only to see a bland placeholder issue from Len Wein. He was given six issues for an Ozymandias story, but apparently he only needed four. This is the comic book equivalent of a high schooler desperately trying to stretch their two-page essay to the required five pages.

Wein rapidly advances through a few years of Adrian’s life, doing absolutely nothing of any particular interest. Adrian admits that he lacked the passion for being a superhero like his counterparts, but he kept going through the motions mostly out of boredom. He was happy to form a close relationship with John F. Kennedy, but was dismayed when he saw the Comedian had an even more intimate relationship with the Kennedy family. Adrian was also surprised when JFK deduced his secret identity, but he was more than happy to resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis, advising the president that Dr. Manhattan was far too powerful to ever be used in a political conflict.

Adrian was shocked by Kennedy’s assassination, and dismayed to discover that there was no grand plot beyond Lee Harvey Oswald. His inability to foresee this starts to put his reputation as the “world’s smartest man” into question, but Wein was not interested in reflecting on that. What he was interested in, apparently, was recreating the entire Crimebusters scene word-for-word as Alan Moore originally told it. I saw absolutely no need for this beyond a frantic need to eat up some pages. And the end of the issue was a bland detail that should have been painfully obvious from Moore’s old work. As Captain Metropolis whimpers that someone’s got to save the world, Adrian decided that he should be that someone. Duh! We already knew that!

Before Watchmen created the opportunity for comics creators to explore new avenues and fresh angles of the characters and world created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Sometimes we got lucky and were given a unique, interesting story. But far too often, this project only produced dull, repetitive nonsense that made this whole endeavor feel more like a cheap cash grab than anything else. This issue is one of the prime examples of the very worst Before Watchmen has to offer.