Before Watchmen: Ozymandias #2 Review
Witness the birth of a new crimefighter… Ozymandias!
Before Watchmen: Ozymandias #2
After losing the love of his life, Miranda, to a drug overdose, Adrian Veidt decides to use a Halloween costume he had made to track down the one responsible for selling the junk to the city. He eventually makes his way to the kingpin of the operation and shuts it down. As the weeks passed, Veidt begins creating a scrapbook of all the Ozymandias articles in the paper until he’s suddenly struck with curiosity over what befell the original Minutemen. As each sad story unfolds before him, he decides to go looking for the biggest mystery of them all – what happened to Hooded Justice. Just as he stumbles upon a clue, he comes face to face with a trigger happy Comedian.
I’m not sure if it’s Len Wein’s ability to create great stories with interesting characters, his closeness to some of these characters, or even Jae Lee’s dark and moody art, but this series has been the most compelling of these prequels. I’ve had issues with a couple of the other stories to this point. Sure, Minutemen has found its heart quickly and Silk Spectre was a major surprise. However, the Nite Owl and Comedian books haven’t been terribly compelling. The Nite Owl story might pull through in the end, and certainly boasts some spectacular art. The Comedian book has left me wishing they hadn’t included it in these because it’s adding unnecessary depth to a character whose motives and personality was a lynch pin of the entire original Watchmen story.
Ozymandias is a different sort of character. He’s used extremely sparingly in Alan Moore’s classic. Yes, spoilers, he was entirely responsible for all the attempts on the other heroes and his murder of Comedian at the very beginning of the story set everything into motion. However, Veidt’s depth of intelligence and motive does allow room for more. He’s not some jerk who fought the good fight in his own smug, cocky, and violent way. At some point, the smartest man in the world decided to become a hero and he did wonderful things before setting off a psychic bomb that killed 3 million people to save the world.
That’s what makes this story that much more interesting and intriguing.
A COMIC BOOK BLOG RATING
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Very well written by Wein and drawn by Lee. Truly the most compelling of all the Before Watchmen stories yet. | Not quite as surprisingly great as the first issue, but still nearly flawless. |
| Rating |
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