Ozymandias (comics)
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- For the other uses, see Ozymandias (disambiguation)
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Ozymandias is a fictional character in the comic book series, Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons and published by DC Comics. Named Ozymandias in the manner of Ramesses II, he is a modified version of the character Thunderbolt from Charlton Comics.
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[edit] Character history
The son of rich immigrant parents, Adrian Veidt was found to be incredibly intelligent at a young age. After his parents and his teachers got suspicious of his grades, he successfully hid his intelligence, by deliberately getting average notes. After his parent's death, he inherited their substantial fortune at age 17, but chose to give it all to charity. Veidt then embarked on a vision quest, following the route of Alexander the Great - a childhood idol - throughout the Mediterranean, Asia Minor, and ancient Persia. It was during this journey that he consumed a ball of hashish and decided to become a superhero. Returning to America, he named himself Ozymandias and became a costumed vigilante, focusing particularly on organized crime and earning a reputation as "the smartest man on the planet." However, his own cases robbed him of the idealistic belief that battling crime would truly lessen the evil and suffering in the world. This was brought to a head when an abortive attempt to organize a new superhero team was disrupted by the Comedian, who noted in his brutally apt way exactly how petty the doings of the costumed heroes were in a world where the threat of nuclear war hung overhead at all times, and how powerless they were to stop it. This inspired Veidt to do just that.
In 1975, for his first move, two years before vigilante crimefighters (superheroes) are banned by the "Keene Act," he retires from superheroism, marketing his image for money. This helps bankroll his scheme of creating a catastrophic event to deceive the world that there is a horrific alien common enemy to unite against. To that end, he employed geneticists to clone the stolen brain of a murdered psychic and use it to create such a creature with a group of artists and creative personnel to help create the illusion. Upon completion, he arranged the murder of all his accomplices to maintain the illusion.
To prevent Doctor Manhattan from interfering, he hired old associates of the superhero and secretly exposed them to radiation to induce terminal cancer in them, then engineered a rumor that Manhattan was responsible.
[edit] Events of Watchmen
By chance in 1985, Comedian spotted the island where the creative staff were working and, heavily distraught, likely planned to alert his superiors. Veidt personally murdered the Comedian, which caught the attention of Rorschach who investigated the crime mistakenly theorizing that there existed a conspiracy to murder masked adventurers. Although Veidt arranged an assassination attempt on himself to throw off suspicion, he decided to frame the wanted investigator on a murder charge to get him out of the way. In addition, Veidt started the accusations against Doctor Manhattan to drive him off the planet and set off a chain of events that threaten to start a global war.
Unknown to him though, the current Nite-Owl and Silk Spectre grew to believe that Rorschach's investigation had merit and sprung him from prison to investigate the matter. In addition, Manhattan took Silk Spectre to Mars where she convinced him to return to Earth.
However, the superheroes were unable to stop the fulfillment of Veidt's scheme, which led to the deaths of three million people in New York City and the world governments falling for the ruse to agree to a union to oppose this new menace. Seeing as how Veidt's plot had the desired effect of uniting the nations of the world and averted a possible nuclear war, Doctor Manhattan, Nite-Owl and Silk Spectre agree to keep silent about what they know, as it would only plunge the world back to the brink of disaster. Rorschach refuses to keep silent, but he allows Doctor Manhattan to kill him before he can tell anybody what he knows. When Veidt asks the god-like Manhattan for verification that he did the "right" thing and that his plans "worked out in the end", Manhattan can only reply that nothing ever ends.
[edit] Powers and Abilities
Adrian Veidt has been deemed the "Smartest Man In The World" by many, mainly the media. It has proven he is incredibly intelligent with his genius plan to help Earth towards utopia. He is shown to be a ruthless master strategist, swiftly eliminating anybody who dares get in the way of his plans. On top of all this, Veidt is depicted at peak physical ability, to the point of being able to catch a bullet. He is a superb fighter and martial artist, almost a superhuman combatant, easily defeating Rorschach and Nite Owl in hand to hand combat. A world-class athlete, he does acrobatic performances in aid of charity events, performing excellently despite being in his mid-forties. Except for Doctor Manhattan, Ozymandias was easily the most dangerous of the crimefighters in that era.
[edit] Analysis
Veidt is an idealistic man, and this image is reinforced by his wealthy German immigrant background and admiration for Alexander the Great's ideals of a united world. His perfection of the human form is such that, during the climactic events at his Antarctic base, he was able to stop a bullet fired at him with his bare hands.
Veidt is also, at least by Rorschach, considered to be a liberal. Veidt's moral worldview, however, seems far too sinister and ambiguous to be labelled simply as "liberal." Veidt does seem to identify himself as "left-leaning," though. Veidt could most accurately be described as believing in utilitarianism, seeing as how he wants to accomplish the most good for the most people. He is willing to murder millions of innocents to achieve his goal of benefitting all of humanity for the forseeable future.
His goal to stop a potentially apocalyptic nuclear war led him to murder the Comedian (which, in a strange way, serves justice, as the Comedian had committed a number of crimes himself), dozens of unwitting accomplices on his private island studio, his own hired assassin (who was himself hired to cover up the death of the Comedian), his three personal assistants who idolized him after Veidt had saved them from the chaos of Vietnam years earlier, and his pet, a genetically-modified lynx named Bubastis, to say nothing about the death of millions and induced insanity of many others in New York City. He also tried to kill Doctor Manhattan by removing his "intrinsic field" (although even Veidt was unsure exactly what that would do to him), as well as giving cancer to Doctor Manhattan's close associates to alienate him from the general public. It seems he was prepared to kill anyone who could possibly discredit his efforts to trick the world into thinking an alien invasion was imminent.
The morality of his actions are left intentionally ambiguous in the comic. A parallel is drawn between his actions and President Truman's decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Veidt is also representative of sheer human will power, as he takes it upon himself to fulfill tasks no other human would be ready or willing to do. This makes him something of a foil to Doctor Manhattan, a technological ubermensch, granted godlike powers by scientific means, while Veidt remains a more traditional ubermensch, having achieved his perfection from hard work and rigid discipline.
