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.
[edit] Character history
The son of rich immigrant parents, Adrian Veidt was found to be incredibly intelligent at a young age. He inherited his parents' 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 was 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, however, will not accept this and begs Manhattan to kill him, with which he complies). 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.
