Drink Your Ovaltine: Ozymandias #1 Review

We’re only about a month into the rollout of Before Watchmen, but I have already learned that, when I open one of these issues, I should expect to experience a strong emotional reaction. Granted, that reaction is normally somewhere in between mild bemusement and screeching pre-psychotic rage, but a reaction nonetheless.

No matter what you think about Before Watchmen as a project, you have to admit that there hasn’t been an issue released so far where you can’t say that the creative team wasn’t swinging for the fences. Sure, Comedian was a hot mess of mischaracterization and plot points that directly conflicted with Moore’s original, and Minutemen seemed to think that Hooded Justice, a former circus strongman, had Moves Like Jagger If Jagger Studied Ninjitsu With Bruce Lee, but there was never any doubt that Azzarello, Cooke and the rest weren’t trying their damnedest to add something substantial to the Watchmen mythos… even if what they’re adding at best isn’t what anyone asked for, and at worst isn’t what anyone ever wanted. You gotta admit they’re trying to bring something new to the party.

At least, you had to admit that. Because this week brings us Ozymandias #1, written by Len Wein with art by Jae Lee. And it is the first Before Watchmen comic that adds literally almost nothing to the story and character that came before. This book almost exclusively reiterates character and story beats directly from the original Watchmen story, giving us very little beyond them… but to be fair, it does provide a bit of additional character illumination and story extension. Unfortunately, the character that is illuminated is Ralphie, and the story it extends is A Christmas Story.

Where the rubber hits the road, most of this comic book retells events already related in the original Watchmen series, only with some more added words, the occasional odd and unnecessary detail, and with a couple of motivating factors that no one needed and which add nothing of concrete value to the character. Think I’m kidding about this issue just retelling stuff from the original? Well, let’s play an exciting round of Watchmen or Oymandias! See if you can guess which quote came from which book!

The principal told my parents that my test scores were so high as to be impossible and insisted that I had somehow cheated… To be as innocuous as possible, I kept my grades average…

or:

My perfect scores on test papers arousing such suspicion that I carefully only achieved average grades thereafter.

And: hows about:

The night before returning to America, I wandered into the desert and ate a ball of hashish I’d been given in Tibet. The ensuing vision transformed me…

or:

During one pale night in Tibet, an… acquaintance of mine presented me with a small ball of hashish — and told me I would know when the moment was right to consume it… On my final night before returning to America, I heard a soft voice whispering my name in the wilderness… wandering into the desert, I ate the hashish, then proceeded to discard my clothing… the ensuing vision transformed me forever…

If you guessed that the longer, more meandering version of the exact same fucking sentence came from the prequel, you’re right… and you’re seeing the problem with this book. Where other Before Watchmen books have the feeling that the writer hasn’t actually read Watchmen in quite some time (if ever), Ozymandias feels like Wein sat down and reread it… and then rewrote it. Without adding much else of value.

This comic re-presents events from Watchmen adding only what feels like filler; for example, we discover that Veidt learns martial arts while attending public school because he is relentlessly bullied for his school lunch. Which I’m sure is meant to add some depth to Veidt’s character, except it only makes sense if you don’t think about the sequence for even a second. Veidt has been presented as highly intelligent and the son of someone rich enough to offer to buy a new library to keep his kid out of trouble. So… we’re talking about a guy who eventually talked the entire fucking planet into believing that they were being invaded by aliens. I’m supposed to believe that Veidt couldn’t convince some ginger hoodlum that the fat kid with the bucket of leftover KFC isn’t easier pickings? Or that he couldn’t convince Rich Dad to put him in private school? Which is likely cheaper than a new public school library? The whole Fight-Back-Against-The-Bully sequence feels like Wein took the script to A Christmas Story and ran it through a thesaurus. A thesaurus that somehow changed Ralphie from a likeable scamp into an arrogant punk you would set on fire just to knock him down a peg.

The one thing going for this book? Jae Lee’s art. This is the guy that Marvel pulled from the bullpen to do the first Stephen King Dark Tower comics, and he’s a good choice for Ozymandias for the same reason: there isn’t a panel in this comic book that doesn’t look like an etching from the cover of a fantasy novel. Fine-lined, painted-looking and extremely detailed, this is art that is unimpeachably and objectively fucking beautiful. The only downside is that, with every panel looking like an Ursula LeGuin novel cover, it makes the comic storytelling a little… odd. Nearly every panel feels like a distinct moment in time, driven only by the narrative captioning to tell you what’s going on and how you got here from the previous panel. This is not to imply that the art is in any way bad; it’s just a different kind of visual storytelling than you might be used to. The panel layout is simple to follow, but this is one of the few comic books I’ve written where the visual pacing almost literally doesn’t matter at all.

This is the first issue of Before Watchmen that really doesn’t seem to have any reason at all for existing. It almost exclusively retells events and character beats told in the original book, only extended with more words and details that don’t add anything at all. The things that are added are unnecessary – really, Adrian? Some skank you met in a coffee shop ODs, and you decide that the best course of action is to fight crime as opposed to getting yourself checked for Hepatitis C? – and add so little to a story that merely retells what we read back in the 80s that this is the first truly inconsequential issue of Before Watchmen. It is beautiful to look at, but so is the cinematography of A Christmas Story. Which, despite its annual 24 hour marathon on TNT, I only ever watch once. Because, after all, I’ve already seen it before.