Before Watchmen: Ozymandias/Crimson Corsair

This volume collects Len Wein's work pm DC's "Before Watchmen" enterprise: Ozymandias, Crimson Corsair, and the Dollar Bill one shot. I've expressed my strong agnostic feelings about Before Watchmen elsewhere and I feel no need to subject anybody to a rehash here. However, this book gets more wrong than right. Only the fine visuals and especially the presence of Jae Lee's magnificent, perfectly pitched art on Ozymandias saves it from vying for the worst of the whole of "Before Watchmen."

Wein's Ozymandias pretty much fulfills every dread prediction of how "Before Watchmen" could go wrong. The story adds near nothing of interest to Moore and Gibbons' original. Instead we have a long, drawn out rehash. Watchmen covered Ozymandias's origin with great economy; do we really need to follow Adrian as he walks across Asia, trains in the martial arts, and gets that ball of hashish? I think not. Is he a richer character for us knowing his father's profession or seeing him fight Moloch or seeing him exchange blows and verbiage with the Comedian? In "Watchmen," we were supposed to be amazed that he can catch a bullet; isn't that feat less impressive if we know lots of folks have seen Ozymandias jam a gun by throwing a metal pen into the barrel at range?

Giving a character a proper treatment must include doing something other than simply spelling out everything readers can already guess at having happened. It must surprise. It must delight. Otherwise, why not just leave it to the readers' imaginations? Unfortunately, what we get instead here tends to plod along. What few surprises Wein conjures tend more push this character towards the pedestrian. Adrian Veidt became Ozymandias when he donned a Halloween costume in order to seek vengeance? The collective yawn deafens.

As an aside, one has to wonder how Wein thought it a good idea to do this book in Ozymandias's perspective (and as a confessional diary no less!)? One cannot imagine a less reliable narrator than Adrian Veidt or one who is less interesting. We already know his motivations and his story from his perspective; Moore and Gibbons forced us to live it in the original. What more could there be to add? The answer is nothing, save filler that Wein (as Moore's editor) would have been well served to edit out. That Veidt's narrates this long version of his story - to himself! -- minutes after he tells the tale to the corpses of his servants and before Rorschach and company burst in so that he can repeat the same, almost makes the whole thing - you'll pardon the pun - comical. It seems our dear Adrian isn't just loquacious, but masterbative as well.

If Ozymandias spins with unrealized potential, "Crimson Corsair" evokes a collective head scratch. If you don't recall, Moore wove a pirate comic, "The Black Freighter," into "Watchmen." It served several purposes. It was a work by Max Shea, an artist who disappeared in the larger story. Moore argued, perhaps unpersuasively, that in a world with real masked heroes, readers "probably wouldn't be at all interested in superhero comics." Black Freighter also served as a meta-commentary on the events of "Watchmen," a clever reflection of several characters and an indictment of their actions. In "Before Watchmen" Crimson Corsair seems wholly unmoored from the rest of the story, a pirate prequel... well... just because DC was rooting around for possible story ideas. They might just as well - or perhaps more thoughtfully - have done a series looking at the cases of detectives Fine and Bourquin. Or maybe followed the careers of Dr. Long or Doug Roth? It would have been better than this. That said, the art here is again quite lovely and haunting, fitting well with the subject matter. All in all, a fine salute to EC Comics, but it has little meaningful to add to the Watchmen universe.

Last but least we have Dollar Bill. Before this, Dollar Bill was known only for dying when his cape got caught in a revolving door (a black gag given a great salute in Pixar's "The Incredibles"). Where in Minutemen, Cooke brought minor characters beautifully to the fore, Wein takes a minor uninteresting character and pretty much keeps him uninteresting. Again, the art fits beautifully (though it more evokes the Silver Age than the Golden) with Steve Rude's drawing and Glen Whitmore's coloring again helping make this by far the best looking of the Before Watchmen volumes. Still, the story remains utterly forgettable. Rather than a riff on the Golden Age of comics, Wein gives us a mediocre mock-Golden Age story.

Depending on your perspective, "Before Watchmen" was either a crass money grab or a brave artistic leap into the dark. Lovely art, however, cannot save this tragically ill-conceived volume.

DC Comics releases what I consider to be the best of the controversial prequels to one of the most celebrated graphic novels of all time with "Before Watchmen: Ozymandias /Crimson Corsair Deluxe Edition." The hardcover collection contains issues 1 through 6 of Before Watchmen: Ozymandias, the entire run of Crimson Corsair stories, and the Dollar Bill one-shot. The Crimson Corsair storyline spread out across several of the different Before Watchmen titles.

The real highlight of the "Before Watchmen: Ozymandias /Crimson Corsair Deluxe Edition" is Adrian Veidt's backstory. "Watchmen" editor Len Wein takes a character I found to be the least interesting in the original graphic novel and completely change my mind about him. When the entire prequel event came to a close, Before Watchmen: Ozymandias reigned supreme as my favorite title. Wein digs so deep into the character's psyche and gives the reader an insight into how a man's ego can drive him to commit unspeakable acts while believing he is an agent of justice and morality.

Jae Lee's art for Before Watchmen: Ozymandias is definitely one of the winning factors of the book for me. His work is so distinctive and unique that one can't help but appreciate it. I've never seen such a bizarre mix of artistic styles. Imagine taking a classic Norman Rockwell painting and blending it with the precision and detail of Jim Lee. Words cannot describe how much I admire Jae's illustrations and talent.

Len Wein and John Higgins handle the writing for "The Curse of the Crimson Corsair." It's an interesting pirate tale which shows one man's descent into madness and his epic journey alongside some of the most ruthless buccaneers to sail the high seas. It's nice to have all the segments together in one book. Things tend to get confusing when you read two pages of a story from week to week.

The artwork for The Curse of the Crimson Corsair matches that of Tales of the Black Freighter. John Higgins brings to life the maddening visions of lead character Gordon McClachlan and the violent actions of the pirates as they journey in search of treasure. Higgins' use of supernatural imagery adds depth and a shot of horror to the tale that should make genre fans giddy.

The Dollar Bill one-shot is one of my favorite titles of the entire Before Watchmen event as well. Len Wein pens a compact and entertaining little backstory for this reluctant and tragic hero. It's amazing how much detail Wein fits into 32 pages of a comic book.

Steve Rude provides art for the Dollar Bill one-shot. His work accurately mimics that of the Golden Age artists. It perfectly captures the time-period the book is supposed to take place in both in style and even coloring, as strange as that might sound.

Thirteen pages of bonus material are included in "Before Watchmen: Ozymandias /Crimson Corsair Deluxe Edition." It features variant covers for both the Ozymandias and Dollar Bill issues by Jim Lee, Phil Jimenez, Phil Noto, Jill Thompson, Darwyne Cooke, and others. There are Ozymandias and Crimson Corsair character sketches and artwork contained in it as well.

"Before Watchmen: Ozymandias /Crimson Corsair Deluxe Edition" is rated M for mature readers. The book features violence, language, adult situations, and nudity. I've voiced my protest of the nudity in my past reviews of Before Watchmen books and will leave it at that. I don't want to start sounding like a broken record.

There's no better place to introduce yourself to the world of Before Watchmen than this book. "Before Watchmen: Ozymandias /Crimson Corsair Deluxe Edition" features two of the best titles in the entire event. The backstories for Adrian Veidt and William Benjamin Brady are compelling and keep readers engaged. The Curse of the Crimson Corsair is a thrilling addition to an already satisfying collection of Watchmen lore.

This was, in the series of Before Watchmen books my 3rd favorite, they are all good, expanding the story the depth of the characters from Watchmen. Except for the Story based on the Comic from the original, these horror, no one can ever win, terrible things happen no matter what and the main character is always screwed kind of stories just do not appeal to me and never have. It was hard enough getting through them in Watchmen and it's not that easy getting through the Before Watchmen version either. Ozymandias on the other hand was fantastic, this really flushed out his back story tell us where this "Hero turned Villain" came from and why he does what he does. Great read highly recommend it. Thanks for reading have a nice day!

Adrian Veidt, alias (spoiler alert!) former costumed crime-clobberer Ozymandias — genius metadata-crunching business mogul; self-promoting, self-made man; vainglorious, darkly scheming moral hypocrite; messiah-complex oozing, Machiavellian, millions-mass-murdering revealed mystery-villain of Alan Moore’s 1986 "Watchmen" comic book opus — is not exactly a figure designed for ready sympathy.

This front-end handicap may go some way toward explaining why, of last year’s follow-up "Before Watchmen" comic efforts, Len Wein’s book proves in this reader’s estimation to be the weakest at penning a prequel worthy of that title association, more so than all others coming off as a clip-show retread of scenes extracted and strung insubstantial as popcorn — worse yet, reading inauthentic to Moore’s voice for the character.

Wein served as editor on Watchmen, and reportedly was dissatisfied with hurriedly stated motivations in the wrap-up of that series. If this 2012 addendum is intended as Wein’s tardy tweak to whichever oversights he was bothered by in the original tale, it invites the question, “Who edits the editor-men?”, because Wein’s off-tone offering here could certainly have done with keener editorial watching.

Reaching for an in-universe premise to justify this comic’s existence, Veidt in soliloquy relays that he’s decided to compose an autobiographical audio recording for posterity ‘just in case’ his gloriously world-saving terroristic masterplan should happen to implode miserably — how belatedly prudent. Problematically, this self-doubting admission to possible failure instantly contradicts the smugly confident bravura previously sculpted by Moore’s vision. It also taxes story logic for Veidt to preside as omniscient narrator over scenes that he didn't even witness.

Chapter XI of the original Watchmen book had already cast a spotlight on Ozy narrating his colourful life’s story to his trusty trio of manservants within the fishbowl-oasis Karnak atrium — an august address delivered to a (shall we say) breathlessly captive audience, occurring on November 1st in story chronology — along with the pontificated backstory disclosures of Chapter XII. Wein’s portrayal introduces Ozymandias redundantly dictating that same Bio (padded with trivialities plus a peripheral pageant of ’60s memorabilia) on October 11th, again at his Antarctic fortress of solitude, immediately preceding his return-trip to New York to make street splatter of Edward Blake, date still denoted as October 11th. [Logistics pinch: Six-issue dictation plus feline workout routine, 9000 mile flight, cross-town commuting for "late-night office work" alibi and stealth entrance for murder wouldn't squeeze into the 24 hours budgeted.] One of those same Karnak attendants is even afforded an earful sampling of Veidt’s oration via a walk-through cameo during the course of this first-run iteration.

Such speechifying repetition, apparently having completely slipped Veidt’s mind come November, is not the hallmark of a coolly efficient intellect; and we are told that this earlier recital is ostensibly being recorded last-minute because (derp! itinerary slipping Veidt’s brilliant mind once more,) it hadn’t occurred to him sooner. [But... why couldn't he have used a tape recorder in airborne transit if so pressed for time, or done this at his N.Y. pad?] There are equally pronounced redundancies within the chosen wording of Veidt’s redux-monologue (“a vicious switchblade…”, “my sleek sports car” — Are these descriptive clunkers honestly the best that the World’s Smartest Man could come up with, Len?), and an irksome convention of emphatic text-bolding to semaphore every modest turn of phrase.

Where not outright photocopying passages from Moore’s original telling [-- How are said instances of verbatim duplication to be accounted for if these twinning Antarctic memoir monologues represent two independent recitations spaced 20 days apart? Is the World’s Smartest Man rehearsing a longform rough draft for later trimming?], Wein’s progressively distorting regurgitation is salted with illogical anachronisms (see below) and an out-of-character plebeian cadence that Moore’s take on Ozymandias would never credibly utter. From Veidt’s lips escape such easygoing idioms as “now and then”, “here and there”; the c’est la vie slushy resignation of “like it or not”, “...after all”; the unbecomingly snarky “don’t even think about it”, winkingly issued as an outcome-telegraphed warning to a pack of encircling hooligans; the effusively gooey “I knew in my heart...” — variations of this drippy sentiment finding triple-play among protagonists in all three features of this volume; the apologetically vacillating “...which in retrospect might have been a mistake”; the oxymoronic “...(I’m) the smartest man in the world, a--hole” — this coarse misfire speaking for itself of how far off-key Ozy’s voice warbles.

Granted, a handful of these are aimed at ironic effect in the tradition of Watchmen’s dualistic prose; but (a) Moore accomplished the same without ever compromising the character’s tone, and (b) Moore’s statuesquely superior golden-boy simply doesn’t speak in such an uncultivated vernacular, does not think like that, not in any candid conversation meant for other living ears less than blue.
(Litmus test: Would [[ASIN:B001QFYLJY Tom Stetchschulte's pitch-perfect Ozy]] perform such lines? I say thee nay, a-hole!)

The elaborated flashback of Wein’s fabrication hoists onto young Adrian a veritable fresh-off-the-boat bumpkin patois in the provincial “...to hide my light under a bushel” butting against a sci-fi-minded poster defining his boyhood bedroom wall. [Isn’t this post-atomic creature-feature kitsch untimely for 1945? No boyhood love for ’40s-contemporaneous Minutemen heroics?] The flaccidly deferential “...and I could not have agreed more” does not reflect the sovereign recalcitrance of a self-styled emissary for new world order. The diffident, validation-seeking “if one were to seriously consider it” does not resound of Veidt’s gold-plated egotism. The theistically-winded “thank God...” inward wonderment at Dr. Manhattan’s media arrival needless to say is not in keeping with Veidt’s unsentimentally pragmatic, analytical secularism.

And since when is Alexander the Great an accredited Harvard “major”? Since when is Veidt’s own middle name "Alexander", supposedly christened as such by his father’s too-conveniently thematically-contrived alike admiration for said conqueror of Antiquity? (...Maybe it runs in the family?) Nope, Moore’s foundational tale had Veidt’s diet low on emotional attachment, nigh indifferent to parents or their sudden death (in Watchmen depicted reclining on their headstone, nonchalantly chewing on a sprig of grass — Chapter XI, p.8); that gravesite tableau is here retconned into twin crosses at which we’re told Adrian “wept,” while another scene suggests a latent Oedipus complex. Veidt himself is made to suffer death by degrees as all of these reconfiguring missteps psychologically muddle the original Ozymandias too visibly with Wein’s smudging fingerprints: this Ozy reads like an imposter.

For a character who is centrally billed as “the World’s Smartest Man”, Wein sure keeps him busy nattering snotty inanities even while an entourage of anonymous bootlickers gush sycophantically about his alleged genius. We’re urged to believe that Veidt is exceptionally clever solely by their affected fawning, because, bereft of Moore’s wit or linguistic élan, his own dullard dialogue certainly fails to impress as much. Veidt's fanboyish doting on particulars of an "Outer Limits" episode — Wein’s own nostalgia registering too loudly here — espoused as the inspirational template for his secret terror design, submits to a shameless aping of ideas authored by evidently brighter TV-scribe minds. Duping foes into action against a manufactured threat is an age-old stratagem from Sun Tzu’s Art of War playbook, yet Wein has our quick-study history scholar poring over libraries only to naively cite ’60s sci-fi television as his primary source?

This parade of mental ineloquence only serves to foreground that putting words of convincingly brainy calibre into the head of a fictional smarty-pants character actually requires a writer sharp of acumen as Alan Moore. Wein’s faux-intellectual, wanting rendition reduces Ozymandias to a paint-by-numbers, ersatz caricature: Liberal popinjay, effete bookworm, offhandedly bisexual, halcyon-age Romanticist, narcissist prig — an elvish wisp of a man thinly scripted (Marvel method, judging from humdrum fight scene banter) to fit Jae Lee’s wispy-fine illustrations.

Jae’s storytelling in places isn’t always true to text descriptions, or vice-versa. The splintering bone of a snapped tibia, seen graphically puncturing the flesh of a boy’s assaulted shin, is not the shattered “kneecap” twice promised by Veidt’s narration; nor is there any hint of knowing irony in this misdiagnosis to signal an unreliable narrator (although his recounted memories writhe with sinuously creeping, Lovecraftian omens) or faulty recollection in spite of asserted prodigious faculties.

Bullied and “beaten to a bloody pulp” (…yet not according to the milder imagery) “daily” throughout his grade school years (…going unattested in adult evidence of his immaculate visage), evinced in young Adrian are shades of a budding clinical psychopathy where apathetically rationalizing the permanently crippling injuries inflicted by aforesaid bone-breaking reprisal. (This same bully-victimized-childhood shtick is recycled as motivation for costumed players in two-and-a-half other "Before Watchmen" books, near becoming a PSA campaign alongside the already documented juvenile abuses endured by Rorschach.) In Wein’s usage, the scared-straight subjugation of these antagonist peers acts to subtly mimic in miniature Veidt’s later-orchestrated global intimidation tactic (and possibly allusion to WWII in the bully-axis of “Jerry” und sidekicks?).

Ten-year-old Adrian — which would place this formative incident in 1949 — exacts said rough justice after supposedly enrolling by his own enterprising initiative in a local Kung Fu dojo. But this Karate Kid scenario presumes too much cultural assimilation contradicting the reality (even granting alternate reality) of post-WWII America, whereas Chinese martial arts didn’t take a foothold stateside until 20 years on when popularized by the TV and film kinetics of Bruce Lee, access to its teaching previously xenophobically restricted [as dramatized in "Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story"; or to quote from Wikipedia: “However, aside from jujitsu, Asian martial arts remained largely unknown in the West even as late as the 1950s; for example, in the 1959 popular fiction Goldfinger, karate was described to readers in near-mythical terms...” — Modern history of East Asian martial arts].

Given these period roadblocks, by far it would make better sense for Adrian to have gathered Eastern fighting prowess only in later years during his globetrekker Eurasian odyssey, per Moore. Revising that account, Wein has Ozy’s monologizing train of thought awkwardly derailed by the (again untrue to character) inelegant segue “I should note that...”, interrupting himself to include seeming near-forgotten mention of his ‘resumed’ martial arts studies abroad, as though his depicted mastery of Shaolin Monk-styled one-finger acrobatics could conceivably be acquired in incidentally remembered spare moments between sightseeing sojourns.

And by what mode of unspecified foreign employment might this wayfaring teenager have managed “to amass a small nest-egg” — paid in 1950s Third World wages, no less — affording his return in clover to New York by age 19? Economics plot holes here be...

The story’s get-rich-quick bookkeeping becomes even more dodgy from there [FYI: stock market performance is mathematically chaotic, not strictly rational, so intelligence wouldn't lend any predictive advantage], along with the accounting of its timeline as the referenced passage of weeks and months compresses prior events overseas into a narrowing window of opportunity. By Wein’s chronology, Veidt would be required to have hot-footed from Turkey to Egypt to Tibet, and all stops in-between — en route gainfully employed, collecting martial arts esoteria plus perfecting his Turkish, then backtracking to Turkey for a boat ticket home — entirely during the months of 1957 (some pugilistic pages later mislabeled “my decades of martial arts training” as though circa 1985).

Meanwhile, the shadowy images of Adrian’s first virginal crime-fighting forays, supposedly occurring in 1959 New York, are unmindful of period coifs or squaresville fashions native to the day — blame the Jae Lee wardrobe department for that styling uniformity.

When a neglected sometime-girlfriend named Miranda (improbably played as too much of a sexually assertive proto-feminist for the era) invites Veidt to wine-and-dining one evening, he aloofly declares that he has no time for such social frivolities amid his empire-building schedule; yet immediately thereafter his narration discloses that he has already made considered preparations regarding his costume in anticipation of attending a forthcoming Halloween party. We readers of lesser supergenius can only speculate at how this not-to-be-missed opportunity to bob for apples and revel in masked party games, apparently prioritized well in advance on Veidt’s social calendar (notwithstanding previous claims to recluse-genius hyperfocus), might play into the greater political machinations of the World’s Smartest Trick-or-Treater...

Purple toga in hand, the remainder of his impromptu-assembled crime-fighting getup is thoughtfully accessorized using museum-grade genuine article antiquities (don't worry, it’s all insured!), arriving at his masked moniker by an equally preposterous spot poetry recital flung at gun-wielding police — contrary to “adopting Rameses the Second's Greek name...”, as Moore would have it. Then it’s off to swap whiz-bang “behold my skills!” jousting in hero-versus-hero aerobics routines against the homophobe, oafishly drafted Comedian — not the greenhorn defeat avowed in Moore’s version (Chapter XI, p.18).

All of this narratively-hamstrung immobility is staged between Bonus Disc outtake footage of arduously trudging small-talk (learn how to pronounce Ozy’s name in two easy lessons!) and couch-potato puffs of Boomer-icon video-wall loitering (Marilyn Monroe putting in a confectionary appearance, just because) before tracking onto familiar ground of the closing act — though how Veidt might manage to freehand-scale the exterior of a glass tower whose meager window-seam handholds are spaced more than an arms-length apart is anyone’s guess... (Stretch Armstrong by night? There's also no après-murder exit strategy by that route, genius.) At least he has impeccable fashion sense.

…Picky, picky. To my ear, the singular backstory addition not squealing out of tune is the poofy occupation proposed for Veidt’s father. Otherwise, hit the mute button and stick to eyeballing Jae’s refined decor, whose art deco layouts here evoke both the clockwork uniformity of Watchmen pages and a children’s storybook aesthetic peculiarity complemented by the toper-nosed blush of June Chung’s chalky colors.

In fairness to Wein, the quandary in trying to port Watchmen’s mystery villain into prequel territory is that for the sake of preserving ambiguity, by story’s finish the hypothetical uninitiated reader is (maybe?) obliged to exit the theater with no standing prejudice against Ozymandias; neither does his impending nefarious role permit attaching too charismatic a rooting interest; ergo, much of what we get here is just a dramatically neutral holding pattern. And continuity errors.

A flurry of technical snags swirl about the Antarctic hideaway. Whereas Moore’s story first visits that haven of vague origins in 1975 (Chapter IV, p.21) at an imprecise “coastline” location a mere “20 miles” inland (Chapter X, pp.25-27), Wein places its dubious construction entirely between June-November 1960 on “several square miles” of land “procured” in “the most inaccessible area” of the continent. Fact-checking:

• From whom might this real estate allegedly be procured given that the continent’s lands, under 1959 international treaty, recognize no claim to ownership?

• The Antarctic Circle is subject to polar night (twilight or no sunrise) during austral winter months: How are construction equipment, materials and workforce transported with hurried facility in frozen darkness, seasonal sea ice, merciless winds, and regular blizzard conditions to toil in this most remote inland locale of Wein’s account, not to mention crew accommodations and food supplies for the duration? Permanent pack ice besides covers all but the rocky fringes of the continent, restricting feasible build-site options [“less than 0.4% of the total area of Antarctica consists of bare ground” (Fox & Cooper 1994)].

• What’s the point of Veidt having implicitly arranged an underhanded “accident” to forever silence Karnak’s three enlisted “best architects in the world” [I’m sure their deaths wouldn’t attract media attention…] when there would still remain minimally hundreds of construction personnel having hands-on knowledge of the frosty fortress design?

• Why is Veidt made so anxious to rush the building’s completion only to subsequently sit there watching TV for the next 20 years? [The rush is all Wein’s: he needed a plot device to visually replay ’60s landmarks.] This setup is inconsistent with the flashback in Watchmen (Chapter XI, p.18) showing a neophyte Ozy of more modest means viewing just three standard television sets stacked in makeshift arrangement at an indistinct lair, his narration there giving no indication of ever having met JFK, let alone serving as chummy political adviser. That same spiel (Chapter XI, p.22) implies Veidt did not cultivate his vast fortune until patenting the electric “spark hydrant” in years after the 1966 Crime-Busters meeting.

• Tossing the TV remote of old, WeinTech wires the boob-tube monitor wall with circa-1960 speedy speech recognition capability for on-demand video control made marvelously possible by analog hardware predating silicon transistor development — Moore’s law in Bizarro-world reverse! Said tech upgrade needlessly installs a plot hole as well, seeing as the climax of Watchmen has Veidt reaching for his (now deposed) TV remote.

• And why /how /“what the-?!” does Wein have the three Asian servants prematurely on site at Karnak’s completion in late 1960 when the "Nova Express" text supplement (dated 1975) of Watchmen Chapter XI indicated that these devoted footmen were post-Nam ex-VC political refugees given charitable sanctuary by Veidt? (...“D’oh!”)

What's more, a television news report in Chapter VII (p.13) states that writer Max Shea went missing “two years” prior to October 1985, corroborated by the "New Frontiersman" postscript of Chapter VIII which reports that other creatives went missing at the same time. Wein displaces this masse disappearance to April 1981, with Veidt undisguisedly soliciting Shea’s services during an arranged meeting at Gunga Diner (there noting that Shea was the final recruit for his project) and then personally delivering a commencement address on the secret isle, contrary to the dummy “paranoid movie company” hiring ploy cited in the pages of Watchmen. [Direct all No-Prize correspondence to Seymour Wein at Pioneer Publishing, N.Y.]

Nor does it demonstrate sage foresight to invite future legal repercussions by self-incriminatingly staging a press-heavy ribbon-cutting ceremony for a midtown research institute ultimately acting as the lightning rod instrumental in the death of millions — ‘After Watchmen’ is shaping up to be "Criminal Negligence Charges + Multi-billion-dollar Class-action Lawsuit" even before getting to the Ozy-Gate bombshell of Rorschach’s journal publication...

The 26-page "Dollar Bill" one-shot comic included in this collected edition, also scripted by Wein, is a similarly banal bungle (related in first-person POV, post-mortem — ugh), but at least the foregone conclusion of that counterfeit hero’s throwaway backstory has the reasonable excuse of being conjured whole cloth from the barest glimpsed scraps of original comic panels.

Ready for his close-up, Mr. DeWein’s sappy-go-lucky Dollar Bill spends the sum of his screwball-comedy chronicle mouthing such charmingly inconsequential fluff as: beaming about his college football glory days; hamming it up in hopeless show-biz auditions; optimistically slogging through dwindling employment prospects; and his eventual acquired affection for derring-do crime-fighting escapades. The tale zips along peachy as a Jimmy Stewart pastiche, artistically aglow with the wholesome polish of Steve Rude’s golden pen. Then, fumbling toward the end zone, on page 22 Wein has our otherwise benign cardboard cut-out of a sparkle-toothed poster-boy suddenly lobbing a moralizing grenade about “the Good Lord” lethally punishing a lesbian cohort’s “deviant lifestyle” (capping two other homophobic wisecracks in earlier dialogue) before retiring the reluctant hero to his perforated fate. The story lets those bigoted interjections pass unexamined — no follow-up, not played ironically toward any progressive statement (well, apart from the pious narrator’s own imminent demise), nor flanked by any alternate examples of period-token prejudice — leaving one to wonder what to make of their isolated inclusion (better developed in Darwyn Cooke’s “Before Watchmen: Minutemen” volume).

The aft end of this reprint volume is anchored to the black-and-white-and-damned "Curse of the Crimson Corsair", an undead-pirate yarn owing more to Flying Dutchman lore and perhaps the screen franchise of Johnny Depp than to Alan Moore. This ship was a horror to navigate in its original comic run, no thanks to its serialized bones being strewn across the deck of "Before Watchmen" titles as two-page backup installments. It floats all-new bodies unrelated to Watchmen alumni, just a companion vessel adrift off the bloody shores of her meta-narrative "Tales of the Black Freighter" comic-within-the-comic.

As in that pirate feature, the viewpoint character here may be regarded as symbolic of Veidt’s self-made circumstance, his crowning achievement a ‘marked’ allusion to Rorschach’s undoing (so to speak), added to the sacrificial pyre of unfortunates spent in his would-be salvific quest. On closer sight, methinks all o’ this tale be allegory for Watchmen’s narrative arc in full, stirring deeper than surface waters would appear — the soul-entrapping casket’s facade resembling the RumRunner neon sign (“frozen scream of the bloody man” referring to Rorschach’s snowy execution); the flayed(/moulting) Snakehead made an avatar for Rorschach’s unmasking, his madly cursing “Mi piel!” [‘My skin!’] echoing Chapter V’s “No! My Face! Give it back!”; Cloud City of the New World subbing for New York, or “Veidt’s new utopia” (“...the body, still screaming, was thrown down...” reading like the opening salvos of Rorschach’s journal); black hellship sailing a [nuclear] wintery clime (“cold ash of countless funeral pyres drifted down from ebony skies...”); its doomed skipper (Veidt, formerly “itinerant sailor” under Wein) shackled in gold(/wealth), ‘Gordon’ knot of his own making...

— Does the Crimson Corsair’s saga in fact chart the apocalyptic aftermath due of Veidt’s shortsighted plan?

Turns out the untranslated native tongue is legitimate Nahuatl: someone invested a scholarly effort to encode story clues. "Xipe Totec" [‘our lord the flayed one’] is the Aztec god of gold, “believed by the Aztecs to be the god that invented war,” to quote from Wikipedia, “represented wearing a flayed human skin... often taken from sacrificial victims who had their hearts cut out, and some representations of Xipe Totec show a stitched-up wound in the chest”; I'm guessing the ceremonial “ix chel!” chant approximates “He lives!” (man playing god). Illuminating on the slave ship scenes of plague: “The deity... [was also] said to afflict mortals with rashes, abscesses and skin and eye infections,” just like Vei...Gordon, later symbolically blinded to his folly as the final line of the story suggests human conflict is inevitable (“...it’s in the blood”), realized too late by the voice of his reflected conscience. The woman N’Tunga first identifies herself as Gordon’s “ministering angel”, but her subsequently administered “gifts” prove her an angel of death; perhaps of significance, her name [near as I can figure by Google] is (Kenyan) Bantu language for “...i am...”, so where Gordon uses her name in dialogue it may dually be serving to admit his inadvertent role as ambassador of war. Mixing cultural metaphors toward that end, the closing chapter title, "Wide Were His Dragon Wings", appears to reference mutineer McLauchlan abask by ‘morning star’ Lucifer at nuke sunrise — cue Oppenheimer’s “...destroyer of worlds.”

Captain Wein abandons script after the first leg of this three-part voyage, leaving artist John Higgins to singlehandedly helm its treacherous course — aye, taking her down to Davy Jones. The lyrical cut of Higgins’ jib isn't half bad, if half is — awash in missed opportunities to polish the prose, and captions losing clarity in too many grammatically orphaned sentence fragments (the digital font also looking too regimented for the story subject; it should have been a hand-lettered scrawl, as if a captain’s log), presentation additionally tormented by a clumsily shifting verb-tense during bedlam scenes of gory torture. Higgins’ etchings throughout render pearls of stupendously rich micro-detailing that may go to waste at print-reduced size, better admired writ large on a monitor in digital form (available for free viewing at DC's website galleries). ’Tis no golden treasure, but the book might net a rating of three-and-then-some doubloons if digging its ghastly timbre, not a sight for queasy souls.

This book contains two stories: Ozymandias and Curse of the Crimson Corsair.

Ozymandias was fantastic. As the prinicpal force behind the events in the original Watchmen, we don't learn much about Adrian Veidt (Ozymandias) other than that he is the "smartest man in the world" and he has a plan to save civilization from nuclear annihilation (from ourselves). This story changes all that. We are taken back to Adrian's childhood and shown how he grew up as a prodigy. Interspersed with this is his growin concern for humanity, particularly in the face of Dr. Manhattan and nuclear weapons. I found Veidt's life and plans fascinating, as he becomes a somewhat sympathetic character, as opposed to the egotistical near-villain he is presented as in the original series. Discovering the plan weaving through Watchmen was pretty cool. Len Wein did an amazing job placing his story with the framework of the original, and also tying in to the various other prequels, particularly The Comedian and Dr. Manhattan. Jae Lee's artwork fit the tone and subject wonderfully.

The second story, Curse of the Crimson Corsair, was a link to the Tales of the Black Freighter in the original series. I believe this particular story was a 2-3 page back-up in each of the prequel comics. I was not interested at all in this story. Nothing about it really captured my attention.

As a collection, this was a little disappointing. However, the Ozymandias story was fantastic. If you are a Watchmen fan, it is nearly required reading.

I received a review copy of this book from Netgalley and DC Comics in exchange for an honest review.

These are great books as a set but the Ozymandias one is by far the most meningfull in my mind. As he was such an important character in Watchmen yet, you don't get to see his story as much as you should. This book is great.

The Ozymandias section blew my roof off, shows what went into his plan that took place in WATCHMEN. Amazingly written and the comic panels are so artistic Ive never read a comic set up like it.

Great deal for a great story.

the ozy half of this book is amazing and highly recommened the crimson corsair is just terrible I didn't even finish it because it was so bad

There is one pro and one con to this book. Pro: Jae Lee's art is beautiful. Con: Len Wein writing is long and drawn out, and bereft of any interesting reveals.

Jae Lee's art is great. His dynamic figures set to beautiful scare backgrounds built of colorscapes is wonderful. However, his repetitive use of the same panel layout gets boring.

Len Wein writing really brings nothing to the table. To be fair, Ozymandias shouldn't have gotten six issues. The entire Minutemen only got six issues. The Crimson Corsair and Dollar Bill stories are just filler. Dollar Bill could have been summed up by Darwin Cooke as a 6-8 page addition to his Minutemen series.