Who the hell is Seymour? He’s a writer at the New Frontiersman, where Rorschach mails his journal and is the final character depicted in both the graphic novel and the movie. Moore says he is “the most low-life, worthless, nerdy sort of character in the entire book who finally has the fate of the world resting in his pudging fingers”.
So naturally, he’s quite identifiable to the likes of us! Just kidding. Anyway, you’re in his position. You have Rorschach’s journal and figure out the circumstances of the disaster. Ozymandias, Adrian Veidt, is a murderer of millions of innocents hoping to save billions from nuclear war. Rorschach did not return, so you can guess his opinion - “Never compromise. Not even in the face of Armageddon”.
Do you expose Veidt’s crime or burn the journal to maintain the pretence?
Well, thing is, even if you take the journal 100% seriously, it’s light on evidence. Rorschach says “Whatever it is, Veidt’s behind it”, but after that he disappears, so it’s not like it’s conclusive, and it’s not nearly as compelling as the psychic crush of alienesque imagery and years of nightmares to follow.
Frankly, I figure the CT-sphere will kick into overdrive and the world will be awash in competing theories accusing just about everybody, including the Jews, the corporations, Nixon, etc. Veidt will get accused by-and-by just for being famous.
Maybe not, but the smoking gun it points to - Veidt’s complex at Karnak in Antarctica - will validate everything in it and be rather hard to explain away, even for Ozy.
As an afterthought, the real piece of lingering evidence is the signed and dated sketch of the “alien”, created by Hira Manish, but we last saw it floating on a beach next to the deserted Central-American island where the plan was hatched. Some survivors know about this island (i.e. the people who sent Edward Blake to investigate it, setting off the chain of events that led to his murder), but not its significance. If anyone ever checks it out, they’ll find a sunken ship and, maybe, a painting washed up on shore.
Well, aside from Drieberg and Juspeczyk, there aren’t any witnesses left on Earth. Veidt has some unusual machinery at Karnak - I think it safe to assume he’ll destroy or erase anything incriminating.
Since as I recall Ozymandias intended to keep on with his plan to reshape the world I release it. After all, I’d expect him to keep on going with the same kind of ruthlessness.
Of course, I also have the out-of-universe knowledge that such an act isn’t necessary to prevent nuclear war. So no doubt that skews my judgement.
In universe, though, nuclear war was pretty much inevitable. Nixon had decided to give the Soviets “a week” to withdraw from Afghanistan (why anyone would care enough about Afghanistan to kick off Armageddon is a mystery, but I guess we’re to assume that Nixon assumed that this was only the first Soviet-led invasion, and stopping them now - while painful - was better than trying to stop them later).
I think that to a large extent, that’s what Moore actually intended for us to think.
He thought that the story would get people investigating, exposing the cracks, and if it doesn’t completely collapse causing lots CTs so that A LA the JFK assassination, most people don’t believe the original story.
It wasn’t in the movie, but in the Graphic Novel, it’s actually and article in the New Frontiersman speculating if a dead circus strongman was really Hooded Justice that gets Ozymandias investigating and eventually convinces him that Hooded Justice was murdered by the Comedian(or at least it’s really strongly implied) that starts the enmity between the two of them.
Well, as I recall, it was Hollis Mason’s memoir Under the Hood that speculated (inconclusively) that HJ was a circus strongman named Rolf Müller, and that a John Doe corpse might have been Müller, though that just piles assumption on top of assumption.
And I just discovered that DC published some prequel stories titled Before Watchmen that sheds light on this and other aspects of the characters’ lives. If I get around to reading them, I will not be considering them “canon”, unless I like them, but probably not even then.
Anyway, Veidt’s take on Blake was “as intelligent men facing lunatic times, we were very much alike - despising each other instantly.” I could buy an immediate and permanent mutual hatred - no need to create additional motives for it.
Here’s what happened in the Minutemen mini-series:[spoiler]Rolf Muller was not Hooded Justice. Hooded Justice was a man named Norbert Veldon. But they were some similarities between Muller and Veldon.
Muller was a German pedophile who had fled to America. Silhouette had been looking for a child murderer when she was killed. After her death Hollis Mason picked up the investigation. He found evidence that the child murderer was Hooded Justice (who had disappeared by this time). But Mason found where Hooded Justice was hiding and when he went to arrest Hooded Justice they fought and Mason killed him.
Mason later found it was a set up. The Comedian had also been looking for Hooded Justice after he disappeared and knew that Hollis Mason was looking. The Comedian tracked down Muller and realized he was the child killer. He killed Muller but figured out Muller was not Hooded Justice. But to get revenge on Hooded Justice and Hollis Mason he planted evidence for Mason to find that made it look like Hooded Justice was the child killer. He expected that Mason would find and arrest Hooded Justice and the resulting exposure and trial would ruin the reputation of both men. Mason killing Hooded Justice instead was a surprise but one that didn’t seem to bother Blake much. Mason, of course, was shocked to realize he had killed an innocent man.[/spoiler]
Not quite. Veldon was Metropolis’s lover when Mason was shopping Under the Hood around (dude has a type, for sure), long after the incident with HJ, which happened before Nite Owl retired. (Note the scene where he’s sleeping after killing HJ, all his hair is still brown, by the time he has his encounter with Veldon, most of it’s gone white.) HJ’s real identity is never actually revealed.
The Karnak complex isn’t a secret lair - there’s a whole interview with Ozy that happens there. I doubt Ozy’s going to leave the incriminating bits lying around, either.
In the graphic novel, Veidt never mentions that New Frontiersman article when recalling his investigation; he just says that he researched his masked predecessors, noted that Hooded Justice disappeared in the mid-'50s, and learned through government sources that an operative named Edward Blake had (a) been tasked with unearthing HJ back then, and (b) reported failure.
Veidt suspects Blake killed HJ and reported failure, but admits he can’t prove it.
Possibly because Blake did fail. A plausible case has been put forth that an early panel in the book shows an aged Captain Metropolis and Hooded Justice in the restaurant - possibly celebrating the anniversary of HJ’s first appearance in public.
They’re…okay. Not great, but still kinda fun. It’s a sort of “Secret Origins” thing: let’s fill in a few of the blank spaces in the story. Nothing much new gets revealed; nothing canon gets contradicted. It’s DC in full “Damage Control” mode, working to make sure that established continuity is preserved.
And he already destroyed parts of it (the incriminating parts, hopefully), when he killed his collaborators, as I recall.
The biggest threat to Adrian’s secrets is Adrian himself - he wants people to know how smart he is, and he’ll probably leave clues around “accidentally” - after all this is the guy who is known to be Oxymandias, and sets up his secret system with a password of “Ramses II” (and the system is set up to ask for more letters if “Ramses” is entered).
Are you sure your out-of-universe knowledge is correct? As I recall it, the big destabilizing influence that had brought the world to the brink was Doctor Manhattan, and we’ve had no such Demiurge among us in the real world.
Well, Nixon presumably assumed he had Dr. Manhattan on-side which gave the US a tremendous edge in a nuclear war. Or any kind of war. The kind of edge that makes people aggressive and anxious to use it as far as they can get away with.
So really, all Ozymandias had to do was run his “mess with Dr. Manhattan’s head” plan unchanged or otherwise just, y’know, *talk *to the guy, get him to fuck off to Mars permanently and the temperature of decision-making heads would have cooled mightily on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
Well, sure, except once Doc leaves for Mars things do get all brink-of-nuclear-war in no time flat; if Veidt had stopped his plan there, Nixon’s still got the military on full alert at DEFCON 2 by chapter ten, right? Contemplating a first strike after noting that he’s never really thought this through before?