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Adrian Veidt (Watchmen)

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Wikipedia This page uses content from Wikipedia. The original article was at Ozymandias (comics). The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with DC Database, the text of Wikipedia is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
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Contents

History

Born in 1939, the son of rich immigrant parents, Adrian Veidt was found to be incredibly intelligent. After his parents and his teachers became suspicious of his grades, he successfully hid his intelligence by deliberately achieving average grades. After his parents' deaths, 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 former 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 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, and how powerless they were to stop it. Veidt was inspired to do just that.

In 1975, two years before vigilante crime fighters (superheroes) are banned by the "Keene Act," he retires from super heroism, marketing his image for money. This helps bankroll his scheme of creating a catastrophic event and deceive the world into uniting against a common enemy—in Veidt's case, a horrific alien invasion. 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, and invents a limited form of teleportation based in part on the studies of (and studies by) Doctor Manhattan. Upon completion, he arranged the murder of all of 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, causing Manhattan to exile himself to Mars. When the Comedian inadvertently learned of Veidt's plans, Veidt personally murdered him as well. The story of Watchmen begins several hours after the killing, with police detectives investigating the crime.

The death of the Comedian caught the attention of Rorschach, who investigated the crime and mistakenly theorized that there existed a conspiracy to murder masked adventurers. Although Veidt arranged an assassination attempt on himself to throw off suspicion, he framed Rorschach 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, 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 over three million people in New York City. The world governments fell for this ruse, and agreed to a union to oppose this new alien menace. Seeing as how Veidt's plot had the desired effect of uniting the nations of the world and averting 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 alone refuses to keep silent, telling Doctor Manhattan that he will never compromise, not even in the face of armageddon – Manhattan must kill Rorschach before he can tell anybody what he knows, and does so. When Veidt asks the precognitive 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, leaving Veidt once again in doubt as to whether or not his plan was successful.


Powers and Abilities

Powers

None known.

Abilities

Great agility, even into his mid-40s. Able to catch a bullet. Fighting skills sufficient to hold off both Nite-Owl and Rorschach at the same time.


Paraphernalia

Equipment: None known.
Transportation: None known.
Weapons: None known.


Notes

  • No special notes.

Trivia

  • No trivia.


See Also


Recommended Reading

  • None.


Links and References



Footnotes


Watchmen
DC

This article features characters, items or events exclusive to the continuity of the "Watchmen limited series," or the Watchmen Movie. This template will categorize all articles that include it into the Watchmen category.

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