Posted in: Comics | Tagged: before watchmen, Comics, dc, jae lee, len wein, Ozymandias, Watchmen

Squaring The Circle Of Before Watchmen: Ozymandias

Published Wed, 04 Jul 2012 10:00:49 -0500

So we've all read the Daily Beast interview by now, right?

The original Watchmen made quite a lot of the rectangles and circles. The nine panel grid, holding smiley face buttons, Dr Manhattan foreheads, watches and Martian constructs. One of the more memorable scenes was Ozymandias standing in front of his rectangular TV monitors, with a circular spotlight on him, as he shouts his success to a world that will never hear it.

He sat before those screens on a rather functional chair. In Before Watchmen: Ozymandias, he instead sits on a statue chair, in the shape of a griffin, built around a circle image from the back. A circle, breaking out of the rigid rectangular structure. And that's how the whole book looks. The circle bursts out of the rectangles, forcing them to fit around it, always in the vertically central axis, making layouts symmetrically. Take one page, which also revisits Gunga Diner in an earlier time. Everything from panel shape to internal objects created by circles and rectangles.

For everything has structure, and even breaking out of the internal structure keeps you inside the overall shape. It's stunning, and the only books to challenge this control of panels and layout with such grace right now are Batwoman and Acme Novelty Library. Odd company to keep.

The book takes a journey through Ozymandias' past, and it goes rather Colonial. The whitest of white man, making his way through the swarthiest Mohammedan countries and inscrutible Oriental states, learning, growing while all the time domineering.

The violence will come. As will the sex of course, with both male and females the object of his ardour, with a Refrigerator moment just round the corner.

And strangely, for as much os Ozymandias seems to have a relativist approach to life and reality in Watchmen, here he seems to be living in more of an objectivist dreamland, that sees him taking steps to exploit his brilliance and survive in a cruel and hostile world, without taking umbrage, indeed, planning to control it in the manner of past Empires.

With something one eyed and squidlike in the back of his mind, of course.