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It was almost immediately after the twelfth, concluding issue of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen that the popular clamoring for a sequel began. It was no wonder; this comic series had achieved legendary status in the medium by its third issue, and to this day, only Art Spiegelman’s Maus compares to it in terms of wide public respect among graphic novels.¹ Moreover, for all of the depth and intricacy of its symbolism, the subtlety and completeness of its characterization, it was a superhero comic. That people expected continuing serialization was par for the course, especially in the mid-1980s. But Moore and Gibbons resisted these requests;² they had told a self-contained story, with a beginning, middle, and end, with characters and situations in its service, not the other way around. Furthermore, though little has been written on the topic, Moore weaves a number of hints as to what happens after the end of the narrative into the book itself. In fact, these hints are so numerous, and all pointing in so similar a direction, that the aftermath of the events in Watchmen is all but spelled out. The sequel, in a way, is already there.

At the end of Watchmen - and if you don’t know this already, and don’t care to, do please stop reading this now - the grand plan of Adrian “Ozymandias” Veidt has come to its fruition. He has tricked the nations of the earth into thinking that an extraterrestrial horror has manifested and died in New York City, killing thousands; and this colossal and lurid threat from without has led to the end of dissension within. The nuclear brinksmanship of the US and the USSR is over, and the world is united. Veidt is triumphant, though very few know of it.

This is the situation at the end; but this is not, in fact, the actual end. The end, the final panel of the book, depicts Seymour, an abused working Joe at the radical-right New Frontiersman newspaper; he has been told to get something from the “crank file” to run in the next edition. In this final panel, he is reaching for Rorschach’s journal. He doesn’t know what he has, but we do; this contains the full story of Rorschach’s hunt for the “mask killer” - the story of Watchmen, from the vigilante’s perspective. And it contains Rorschach’s final conclusion, in his usual clipped style: “Whatever precise nature of this conspiracy, Adrian Veidt responsible.”³

The impending discovery of Rorschach’s journal by The New Frontiersman is not necessarily the doom of Veidt’s great work. The New Frontiersman is depicted throughout the narrative as essentially a crank, reactionary outfit, though possibly one with a decent-sized readership; perhaps Alan Moore anticipated Fox News. It could certainly be argued that it hasn’t the clout to harm Veidt’s utopia. But it is significant that the final image of the story is of a hand reaching for the journal; of the discovery, by absurd hands or otherwise, of the story that blows open the secret.

It’s not a lock, but there’s much more to the idea that Veidt’s plan will unravel than simply this.

Another major clue is in the mastermind’s superhero name. Ever the admirer of antiquity, Veidt claims to have taken it from Rameses the Second’s Greek name.⁴ True though this may be, in the world of the reader, Rameses II’s Greek name is little more than trivia, a historical footnote; any discussion of Egyptology will most likely refer to Rameses II as Rameses II. In our world, the name “Ozymandias” has a wholly different cultural relevance. It is the title of an 1817 poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, in which a traveler tells the poet of finding a ruined and broken statue amidst the vast desert sands, engraved, “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” It is a poem about the futility of human endeavor, about the erosion by time of even the most towering achievements. Alan Moore certainly knows of this poem; he quotes the statue’s boast in chapter eleven, the chapter relating Veidt’s history. It can only be a sign of the fate of Veidt’s plan, that his name is taken from a poem about the eventual ruin of great works.

Within the novel, Rameses II is not Veidt’s only inspiration, however. He also idolizes Alexander the Great, retracing the conqueror’s journeys in his youth. At the end of these travels, disillusionment hits; “I saw at last his failings,” says Veidt. “He’d not united all the world, nor built a unity that would survive him.”⁵ Veidt resolves to do better. But it’s a bad start, and another bad sign.

Veidt’s own confidence in his absolute success is itself imperfect. When last we see Adrian, he converses with Dr. Manhattan, here in full “Dr.-Manhattan-as-God” symbolism; the blue man has only just walked on water for no particular reason, and he visits Veidt as the man meditates. Veidt seeks absolution from the doctor: “I did the right thing, didn’t I? It all worked out in the end.”

“‘In the end?’” replies Manhattan. “Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.”⁶ And he fades away before Veidt can get him to clarify. The last we see of Adrian, he is standing, looking over his shoulder, apprehensive: the first real sign of self-doubt we’ve seen in him. Here, at the end. Or “end.”

But perhaps the subtlest, and yet most revealing, revelation of the doom of Ozymandias’ plan is contained in Tales of the Black Freighter, the comic-within-a-comic that is woven throughout the narrative.

Tales of the Black Freighter - or, more specifically, “Marooned,” the specific issue of Black Freighter we see in Watchmen - is the story of a man who finds himself on a deserted island, after the sinking of his ship by the titular Freighter. Said Freighter is a ship from Hell, crewed by the damned. The marooned sailor is convinced that the Freighter is making its way to his home, there to destroy everything that he loves. He devises a desperate plan, building a raft that takes its buoyancy from floating on the backs of his dead and bloated comrades, and makes for home. But the horrors of his journey and situation drive him mad, and he kills his own wife upon arrival at his house, mistaking her for an invader. Pursued by a mob, he swims out to the waiting Freighter, come to claim his soul.

Ozymandias, too, builds his plan upon the backs of corpses; not only those he kills to cover it up, but the New Yorkers he kills in the “alien’s” manifestation. By the end of things, he too destroys those closest to him - he callously murders his three servants and confidants, and presents his beautiful pet, Bubastis, with a similar fate. But then, The Black Freighter weaves through a lot of the characters’ stories, and these Veidt parallels alone are not conclusive.

However, on page 20 of chapter five of Watchmen, the unnamed Black Freighter protagonist is attacked by a shark, mottled in color, “neither black, nor wholly white.” The sailor kills it, with some difficulty, and dines on its flesh. Immediately afterwards, on page 22 of that same chapter, a detective receives an anonymous telephone tip, which he mishears as “raw shark.” The actual subject of the tip, and of this symbolic correspondence, is obvious: Rorschach. And whose journey does Rorschach attempt to violently interrupt, before being put down as a result of it? Quite simply, Veidt’s.

Finally, let us return to Veidt’s final conversation with Manhattan. “I know people think me callous, but I’ve made myself feel every death,” he tells the doctor. “By day I imagine endless faces. By night… Well, I dream, about swimming towards a hideous… No. Never mind.”⁶

For now, he only dreams of it. Ozymandias is the sailor of The Black Freighter, assuredly, but he has yet to realize the same fate, in full. He has completed his morbid plan, and resorted in the end to killing those closest to him, consumed by his monomania. To come, then, is realization, and the pursuit of the mob, and finally, utter damnation - the becoming of precisely the sort of monstrousness he had striven to undo.

It is tantalizing to consider just what form his damnation would take. Would he destroy himself on realizing that he’d not unified all the world, nor built unity would survive him? Would he continue his quest, becoming in the process little more than another world-threatening superpower, joining the crew of the ship he’d hoped to thwart? Would he be destroyed from without, a scapegoat for the world’s own sins? We will never know. But it is enough, and more than enough, to know that his plan is doomed, that his future is subtly but certainly woven into the story of Watchmen.