A hilariously depressing webcomic has resurfaced poking fun at how the events of 2020 prove that the logic of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen actually had a major flaw. Easily one of the most popular series of all time, the ending of Watchmen includes one of the most famous twists in comics. The moment revolves around the smartest person on the planet – former masked hero Adrian Veidt, aka Ozymandias. As tensions heat up between the Soviet Union and the United States, nuclear war appears imminent. Ozymandias uses cold, harsh logic to reset the Doomsday Clock and bring humanity together, but real life suggests his methods wouldn’t have succeeded.
Veidt creates a gargantuan, squid-like monster with incredible psychic power using the help of some of the world’s best artists and scientists, who he later kills to keep the secret. Ozymandias then teleports the monster to New York. It releases a psychic shockwave that kills half of New York and then dies itself immediately after. Believing the squid to have been an alien race attacking humanity, the powers of the world set aside their differences and come together to face a common threat. While Doctor Manhattan makes sure that Ozymandias knows his solution won’t last forever, it’s nevertheless a success in radically bringing the two nations into political and even cultural unity.
The webcomic shared on Tumblr by medli20 shows Ozymandias explaining his plan and then a personification of 2020 laughing first hysterically, then sadistically, at the idea that humanity will be brought together by a common threat. 2020 was an extremely difficult year for society. COVID-19 impacted every corner of the Earth and was like nothing humanity has faced in recent history. Yet, despite being faced with a common enemy, there was little sense that the world – or even individual countries – experienced the unity imagined in Watchmen.
While Watchmen imagines Ozymandias’ attack leading America and Russia to embrace each other on every level, with their cultures intermingling even down to the level of fast food, the seismic events of COVID-19 showed that this is sadly a pipe dream. Even within the United States itself, different attitudes to the pandemic have spurred a sense of social disunity, present from the highest level of politics down to everyday life. While follow-up stories have suggested that the impact of Watchmen‘s final twist go beyond what fans saw in the original story, medli20’s webcomic suggests that even the brief burst of togetherness depicted in Moore and Gibbons’ story is unrealistic.
That the comic is once more being shared in 2021, over a year after it was first popular, underlines both how relatable the sense of a fractured world is and the sheer length of time the world has been affected by COVID-19. While Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen depicts an arrogant villain doing the unthinkable to attain temporary unity, medli20’s suggests that even Ozymandias’ unforgivable cynicism was optimistic in hindsight.
