Ozymandias


First appearance Watchmen #1 (1986)

Adrian Veidt was born in 1939, the son of rich immigrant parents. After his parents' deaths, he inherited their substantial fortune at age 17, but chose to give it all to charity and embark on a vision quest, following the route of his childhood idol Alexander the Great.

Returning to America Veidt named himself Ozymandias and became a costumed vigilante, earning a reputation as "the smartest man on the planet."

In 1975, two years before vigilante crimefighters (superheroes) were banned by the "Keene Act," Veidt retired from superheroism, marketing his image for money. This helped bankroll Veidt's scheme of creating a catastrophic event to deceive the world into uniting against a common enemy. Upon completion of his project, Veidt arranged the murder of all of his accomplices and the exile of the presumably invincible Dr. Manhattan.

Soon fellow masked vigilante Comedian inadvertently learned of Veidt's plans, leading to Veidt personally murdering the Comedian as well. The story of Watchmen begins several hours after the death of the Comedian.


Abilities
Peak human agility and strength
Genius-level intelligence

Moloch the Mystic

First appearance Watchmen #2 (1986)

A crime boss from the 1940s through the 1960s, he ran an underground vice den and constructed a solar mirror weapon as part of his nefarious schemes. Over the course of his criminal career, he clashed with Nite Owls, Ozymandias, and Doctor Manhattan. Eventually captured, he spent the 1970s in prison, where he converted to Christianity and gave up his life of crime. At some point during that time, he worked for a company run by Adrian Veidt, Dimensional Developments, where he contracted cancer. Following his release, he lived alone in New York City, until his murder in 1985 as part of Ozymandias' plot.

Though a secondary character and well past his criminal phase in life, Jacobi serves an important role in the Watchmen story; it is he who is first confronted in his bedroom one night by the Comedian, Edward Blake, who reveals his recent discovery of Ozymandias' plot to stop an impending nuclear crisis between the Soviet Union and the United States. Unbeknowst to either Jacobi or Blake, Ozymandias had bugged Jacobi's apartment.

Later, Jacobi is harshly interrogated several times by Rorschach, who is investigating Blake's murder. Rorschach returns one night to find Jacobi murdered, an obvious frameup. Rorschach is captured and remanded to prison.

Abilities
Ruthless criminal mastermind, effective planner and organizer. "Solar mirror weapon".

Silk Spectre


First appearance Watchmen

Abilities
Athlete-level strength and great fighting prowess.

Rorschach

First appearance Watchmen #1 (1986)

Wearing the inkblot-like mask he considers his true face, Rorschach has continued his one-man battle against crime long after superheroes became both detested and illegal. Rorschach’s actions and journal writings display a belief in moral absolutism and objectivism, where good and evil are clearly defined and evil must be violently punished. He has alienated himself from the rest of society to achieve these aims. Politically, he is an anti-communist, anti-liberal, reactionary, and strong nationalist. Rorschach is described by Alan Moore as an extremely right-wing character.

Abilities
Ruthless, extremely resourceful fighter and investigator. Athlete-level strength.

Comedian

First appearance Watchmen #1 (1986)

The Comedian is a cigar-chomping, gun-toting vigilante-turned-paramilitary agent. During some of the series' most intense moments, he has shown himself to be a nihilist with little regard for morality or human life. It may even be possible that, because no motivation is ever stated, he only fights crime as an excuse to please a sadistic desire to commit violent acts.

Abilities: Olympic-level strength, great fighting prowess. He is an expert in practically any type of weaponry.

source:wikipedia

Doctor Manhattan

First appearance Watchmen #1 (1986)

Accidentally locked inside a test chamber during a nuclear physics experiment, Jon Osterman was completely disintegrated; rather than dying, Osterman gained vast godlike powers, the first use of which involved re-constituting his own body. Manhattan's powers include superhuman strength, telekinesis, the ability to teleport himself or others over planetary, interplanetary and Intergalactic distances, the manipulation of matter at a subatomic level, and near total clairvoyance.

While his military backers market him as a superhero, he grows increasingly disinterested in human affairs, despite his importance in the Cold War, and is unable to connect with others, especially his love interest Laurie, the second Silk Spectre.

Dr. Manhattan was created by Watchmen writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons but, like many main characters of the series, he is a modified version of a Charlton Comics character, in this case Captain Atom, created by Joe Gill and Steve Ditko.

Abilities:
Control over space and time, Regeneration, Energy and matter manipulation, Flight,
Immortality, Superhuman strength, speed and durability, Intangibility, Precognition,
Teleportation, Self-duplication

Nite Owl

First appearance Watchmen #1 (1986)

Nite Owl is the name of two fictional characters in the comic book limited series Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons and published by DC Comics. They are modified versions of the various Blue Beetle characters created for Fox Feature Syndicate and later sold to Charlton Comics, with the second Nite Owl bearing certain similarities in appearance to Batman.

Abilities
Dreiberg:Has technical knowledge and employs several high-tech gadgets and weaponry, notably including a flying/submarine owl shaped ship (that he affectionately refers to as "Archie"). Good fighting prowess.
Hollis: Athlete-level strength, skilled hand-to-hand combatant


Hollis J. Mason
Fictional character history
Hollis J. Mason (1916-1985)
At the age of 12 his father left the family farm in Montana and moved to New York City, working at Moe Vernon's Auto Repairs.

Starting out as a New York City policeman in 1938, he was inspired by Action Comics' Superman and the real life exploits of Hooded Justice to take up the life of a vigilante. He was nicknamed Nite Owl for spending his evenings working out in the Police Gymnasiums as much as possible and going to bed at 9:00pm to rise for a 5:00am work out before donning his badge and uniform.

His costume was designed to free his arms and legs while protecting his chest, abdomen and head with a tough leather tunic. With the tunic hiding his hair, a domino mask concealed his identity.

He became a member of the Minutemen, a "masked adventurer" league in mid-1939. Mason was an "old school" crimefighter, a real "Boy Scout" in the eyes of Captain Metropolis. He stopped colorful criminals like the Screaming Skull and went on to fight supposed Axis operatives including Captain Axis during World War II. He retired in May, 1962 to open an auto business and write his memoir of his crime-fighting exploits, Under the Hood. By reading Under the Hood, Silk Spectre II later learned of the Comedian's attempted rape of her mother Silk Spectre I.

Soon after Hollis retired, Daniel Drieberg sought out Hollis in the mid-1960s and asked if he could use the name and persona of Nite Owl to fight crime. Hollis met Daniel and was far too impressed by Daniel's technologies and ideas to deny him the mantle of Nite Owl (which Hollis confesses in his book was slightly an idiotic name).


Personality
Mason was quite possibly the most decent and "normal" of the masked adventurers presented in Watchmen. While many of his colleagues have psychological issues with regards to society, race, gender, sex or just simple megalomania, Mason is apparently free of these traits, and judging by the excerpts from his book, is something of a voice of reason in the world of the costumed adventurers. Both in person and in his book his words tend to be kindly and temperate, with a slight tendency towards light hearted self-deprecating humor.

He seems to be well liked by most of his teammates and to get along with most as well, despite sometimes being all too aware of their faults and flaws. His enmity seems to be saved for the Comedian, whom he never forgave for the attempted rape of Sally Jupiter, and whose brutal means of crimefighting proved too much for Mason to reconcile himself with.


Role in Watchmen
After Nite Owl II and Silk Spectre II break Rorschach out of prison on Halloween night, the Knot-tops, led by Derf, hear of the news. Angered by it, the entire group follows the suggestion of a gang member who mistakenly believes that Mason is the same Nite Owl that had participated in the prison break. Mistaking the group for trick-or-treaters, Mason opens his door to them, and afterwards they proceed to attack en masse. Mason gets in a few solid hits but is beaten down. Ignoring the protests of some of the Knot-Tops, Derf kills Mason with the very statue that was given to him as an acknowledgment and reward for his service as a costumed adventurer.



Dan Dreiberg
Fictional character history
Born in 1945, Daniel Dreiberg relied more upon technical wizardry and tools than toughness, which set him apart from his fellow costumed adventurers. Still, he has demonstrated more than adequate skills when defending himself. All of his gadgets and costumes are based on an owl theme. He uses an owl-shaped flying vehicle nicknamed the "Owlship" or "Archie" (Archimedes, after Merlin's pet owl), equipped with a variety of offensive and defensive devices, such as flamethrowers and "screechers" -devices capable of producing a sharp schreech-like sound.

Dreiberg's father was a banker who left him a large inheritance, which he used to design and build his crime-fighting gear. Hollis Mason, the original Nite Owl, was his hero and when he retired, Dan wrote to Mason, asking if he could carry on his name. Upon looking at his gear, Mason was too impressed to refuse, and gave Dan the greenlight to start fighting crime in the 1960s. From then, the two men became friends, and met every Saturday at Hollis' house.

In 1965, Dreiberg (as Nite Owl) successfully debuted and teamed up with fellow costumed adventurer Rorschach to take on organized crime. Having already come to believe that his expensive activities were accomplishing little, Dreiberg retired after the passing of the Keene Act on August 3, 1977, although in 1985 (when the story takes place) he seems to regret his decision to give up crime fighting. Rorschach would later say regarding his retirement, "No staying power." When not fighting crime, Dreiberg mastered in aeronautics and zoology at Harvard University, contributing scholarly articles to ornithological journals after his retirement in 1977.


Personality
Like Hollis Mason before him, Dan Dreiberg was friendly, honest, and affable. Also like Hollis, he lacked psychological issues like the ones that tainted his colleagues. Dreiberg appears to have old fashioned tastes in music, preferring 1930-1940s Jazz to modern pop music. There is a vague suggestion that Dreiberg may have been sexually inexperienced before he became involved with Laurie Juspeczyk. Alternatively, he may have been impotent.


Events of Watchmen
Dreiberg becomes romantically entangled with the second Silk Spectre, Laurie Juspeczyk, after she leaves Doctor Manhattan. He returns to vigilantism along with her which began with a heartening night out in costume where they successfully save the occupants of a burning building. The excitement of aiding the residents awakens Dreiberg's sexual feelings for Laurie and the two make passionate love following the rescue. They later break Rorschach out of prison in an attempt to stop Ozymandias' scheme to "save the world from itself." Unfortunately, the freeing of Rorschach resulted in the murder of Hollis Mason, which Dan learned of only when he and Rorschach went to interrogate suspects. Upon learning of Mason's death, Dan becomes violent, attacking the informer and loudly swearing vengeance against Mason's killers with such ferocity that Rorschach, a notorious as a sociopathic killer, had to restrain him. In the end, Hollis' killers (the Knot Tops) were killed along half New York by Ozymandias' plot.

Dan and Rorschach travel to Ozymandias' Antarctic fortress without Silk Spectre, as she had been teleported away by Doctor Manhattan. They battle and are swiftly defeated by Ozymandias, who reveals his plan to unleash a telepathic monstrosity on New York City that would expand massive psychic waves that would kill half the city. Dan expresses the desire to stop him and is told that the events already had happened well before the conversation itself. Millions are dead, and the world's nations agree to work together to combat this new 'threat'. Reluctantly, Dan and the returned Laurie agree to keep this secret.

Rorschach leaves anyway, attempting to take Dan's vehicle back to civilization and tell the world. Unseen by the others, Doctor Manhattan attempts to stop him, but Rorschach demands Doctor Manhattan kill him rather than live with keeping such villainy a secret, and Manhattan reluctantly complies. Dan and Laurie are offered hospitality by Ozymandias, which they accept.

They are seen in the conclusion of the story under their new identities of Sam and Sandra Hollis, making a brief visit to Laurie's mother.

source:wikipedia