Team-Up Tuesdays: Watchmen's !mpact #5

The culmination of the visions set forth in Watchmen and Impact Comics' Crucible centered on two key players, but ones were not always featured prominently alongside their peers. Adrian Veidt and Rob Connors were the sons of parents now deceased who found themselves possessing abilities far beyond those of morta men. As Ozymandias and the Comet, these two young men attempt to use their gifts for the good of all humanity. Unlike many superheroes, however, their own determination to stick to the straight and narrow wavered a bit, leading the epic tragedy for those around each of them.

For Rob, it harkened back to the day when he first obtained his energy manipulating powers due to a tragedy befalling his parents and their research. Now possessed of immense power over electricity and flight, he adopts the alias of the Comet and embarks on a brief career. However, when he learns his body was swapped with that of an alien observer... and later still learning that he himself is that alien while the actual Rob Connors perished... he loses a bit of his humanity. After fleeing from the authorities, accusing him of having killed his secret identity, the Comet joins forces with the Black Hood until tricked into unleashing his destructive powers on an entire city. Turned criminal in a post-cold war age, his very ally the Hood is the one who rids the Earth of the Comet once and for all.

As to Ozymandias, after feeling disillusioned over his initial dreams of protecting his fellow man alongside fellow heroes in the Crimebusters, he seeks self-imposed retirement. Yet behind the scenes, he funded his own company development in genetic research that would one day unleash a monstrostity such that the world would have to rally around one another... dropping longterm grudges held throughout the cold war... and join together against a common foe from another world. However, Rorschach had like the Black Hood stood against his one time powerful comrade-in-arms, only unlike the Hood it was Rorschach who perished... not the instigator of so many deaths in that master of manipulation, Ozymandias.

And yet, all such victories are empty when the future in unknown. While the Crusaders ceased to be, themselves just returning from exile in space to face a former friend turned fiendish foe, and the Watchmen went back into retirement in a world now seemingly at piece... still their legacies are safely entrenched in the minds of all who read of their exploits.