This volume collects Len Wein's work pm DC's "Before Watchmen" enterprise: Ozymandias, Crimson Corsair, and the Dollar Bill one shot. I've expressed my strong agnostic feelings about Before Watchmen elsewhere and I feel no need to subject anybody to a rehash here. However, this book gets more wrong than right. Only the fine visuals and especially the presence of Jae Lee's magnificent, perfectly pitched art on Ozymandias saves it from vying for the worst of the whole of "Before Watchmen." 
 Wein's Ozymandias pretty much fulfills every dread prediction of how "Before Watchmen" could go wrong. The story adds near nothing of interest to Moore and Gibbons' original. Instead we have a long, drawn out rehash. Watchmen covered Ozymandias's origin with great economy; do we really need to follow Adrian as he walks across Asia, trains in the martial arts, and gets that ball of hashish? I think not. Is he a richer character for us knowing his father's profession or seeing him fight Moloch or seeing him exchange blows and verbiage with the Comedian? In "Watchmen," we were supposed to be amazed that he can catch a bullet; isn't that feat less impressive if we know lots of folks have seen Ozymandias jam a gun by throwing a metal pen into the barrel at range? 
 Giving a character a proper treatment must include doing something other than simply spelling out everything readers can already guess at having happened. It must surprise. It must delight. Otherwise, why not just leave it to the readers' imaginations? Unfortunately, what we get instead here tends to plod along. What few surprises Wein conjures tend more push this character towards the pedestrian. Adrian Veidt became Ozymandias when he donned a Halloween costume in order to seek vengeance? The collective yawn deafens. 
 As an aside, one has to wonder how Wein thought it a good idea to do this book in Ozymandias's perspective (and as a confessional diary no less!)? One cannot imagine a less reliable narrator than Adrian Veidt or one who is less interesting. We already know his motivations and his story from his perspective; Moore and Gibbons forced us to live it in the original. What more could there be to add? The answer is nothing, save filler that Wein (as Moore's editor) would have been well served to edit out. That Veidt's narrates this long version of his story - to himself! -- minutes after he tells the tale to the corpses of his servants and before Rorschach and company burst in so that he can repeat the same, almost makes the whole thing - you'll pardon the pun - comical. It seems our dear Adrian isn't just loquacious, but masterbative as well. 
 If Ozymandias spins with unrealized potential, "Crimson Corsair" evokes a collective head scratch. If you don't recall, Moore wove a pirate comic, "The Black Freighter," into "Watchmen." It served several purposes. It was a work by Max Shea, an artist who disappeared in the larger story. Moore argued, perhaps unpersuasively, that in a world with real masked heroes, readers "probably wouldn't be at all interested in superhero comics." Black Freighter also served as a meta-commentary on the events of "Watchmen," a clever reflection of several characters and an indictment of their actions. In "Before Watchmen" Crimson Corsair seems wholly unmoored from the rest of the story, a pirate prequel... well... just because DC was rooting around for possible story ideas. They might just as well - or perhaps more thoughtfully - have done a series looking at the cases of detectives Fine and Bourquin. Or maybe followed the careers of Dr. Long or Doug Roth? It would have been better than this. That said, the art here is again quite lovely and haunting, fitting well with the subject matter. All in all, a fine salute to EC Comics, but it has little meaningful to add to the Watchmen universe. 
 Last but least we have Dollar Bill. Before this, Dollar Bill was known only for dying when his cape got caught in a revolving door (a black gag given a great salute in Pixar's "The Incredibles"). Where in Minutemen, Cooke brought minor characters beautifully to the fore, Wein takes a minor uninteresting character and pretty much keeps him uninteresting. Again, the art fits beautifully (though it more evokes the Silver Age than the Golden) with Steve Rude's drawing and Glen Whitmore's coloring again helping make this by far the best looking of the Before Watchmen volumes. Still, the story remains utterly forgettable. Rather than a riff on the Golden Age of comics, Wein gives us a mediocre mock-Golden Age story. 
 Depending on your perspective, "Before Watchmen" was either a crass money grab or a brave artistic leap into the dark. Lovely art, however, cannot save this tragically ill-conceived volume.