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I'm sure you all know this answer already, but I remember that the final fight between Veidt and Blake was actually "round 2," so to speak, and that Blake bested Veidt the first time. Did we ever learn anything about the circumstances of that first fight?

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I don't mind being the smartest man in the world. I just wish it wasn't this one.

Well, according to the book, Veidt ran into Blake on the docks and Blake "Mistook" him for a villain and beat the shit out of him, and that led to a rivalry of sorts between Veidt and Blake.

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@RealSlimCAvery

Veidt remembered Blake's fighting style, his strengths and weaknesses, from that first fight.

Chapter XI, Page 18, panel 6: Veidt "I studied his limitations: skillful feint; devastating uppercut; little else... He won. In the short term."

He put that knowledge to good use when he bust into his apartment and beat him to a pulp before throwing him to his death.

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"Because there is good and there is evil, and evil must be punished. Even in the face of Armageddon I shall not compromise in this."

I might be way off here, but I noticed and interesting parralell between Comedian and Veidt in that sense.

Comedian was beaten up by Hooded Justice after he tried to rape Silk Spectre, and many years later Comedian exacted revenge by killing Hooded Justice (supposedly anyway). In the same way, Veidt was beaten up by the Comedian, then many years later returned to kill the Comedian.

Certainly Veidt improved his dogde skill for the 2nd round...

It's worth noting that this is a play on a creaky old superhero comics trope: When any two (or more) heroes meet for the first time, at least one of them will automatically assume that the other is up to no good, and attack them without so much as a how-do-you-do. The fact that this would probably be a fairly common social gaffe among real-life extralegal vigilantes does not make it any less cliched. This is one of my favorite little touches in the whole series, because Moore underplays the irony so nicely.

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"The light is taking me to pieces, and I'm afraid I just blue myself."

Reading that, the irony just dawned on me. Veidt *was* a villain (from one standpoint). Nice!

It's the little things that hit you later that make this book so awesome...

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It also didn't hurt that for round 2 that Blake was now a man in his 60's.

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You can make your superhero a psychopath, you can draw gut-splattering violence, and you can call it a "graphic novel," but comic books are still incredibly stupid.

-Bill Watterson

He had also been drinking and was settled in for a night watching the TV.

Veidt being the master strategist picked the timing of his attack to perfection.

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"Because there is good and there is evil, and evil must be punished. Even in the face of Armageddon I shall not compromise in this."

To be fair, I suspect the timing was easy. I doubt Blake spent a lot of time prepared for a fight (i.e: sobre) at the time...

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But Veidt still couldn't just walk up to him in a back alley/bar/wherever and kill him off. He had to wait for the right time to do it, ensuring Blake was alone. During the evening it would be more likely that Blake would be relaxed, undressed, off his guard, than during the day.

I also doubt very much Blake was drunk 24/7.

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"Because there is good and there is evil, and evil must be punished. Even in the face of Armageddon I shall not compromise in this."

Blake was also rather depressed when Veidt broke into his apartment, as the scale of Veidt's plan "rather took the wind from his sails" as Veidt put it. From the snippets we see of the fight, Blake apparently doesn't put up much of a fight, as if he wants to be put out of his misery.

I've often thought there was a poetic justice to it: Blake died as he lived, violently.

All this implies Veidt didn't think he could take Blake unless the latter was at some kind of disadvantage.



Yeah, he was in a pretty bad state. He didn't know how to deal with what he knew (though maybe knocking off Veidt would be a start?)

Depression is a powerful force and that helpless feeling had been brewing since that night in the bar when he realised he couldn't trust Dr Manhattan to step in.
Plus, because of the way we was, he didn't have anyone else to turn to (except for an old enemy). He'd driven everyone else away. I can see why he didn't put up much of a fight.

He may have even had a chance of winning had he wished it. Veidt certainly had no illusions about it being an easy kill.

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This is serious

True, but there's also a very interesting aspect about the fight, hinted in the book and expanded upon in the film. Veidt was actually looking forward to the fight. He arrived at the apartment unarmed, when simply finishing him off with a silenced pistol would have been easier and raised less questions. A large part of the cofrontation was about revenge: revenge for their first encounter, for uncovering veidt's plan, and probably for alot of what veidt knew blake had done during his career.

The movie makes this even clearer by arming the comedian: his gun is taken off him almost instantly, and there is a moment in that fight where he's been thrown against the wall and veidt is standing there with the gun in his hand. The pause before he decides to throw it away shows how he actually wanted to physically punish blake before he ended him.

In Watchmen XI - 19 - Frame 9, Veid says:



This suggests that careful planning and timing was involved.

This just comes to corroborate the notion that Ozymandias, though physically superb, was still very human in his capacities, his main "power" being his intelligence translated into skill and preparation.

The above quote is also why the moment in the film in which Veidt tosses the Comedian's gun away was so great.

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Good point. I think it was also a matter of pride as well of convience for Veidt. The Comedian had, it the past, defeated him in equal terms. He could only take pride in taking him down if he also did it on equal terms, maybe even to humiliate him in the process as he must have felt humiliated (being such a proud bugger).

Veidt must have been disappointed to come across a Comedian who really didn't give a shit if he lived or died anymore (though the film shows Blake putting up more than a fight suggesting he does want to survive despite his resignation at the start. Not sure this accurate but it served to make for a more interesting fight scene).

I agree with you he wants to use his hands to take his down. A gun just isn't intimate enough. He wants Blake to know it's personal. And, yeah, I think he enjoys it more that way.

Plus shooting the Comedian in the back is cowardly and he knows it. Veidt would need to come out of this fight feeling he had won a moral victory.

Plus maybe some respect? One masked hero to another? You don't knock 'em off in their sleep. One mask wants to take down another, you look 'em in the eye.

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This is serious

Veidt blasts Dr. Manhattan in a very cowardly way. It simply boils down to the fact that he felt the need to prove his superiority to the Comedian to himself.

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I'm not sure that it was really about revenge, possibly deep down but during the novel, Vedit always seems very cool and calculated apart from at the very end where he asks Dr. M if he did the right thing. Revenge would have been a part of it, but I doubt it was at the forefront of his mind, he never seems impulsive during the rest of the book. That is unless of course he was planning his revenge. I think by throwing the Comedian out of the window, he was in a way having some fun, because Rorschach immediately jumps to the conclusion of a mask killer and even goes to warn Vedit. I think part of the reason he threw the Comedian out of the window was to show the message to other masked vigilantes that no one could stop him and he was "the cleverest man on the earth."

Like at the end where he says "I did it 35 minutes ago" even with the comedian obviously murdered, and plain for all to see, nobody can stop him, not even the Comedian, who bested him in another fight in the past.

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Like I said, it's not about getting revenge or showing off to other people, I don't think, as much as it is about showing off to himself.

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