Who is Mister Oz and What Does He Want With Superman?

Who is Mister Oz? Readers are ready to find out in September’s Action Comics issues, and today’s release of both the standard lenticular and variant covers for those issues have offered some enticing clues.

For more than a year, DC fans have been fairly certain that the enigmatic Mr. Oz, a hooded figure appearing in the Superman titles, was likely Ozymandias, principal antagonist of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen, widely regarded as one of the best superhero stories ever created.

That certainty came primarily out of the fact that Mr. Oz was hanging around, being enigmatic, in DC Universe: Rebirth last May. In that same issue, lines of Watchmen dialogue were repeated, indicating that Doctor Manhattan and Ozymandias had played a key role in the 2011 reboot following the events of Flashpoint.

Mr. Oz, though, had been introduced before that: in an issue of Superman during Geoff Johns’s run in 2015. He presented himself as someone who had been watching Superman’s story from the beginning, and who had “taught” Superman at some point. That has never been born out by the Man of Steel himself, who has encountered Mr. Oz a couple of times now and doens’t seem to recognize him.

Upcoming solicitations, and particularly a batch of newly-release covers, seem to indicate that Superman is astounded to see the face of Mr. Oz, something that suggests Ozymandias, someone Clark has never met before, is no longer the undisputed favorite.

So…who could Mr. Oz be? We’ve put together a hand-dandy scorecard…!

THE WATCHMEN CONNECTIONS

At this point, it seems clear from context that Mr. Oz is tied in with Doctor Manhattan in one way or another, whether or not he is actually Ozymandias.

For ease of reading, we are going to break out the Watchmen references distinctly from the Ozymandias theory, as putting the two together can be unwieldy, and frankly seems unnecessary in the face of a base supposition that Manhattan and Oz are connected.

Mr. Oz, who spends a whole lot of time staring at banks of monitors and worrying about the “long game” (like Ozymandias), and who told The New 52 Superman that he’d been “watching” him for years, popped up periodically throughout Geoff Johns’s run, notably revealing that he had someone or something in custody behind giant, heavy, metal doors in Superman #34. At the time of DC Universe: Rebirth, Newsarama (see link above) speculated that if Mr. Oz were Ozymandias, perhaps his prisoner was Doctor Manhattan — but that doesn’t seem to track with other evidence we’ve seen since.

In Justice League #50 — the end of the Darkseid War storyline — Owlman and Metron are having a disagreement about just who owns the Mobius Chair, when somebody approaches them and blows them both up in a blast of blue energy.

Their deaths mirrored the death of Pandora, the mysterious Trinity of Sin member who first appeared at the birth of the New 52 and then went on to appear in every #1 issue for the line’s 2011 launch. Her death was even more overtly implied to have been done by Doctor Manhattan, as when she died, the image was reminiscent of the moment when Manhattan killed Rorschach, near the end of Watchmen (thanks Bleeding Cool).

That latter death took place in DC Universe: Rebirth #1. In that issue, Mr. Oz showed up to issue more cryptic declarations — this time to the pre-Flashpoint (and post-Rebirth) Superman, telling him that he and his family are not what they believed themselves to be. That — say it with me, kids — hasn’t yet been explained.

It’s those deaths, though, and some events that took place in Detective Comics #940, had us thinking Doctor Manhattan is involved with whatever Mr. Oz is doing in the DC Universe right now: All that blue light, and the exact manifestation of the powers, seems like too much of a coincidence to ignore.

None of this explains why Mr. Oz felt like he needed to get Doomsday — who is, as far as anyone can tell, the pre-Flashpoint version of Doomsday — into his custody. It’s possible he believes he can control the beast, but there have been repeated efforts to do that in the past (including Brainiac in Superman: The Doomsday Wars and the U.S. Government in Flashpoint), and they have never gone particularly well for the people trying to use Doomsday for their own ends. But in a recent issue of Action Comics, the character managed to hijack the signal from Superman’s home-made Phantom Zone Projector and use it to steal Doomsday before he could be thrown into the Phantom Zone.

So when, in Detective Comics #940, Tim Drake was saved moments before his death and teleported into a cell in Mr. Oz’s custody, it was awfully curious. His motives — that Tim is tying up loose ends that couldn’t be tied up — sounds a lot like Mr. Oz is likely tied to the mysterious realigning of the post-Flashpoint DC Universe timeline. That, in turn, is assumed to be Doctor Manhattan’s doing, especially because of the pre-Flashpoint Wally West’s stories about what he saw while trapped in the Speed Force. 

…Oh, and there was a whole lot of blue energy. Like…everywhere, in every panel where Mr. Oz appeared, in Detective Comics #940. Whatever force teleported Robin did so using blue energy, and an effect that looks not entirely dissimilar to the one that happened when Manhattan teleported himself around in Watchmen:

While correlation is not causation, it was also hard to ignore the fact that the dormant “Mr. Oz” plot thread picked up during the “Superman Reborn” storyline at the same time Batman and the Flash were chasing “The Button.”

THE DARK HORSE CONTENDERS

There are a number of candidates who have been mentioned at least once or twice, but who seem either extremely unlikely or who don’t have enough evidence supporting their inclusion to really make them worth really diving into.

Here is a quick rundown:

Jonathan Kent, basically just because in his first-ever appearance, Mr. Oz said that it was he who taught Superman to get back up after being knocked down;

Superboy-Prime, because he re-emerged as a suspect during the whole “Who is the other Clark Kent?” mystery, and Geoff Johns has said that the Doomsday Clock event will be “a culmination of everything I’ve done at DC so far,” or something like that, which for some reason convinced a bunch of people that the recurring villain from Infinite Crisis and Sinestro Corps War would reappear.

Booster Gold, or some other time-traveler, because the bracelets/gauntlets seem connecting Mr. Oz to his throne on the variant cover to Action Comics #988 look very similar to the ones Booster wore on his pre-Flashpoint costume. The gauntlets themselves provided him with a force field, so unless there is some big explanation as to what they have to do with anything coming, it’s likely the design similarity is incidental.

Okay, on to the main event…

 

OZYMANDIAS

The prevailing theory, as we indicated earlier, says Mr. Oz is Adrian Veidt, the man known as Ozymandias in Watchmen.

There’s a fair amount of (mostly circumstantial) evidence to back this up — and Detective Comics #940 certainly seemed to pile more on top of what was already there.

As early as March of 2015, some had noted that a homeless woman being manipulated into working for Mr. Oz had been “branded” — and that the brand or tattoo resembled the logo on Nostalgia perfume, a brand sold by Veidt’s company in Watchmen.

That’s the kind of think that you just doin’t think much about — unless it’s a year later and the character is still mysterious and starting to play a bigger role and suddenly you’re googling furiously to find the blog where that theory was offered (a tip of the hat to Newsarama).

In Rebirth, fans noted that the colorist had given Mr. Oz blue eyes — the same color as Ozymandias’s in Watchmen. This was in the issue that officially revealed the involvement of Watchmen characters with whatever is going on in the DC Universe, by way of Batman investigating The Comedian’s errant button, which ended up in the Batcave, and a bit of dialogue between Veidt and Manhattan in the book’s final pages.

If indeed Veidt and Manhattan are the ones who tinkered with the DC Universe timeline (which seems likely) and if Mr. Oz is in fact Veidt (also likely, although admittedly less so), it’s not yet clear what their master plan is. Whatever it is, it will come out in Doomsday Clock, the forthcoming, Johns-penned mega-crossover.

In interviews during their Superman run, Johns and John Romita, Jr. made Mr. Oz sound like a character they planned on exploring quite a bit down the road, but when he took over on the title, Gene Luen Yang seemingly wasn’t looped in on what those plans might be.

So far, Mr. Oz has wreaked havoc on the lives of both Batman and Superman. For the first time in a while, we know for sure where he will pop up next (besides the Action Comics stories, there will be a concurrent mini-arc in Detective Comics that centers on Tim Drake escaping Mr. Oz’s prison). Will those stories finally lay to rest whether he really is, as so many fans assume, the ultimate big bad behind Watchmen?

JOR-EL

In his earliest appearances, pre-Rebirth, Mr. Oz suggested to Superman that he had “taught” Superman to always get back up when he’s knocked down. This led some to speculate on the possibility that he was, in some way, Jonathan Kent (Superman’s adoptive father).

That theory never really got traction, in part because it would be difficult to imagine just where Mister Oz might have got all of his expertise and power if he’s just a farmer from Kansas.

More recently, though, a theory has come around that Superman’s other father, Jor-El, might be in the mix.

Jor-El, like his son, has blue eyes (which, as previously noted, Oz does too).

Jor-El would have reason to feel ownership of Clark, to believe he had something to do with Clark’s upbringing, and to lay claim to having taught Clark something (if only via the posthumous holograms that have been a staple of Superman mythology for decades).

In Action Comics #984, which came out last week, Jonathan Kent helped his father battle supervillains by jumping into a Kryptonian warsuit (a giant purple humanoid robot) and tearing after the Superman Revenge Squad. He was assisted by a mysterious voice — apparently Mr. Oz’s — who knew the details of the suit intimately, seemingly implying that he was Kryptonian or had spent a lot of time around Kryptonian technology.

Certainly, the covers for next month’s Action Comics #987 and 988 make a compelling argument on Jor-El’s behalf: the variant to #987 sees Superman standing absolutely stunned as Oz unmasks, while the lenticular cover to #988 depicts baby Kal-El’s rocket taking off from Krypton, and Jor-El subsumed in blue energy while Lara and the rest of the world dies.

It does not look like Jor-El controls the blue energy: it appears as though he is being, essentially, “taken.” That might account for some of the ambivalence that Mr. Oz seems to have about Doctor Manhattan, if the two are not truly partners but one is essentially a hostage or, at best, conscripted into whatever it is they are doing.

…Could it even be that he is kidnapping people not to serve Doctor Manhattan, but to raise a standing army against a mad god?

The solicitation text for the issues backs up the assertion that Superman has a personal connection to Mr. Oz; Action Comics #988 is an issue dedicated to Superman having been left “reeling” from the previous issue’s revelation.

DOOMSDAY CLOCK

First of all, we get one of the earliest appearances of Mr. Oz, where he talks about how Superman is a symbol of hope, and wonders whether someone who has lost everything Clark has in life, and still remains pure, is capable of losing hope:

That’s an interesting question to pose, as the Doomsday Clock storyline that pits Superman against Doctor Manhattan, has been described as a philosophical showdown between Superman’s hope and optimism, and the dark, cynical world of Watchmen.

In Doomsday Clock, DC Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns (who also serves as the writer of the series) told fans during his Comic Con spotlight panel last month that one of his favorite sequences will feature “the smartest men of two worlds” squaring off against one another.

He went on to characterize one of those two men as Lex Luthor, whom he described as “the smartest man in this world, the DC world,” suggesting that the other “smartest man” wasn’t merely an alien from another planet but was from another universe in the DC multiverse (or, we suppose, the dark multiverse).

Most fans took the implication to mean the meeting would take place between Luthor and Ozymandias, the self-proclaimed “smartest man in the world” in Watchmen.

Another interpretation could be that Johns was talking about Jor-El, who was so smart he had the foresight to see, accept, and prepare for the death of Krypton while all the world’s other great minds remained in denial.

THAT SAID, the solicitation text for Action Comics #988, out in September, suggests that Lex and Mr. Oz will come face to face. Dissecting that, there is a solid argument to be made that Mr. Oz is likely not the “world’s smartest man” that Johns is talking about, as he will meet Luthor in Doomsday Clock. That brings us, again, back to the possibility that there are three individuals at play here: Ozymandias, Manhattan, and Oz.

It seems like fans will know the truth in just under a month’s time…!