Evidently, characters from the Watchmen-Earth have been fiddling around with the DC-Earth. In other words, DC tried a five-year failed experiment and thought the best way to fix it was to again rip off Alan Moore.
As the last year has progressed, all we've really been told as readers is that the DC-Earth (my word) was corrupted and a decade was stolen from its history. Yesterday, the story of "The Button" starts in the Batman and Flash titles. Of the characters pictured above, The Comedian and Rorshach are dead. A character seen since the "Rebirth" of the books has been known as Dr. Oz, and the obvious connotation is that he is Ozymandius, the blond guy between the two dead guys.
I suggest that the real identity is Nite Owl, the guy with the goggles. He would be the closest counterpart to Batman, and many people think the Dr. Oz thing is just too obvious. So. What else can I add to this? Dr. Manhattan (in blue) is seemingly behind this, somehow trapped. In his mini-series during the Before Watchmen event, he is seen creating a baby universe, to see what will happen. And so DC had an out, if what they called the new52, their line-wide reboot in September of 2011 (mainly making everybody five years younger), failed...well, that was Dr. Manhattan's little universe.
But that might also suggest that Dr. M. could change his own Earth, and bring Comedian and Rorshach back to life. Here's what I believe. That it is really Ozymandias that is trapped on the DC-Earth, by Nite Owl. Who the hell knows where Dr. Manhattan and his girlfriend, Sally Jupiter (seen above) are. They were on Mars a lot.
I'm just going on record as saying that DC wants us to believe--well, they have been since last summer--that Ozymandias has Dr. Manhattan locked up. I say that Nite Owl has Ozy locked up. After all, he was appalled at what Ozy had done at the end of the Watchmen graphic novel.
The GN was set in late 1985, and I'd be curious to see if Watchmen-Earth now has a 2017 setting, with the characters having aged the way all comic heroes do via a sliding timescale. So that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
I'll bet even Charles Gramlich doesn't believe me. Nor does Kurt Russell.
