10 Best Times Superheroes Became Villains

2. Ozymandias - Watchmen

First thing's first - no one's really "right" in Watchmen. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' superhero satire has no heroes or villains - only tragic figures with varying levels of humanity.

One of the biggest misconceptions surrounding Watchmen is that Rorschach is the tale's uncompromising hero. In reality he was Moore's attempt at satirising the Randian ideals embodied by old Ditko characters like Mr. A and the old Charlton version of the Question, which had gradually filtered into the modern age of comics with increasingly darker portrayals of once optimistic figures. Again, Rorschach is not the hero.

But neither is Ozymandias. Regardless of either figure's position on the moral scale, the latter most certainly betrays his former colleagues and becomes a villain as soon as he enacts his plan to bring about world peace. He murders millions to bring the world together - a truly horrific act - but there is an important distinction to be made. The heroes only discover his conspiracy once the plan has been initiated, so to expose it now would be to invoke nuclear armageddon, with America and the USSR already on the brink of conflict.

So yes, Ozymandias does betray the Minute Men and yes, the atrocity he commits is unquestionably evil. However, once it has been committed, Rorschach's attempts to expose the conspiracy would jeopardise world peace, and is illustrative of the failings of that old, objectivist philosophy that informed his inspiration up until the mid-eighties.