Doomsday Clock - Geoff Johns & Gary Frank

Unlike some I have no particular quibble with taking Alan Moore & Dave Gibbon's seminal comic Watchmen and using those characters to tell new stories.  The original stands on its own merits and always will.  Indeed, the current Rorschach comic and the critically acclaimed Watchmen TV series suggest that sealing the original off from any further works would only deny us some expertly crafted additions to the canon.  Is it snobbish, or perhaps gatekeeping, to expect Watchmen art to be held to a higher standard though?  Is the original held in such holy reverence that to besmirch the Watchmen name is tantamount to heresy?  Or can we put these characters alongside all the other pop culture icons and accept that they are simply tools to be used and that the resulting quality may be good, bad, or indifferent, just as with, say, any Batman or Spider-Man comic, regardless of the origins or high watermarks of the past?

I ask these questions because Doomsday Clock, the somewhat controversial DC Comics series that brings together the Watchmen characters and those of the regular 'DC Universe' is, to be blunt, not very good.  However, in many ways it's the very reverence for the original that is at the heart of its flaws (something it shares with Zack Snyder's film adaptation of Watchmen).

Writer Geoff Johns has essentially produced a re-make of the original Watchmen, complete with almost identical plot, characters, page layout, and narrative techniques.  It's along the lines of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, simultaneously a re-telling of the previous story and yet a sequel at the same time.  Now, that alone doesn't necessarily dictate quality, but it does beg the question of 'what's the point?'

Johns does an incredible trick of presenting a plot that is incredibly complicated yet also almost entirely absent.  The crux of the story is that after the ending of the original Watchmen series Dr Manhattan has left that world/universe/reality [delete as per your preferred comic book jargon term] and found himself in the DC Universe of Superman, Batman, and the myriad thousands of other super powered characters.  In his absence the ruse of Ozymandias has been revealed, and the Watchmen world has descended into nuclear Armageddon that the ruse was supposed to prevent in the first place.  Ozymandias and a handful of other characters, including a new Rorschach, also cross over to the DC Universe to find Dr Manhattan and convince him to return and - somehow - save their world.

Against the backdrop of this simple premise are numerous sub-plots, many of which don't seem particularly relevant or don't go anywhere, and seem to exist simply as an excuse to bring in as many DC heroes and villains as possible into the story.  Generally however, the idea is that there is an international super-powers arms race that seems destined to end in global war and destruction - can this be averted as the clock to disaster ticks down?  These super powered threats take the place of the military nuclear arsenals in the original Watchmen, but the story and effects are essentially the same.  There is a 'revelation' that many of these super powered heroes and villains were created by the US government triggering their latent 'metagene'.  I'm not a regular DC reader so I don't know if this is an established fact that the readers already knew, but the characters did not.  I suspect no, as its presented as a major shift in the background of the DC universe - it essentially retcons almost everyone's secret origin story, and I'm not particular sure it was necessary. 

Throw in a movie star that Dr Manhattan befriends, who's last film serves as a story-within-a-story foreshadowing the main narrative's conclusion - yes, very much in the way that the 'Tales of the Black Freighter' did in Watchmen - and a nation offering refuge to the now publicly demonised costumed crime fighters (and criminals) that takes up a lot of the story but doesn't really go anywhere, and a skulking-in-the-shadows Lex Luthor who, other than providing some handy exposition at the end, doesn't achieve any of the scene stealing promises his story seems to be building towards, and it all becomes a bit overcooked. 

 

 Perhaps most baffling is the inclusion of two characters that are brought over from the Watchmen universe - Marionette and The Mime.  Petty criminals in fancy costumes (one of whom has super-powers, even though one of the key aspects of Watchmen is that Dr Manhattan was the sole super-powered being).  It's not that they are irrelevant to the plot, but their role in it is so minor that it's just confusing as to why so much time is spent focusing on them.  That's not to say it's all bad, perhaps the best bit of the whole story is the chapter that focuses on their 'origin', it's just that it doesn't really tie in to the main narrative at all.

As the story reaches its conclusion we see that it is ultimately there to provide DC with yet another opportunity to retcon some stories, bring back others, and generally offer some kind of 'in-universe' explanation as to how these characters have been around for decades (in real time) yet haven't aged a day.  This obsession with timelines and multiverses seems to be the go-to subject for any major project at DC, and they weren't letting the Watchmen characters escape without being part of it.

Now, Geoff Johns is not a bad writer.  In fact he pulls of some entertaining scenes with aplomb, and his dialogue is in general spot on - even if a lot of it is replicating that of Rorschach and Dr Manhattan in as faithful Alan Moore style as possible.  It's also to his credit that he takes what was becoming unwieldy mess and delivers a reasonably good final chapter to answer a lot of the key questions raised along the way - though leaving many others hanging.  He even manages to channel his inner Grant Morrison and deliver some meta-textual Superman hero worship.

Where Doomsday Clock really does deliver is in the art of Gary Frank (illustrator) and Brad Anderson (colours).  Plaudits too to the letterer Rob Leigh (ably imitating the original Watchmen lettering) and the Amie Brockway-Metcalf for the 'back matter design' (i.e. the newspapers clippings, etc, that end each story just like, yes, Watchmen).

The page layouts are on the whole tied to the 9-panel grid of the original Watchmen, though they thankfully deviate from that on regular occasions.  This puts a huge amount of storytelling onus on Frank's artwork - he has to use what's in the panels, rather than the shape, size and arrangement of them, to help control pacing, atmosphere and emotion.  It is here that his wonderful facial expressions and body language come into their own.  However, I was most impressed by his use of close-ups and 'dead panels' (those where nothing of particular note is happening, such as a silent face or a shot of a city skyline) to really tell the story within the confines of the strict grid system.  

Ultimately Doomsday Clock feels like a missed opportunity.  The idea of bringing together characters from these two universes is ripe with opportunity - not least because the characters of Watchmen were based on old Charlton Comics characters that are now part of the DC universe - a fact that that is subtly alluded to here, but never taken any further.  However, the story is hamstrung from the beginning by trying to re-tell the original story, even telling it in the same format, but in a new setting.  When it belatedly breaks away from this somewhat towards the end it is only to familiar ground of multiple universes and continuity corrections.  Ironically, given the infinite time and space that becomes the focus of the story, its horizons are all too narrow. 

Doomsday Clock 

Geoff Johns and Gary Frank

DC Comics