Doomsday Clock #3

Ernie: Tonight, I shall perform Singin' in the Rain.

Eric:   Ah. Gene Kelly did that very well.
Ernie:  Yes. But I shall do it just that little bit better.

Watchmen

Doomsday Clock

On the first page of Doomsday Clock #3, we clearly see the Comedian’s badge. It has a little highlight on the edge, a little arc where the colour is slightly lighter, a simple artist's trick to indicate that this is a shiny badge which reflects the light. 

Each time we saw it in Watchmen, it was simply a yellow disc.

A trivial thing; a tiny thing. A minor difference in artistic style. 

But it irks me. Watchmen is said to have brought realism to the world of superhero comics. But the art still looked like comic book art. The characters looked like comic book characters, but they talked like real people. Kind of.

Detail

Detail

We are going to go back and redo a classic comic book. But we are going to improve on it. And the way we are going to improve on it is by making it more shiny. More realistic. We are going to show you Rorschach alongside ther Batman. We are going to show you ther Batman easily outwitting Rorschach. We are going to try to pretend that Scooby Doo Meets Watchmen is ever so slightly more realistic than the original comic.

We see the murder of Comedian, which was only shown in fragmentary flashbacks in the original comic. It has been dubbed into the new, photo-realistic style. We see it from a neutral, camera-man’s point of view; where the original comic showed it subjectively, from the point of view of the killer. As he falls, the camera focuses on the shiny, blood splattered badge. The final frame of page 2 shows us the badge by itself, on a black background. 

Realization dawns. Doomsday Clock is for people who saw the movie, but never read the comic. 

No-one attempts to sing The Times They Are a Changin’. I would have liked it better if they had.

Watchmen

As the Comedian falls, a set of black lines, like the slats of a horizontal window blind, block out the panel. He never hits the ground. He ends up in the sea outside Gotham City.  Doctor Manhattan, or at any rate, someone with blue legs, greets him. The person with blue legs drops the badge in the sand alongside him. (It isn't clear where he got it from.) 

Whatever Doctor Manhattan is planning, part of his purpose is to erase Watchmen the graphic novel. The dead Comedian has been teleported out of the story. No corpse to bury; no badge for Rorschach to find. 

A very large chunk of the graphic novel never happened. 

Doomsday Clock

No interesting conversation or confrontation between fake Rorschach and ther Batman is forthcoming. Rorschach gives ther Batman the original Rorschach’s journal, and ther Batman says that Doctor Manhattan is in Arkham Asylum, so they go off together to bust him out. 

But…gotcha…it was a trick, and when Rorschach goes into the cell where Doctor Manhattan is meant to be, ther Batman locks him in and leaves him there. The episode ends with Rorschach shouting “Let! Me! Out!” like a psychopathic Fred Flintstone. 

In the old Avengers / Justice League cross over, all the other superheroes have an enormous fight while Batman and Captain America go to the Batcave and sort everything out like civilized people. There is an old geek joke that the answer to the question “Who would win a fight between Batman and X” is always "Batman" because while other characters may have superhuman powers, Batman’s power is that he is a BADASS. He is more of a badass than Rorschach, at any rate. The deal appears to be that DC characters can run rings around the Watchmen characters because they are 1980s comic book characters and the DC characters are real.

Where fake Rorschach got real Rorschach’s journal from, we do not yet know. In the graphic novel, it was last seen in the possession of the two guys from the New Frontiersman, but that part of the plot may very well have been overwritten. 

We see fake Rorschach’s face: the unmasking is shown as if it is a big reveal, as if we ought to know who the young black guy is, but I certainly didn’t. Doomsday Clock is taking place 7 years after the end of Watchmen, so my first guess could still be right: Bernie from the newstand would be 19 or 20 by now. But we see fake Rorschach dreaming that he is driving away from Ozymandias’s squid, which suggests that he was old enough to drive a car in 1987.

The Comedian and Ozymandias have a five page fight scene. The Comedian throws Ozymandias out of the window but he survives. Lex Luther is badly injured. 

A surprising amount of space is given over to a fictional black and white detective movie called The Adjournment featuring a fictional detective called Nathaniel Dusk. Nathaniel Dusk is an obscure DC character; he appeared in a couple of mini-series in the 1980s. It appears that this fictional film is meant to have the same ironic connection with the action that Tales of the Black Freighter did in Watchmen itself. I am sure that remarks like “there’s a big twist where one of the dead guys turns out to be a killer, too” will turn out to be terribly ironic or prophetic in retrospect. I fimd the Black Freighter stuff much the least interesting part of Watchmen, although obviously I never, ever skip it.

One of the people watching Nathaniel Dusk on TV is a Mr Thunder. Mr Thunder is a resident in an old people's home, and is expecting that his family will come and visit; like Godot, they never show up. There is quite a lot of conversation at the old people’s home, none of which seems relevant to the main story. 

Mr Thunder is presumably Johnny Thunder. Johnny Thunder was an actual DC character actually published in the 1940s. He was also a member of the Justice Society of America, which again, was an actual comic. The Justice Society is to DC Comics very much what the Minutemen are to Watchmen: the aging heroes of a previous generation. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Justice Society was deemed to have existed in a parallel earth, Earth-Two, whereas the contemporary Justice League lived on Earth-One. Then, in the 80s, Marv Wolfman promulgated a dogma that the Justice Society and the Justice League both existed in the same continuity, the J.S.A in the 40s and 50s, the J.L.A in the 70s and 80s. I am not entirely certain what the current doctrinal position is, but I assume that the status of the J.S.A is going to be changed, again, through Doctor Manhattan’s tinkering. 

This may turn out to be very interesting if you are keeping tabs on the ins and outs of the DC universe. In the comic that we have in front of us, various senior citizens watch TV for several pages, and no answer to the question “Who are these people and why should I be interested in them?" is forthcoming. 

The Mime and Marionette walk into a bar. (Ouch. It was an iron bar.) There is a comedian (geddit?) telling very weak jokes. The bar is on the Joker’s territory; after beating up everyone in the bar, Marionette says that she is going to go and look for the Joker. The Mime seems to be actually able to kill people with his imaginary gun. Marionette implies that she was at one time pregnant with Doctor Manhattan’s child. They both wear clown make up and would fit into a Joker story fairly well. Please, flying spaghetti monster, do not let it turn out that the Mime is Doctor Manhattan's son.  

The comedian in the bar is Stewart Lee. Not a caricature or a stand-in: it’s simply a portrait of Stewart Lee. 

Stewart Lee is a British comedian. He deals in sweary, surreal, bad-taste, politically inspired riffs which often do not have punchlines. 

Here is an example of a Stewart Lee joke: 

“(An American) said ‘They should have brought Bin Laden's body here and hung it from the lamp-post. In fact, they should have roasted him here. Like a chicken. So he would have seen what it felt like.’ Hung it from the lamp post? What lamp post is that? The New York City designated corpse roasting lamppost. Who should have done that? 'They' should. Who are 'they'? The New York City dedicated corpse roasting team. They don’t do a lot of corpse roasting. Their duties mainly involve maintenance of the corpse roasting lamp-post…” 

Here is the fictitious Stewart Lee’s joke:

“How many of Gotham’s caped crusaders does it take to screw in a light bulb? None! They like the dark!”

This would have been a pretty poor scene if it had been a generic, faceless comedian. (Do stand ups, however weak they are and however scuzzy the venue, really deal in those kinds of playground riddles?) But Stewart Lee can easily be shown to be an old friend of Alan Moore’s. When Radio 4 ran a strand in which celebrities and performers got to interview their mates, Stewart Lee interviewed Alan Moore. (Alan Moore interviewed Brian Eno.) 

Someone throws a glass in Stewart Lee's face. 

It is said that in the 1970s, Marvel Comics stopped ignoring Jack Kirby and became actively hostile to him. There is a persistent oral tradition that archivists used to burn priceless pages of Kirby artwork as an initiation rite. Another story says that photostats of his work used to appear on bullpen noticeboards with puerile, disparaging lettering added. It is certainly true that the letters pages in The Eternals were filled with knocking copy; and that editorials started to appear saying that Peter Parker would never have asked for co-ownership of characters which he had co-created. The wheel turned around and the wheel turned around and now Marvel revere their co-founder as much as everyone else. Doubtless Alan Moore’s genius will be recognized after he is dead. But right now, this comic has passed beyond not being very interesting and become the literary equivalent of taking a match to Alan Moore’s legacy.

Andrew Rilstone is a writer and critic from Bristol, England. 

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 Watchmen and Doomsday Clock are copyright DC Comics. All quotes and illustrations are use for the purpose of criticism under the principle of fair dealing and fair use, and remain the property of the copyright holder.

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Doomsday Clock #2

The Comedian is alive and well and living in a parallel universe.

He tries to kill Ozymandias while Ozymandias is talking to Lex Luther.

Comedian still alive.

Ozymandias talking to Lex Luther.

Still alive. Comedian.

What.

Were.

They.

Thinking.

I remember Superman Versus The Amazing Spider-Man.

That was what it was called. Not “Superman and Spider-Man meet” or “Spider-Man vs Superman.” Superman Versus The Amazing Spider-Man. A huge over-sized thing, with a long title, costing ten times what a normal comic cost. 

I read it over and over, twenty or fifty times, the most times I have read a comic apart from Spider-Man Comics Weekly #5 or the Star Wars Treasuries.

Did I even know who Superman was? I suppose there were annuals, and second hand imports in markets, and a TV cartoon, voiced by your actual Bud Collyer, so I knew the basics. It was a smart piece of work: it knew what Superman Versus The Amazing Spider-Man had to deliver and by Rao it delivered it. Rather pointedly it started with a standard issue Spider-Man solo story of the period and followed it up with a standard issue Superman story so we could see how different the two guys were before we saw them together. Spidey sent Doctor Octopus back to prison and Superman sent Lex Luther back to prison and the two villains ended up in the same prison plotting a horrible revenge. When Peter Parker and Clark Kent both end up at the same newspaper conference there is a massive misunderstanding which results in Spider-Man punching Superman. Kryptonite becomes involved. But they make friends in time to join forces and foil their respective villains. Lois Lane and Mary Jane have a girly chat, and J. Jonah Jameson talks photographers and news reporters with Perry White in the bar. 

There is no reason why this kind of thing can’t be a lot of fun. Comic book universes thrive because we already know the characters: Spider-Man reminds us of every Spider-Man story we have ever read and Superman reminds us of every Superman story we have ever read so naturally if you put both of them in the same panel our fan-emotions run off the scale. All the writer really has to do is play up the differences between the characters — have Spider-Man behaving in as typical a Spider-Man way as possible and Superman being as much like Superman as possible and then stand back and allow the stylistic clashes to emerge. And when you are done, put everything back in the box. Spider-Man meeting Superman is a one-off for our entertainment, not a stage in his character development. Marvel didn’t have a concept of Imaginary Tales back then, but Roy Thomas shunted Superman Versus The Amazing Spider-Man off to a parallel universe in the very first issue of What If…? Superman and Spider-Man could never really meet: Spider-Man lives in a much more realistic story-world than Superman and Superman lives in a much more heroic story-world than Spider-Man. That is kind of the point of them.

I remember a 1970s cartoon in which Scooby Doo visited Batman and Robin in the Batcave. There was a whole series in which Scooby Doo met other celebrities and cartoon characters. Scooby Doo meets the Adams Family; Scooby Doo meets Laurel and Hardy; Scooby Doo vs Predator. I think even us kids could see that this was a silly idea. Scooby Doo and Batman don’t belong in the same story. Pretending that they do takes all the laughter out of Scooby Doo and all the excitement out of Batman.

The two criminals who the fake Rorschach sprung from prison last month rob a bank. One of them, the lady, Marionette, has an unspecified previous connection with Doctor Manhattan. While the bank robbery is in progress, Doctor Manhattan teleports in from the galaxy or universe where he has been staying. That is why Ozymandias needed the crooks: as bait for Doctor Manhattan. Ozymandias has retrofitted the Owl Ship into a TARDIS and worked out that when Doctor Manhattan teleports he leaves a trail of McGuffin Particles. So Ozymandias and fake Rorschach and the two crooks can follow the McGuffin Trail back to the universe and world where Doctor Manhattan has been hiding out since the end of Watchmen. The DC Universe, obviously.

There was a good TV series a while back in which a policeman from a modern cop show got sent back in time and had to work with policemen from a 1970s cop show. The methods and attitudes of modern day policemen, and the style and assumptions of modern cop shows are ironically contrasted with the methods and attitudes and styles and assumptions of 1970s cop shows. They also did a 1980s version but that was boring. Why they didn't bring Gene Hunt forward to the present day I never understood.

So it could have been fun to take the realistic, grim, dark superheroes from Watchmen and dump them inside a traditional four-colour comic book universe. Part of the point of Watchmen was that superheroes had escaped from the printed page and got into the real world -- metaphorically, at least --  so a story in which those same superheroes somehow got trapped inside a comic would have been in keeping with Alan Moore’s metaphysics. But so far as one can tell, the mainstream DC Universe is now indistinguishable from the Watchmen universe. It’s grim, it’s dark, everyone is talking about corporate take overs, there are anti-superhero riots going on and no-one trusts ther Batman. That’s also very nearly the plot of the Superman vs Batman movie, which is as far as I have got with the DC Cinematic Universe. Wouldn’t it have been more interesting if Rorschach had met the square-jawed Adam West version of Batman? Then Ozymandias could have met Lex Luther the gangster who stole forty cupcakes. Or even Gene Hackman.

There was a comic where Miles Morales met Peter Parker, wasn’t there? It didn’t do very much except establish that the Traditional Marvel Universe was now just as realistic as the More Believable Ultimate Marvel Universe and that the latter therefore had no good reason to exist. Miles and Peter both now live in regular Marvel Continuity. They get on just fine. 

So: Ozymandias and Rorschach go to look for the two smartest people on this new earth, namely Bruce Wayne and Lex Luther. Lex Luther seems to be part way between the corrupt businessman persona and the super-villain persona — he lives in a tower block and wants to buy out Wayne Industries, but he has minions who he keeps threatening to execute. I liked the Lois n’ Clark version better.

The real Ozymandias told Nite Owl that he wasn't a Republic Serial Villain. The line was changed to "I'm not a comic book villain" in the movie, presumably because most people wouldn't know what a Republic Serial was. Lex Luther actually is a comic book villain, but Doomsday Clock consistently encourages the reader to see him as the plausible figure and to see Ozymandias as a little absurd. “If you are the smartest person on your earth, I would hate to meet the dumbest” says Lex. The point of Watchmen is that Ozymandias creates a brilliant plan, but Rorschach (just possibly, we never know) spoils it by sending the confession to the conspiracy theorists. Everyone in Doomsday Clock seems to take it for granted that it was a bloody stupid plan from the beginning. (The plan is framed as “scaring everyone with an arse-faced squid”. No-one has grasped any of Alan Moore’s metaphors about fiction and reality and idea space.) This isn’t the wholesome proper traditional four coloured DC Universe fighting back against the much too dark, much too cynical Watchmen. It’s more like the DC Universe and the Watchmen Universe vying to see who can be more cynical. Watchmen is if anything the naive younger brother.

Meanwhile, Rorschach has found his way into Wayne Manner and discovered the secret entrance to the Bat Cave which rather charmingly is still hidden behind a grandfather clock. He goes down a long stone staircase rather than a bat pole. Batman still has Robin’s old costume in a tube and a gigantic American penny, but no dinosaur. Rorschach isn’t impressed by Batman’s collection of trophies. They eventually meet in the last panel.

Geoff Johns tries to imitate Alan Moore’s writing style, a little bit, sometimes. On the opening pages, Ozymandias monologues that if he succeeds in persuading Doctor Manhattan to save the world “we’ll all be heroes again” — and we cut to Marionette telling the staff in the bank not to try to be heroes. We watch the robbery on black and white CCTV while Ozymandias says that “nothing is black and white any more”. In Watchmen there was sort of a point to this kind of thing: Rorschach, Ozymandias and Doctor Manhattan all believed, in different ways, that there were connections between everything if you looked hard enough. In this context, it feels more like parroting a narrative tick.

There are several panels in which a psychiatrist tries to assess Bruce Wayne’s sanity using, you’ll like this, Rorschach blotches. The sequence very closely parallels (although, in fairness, it doesn’t directly quote) Dr Long’s interview with Rorschach in Watchmen #6. (The psychiatrist has a bow-tie like the prison guy, although his suit is plain brown rather than natty purple.) One of the blotches looks like a bat. One of them looks like the iconic “young Bruce looking at his dead parents” panel, although to be honest I didn’t spot this until Bruce has a flashback a few pages later. An one of them is possibly meant to look like the Comedian. Bruce says they all look like speedboats. This is reference for the sake of reference: a thing happens in Doomsday Clock which reminds us of a thing which happened in Watchmen. I suppose some of our memories of Watchmen are supposed to be transferred to Doomsday Clock; the one stealing the gravitas of the other. All it really does is piss us off.

The artist’s decision to stick with a 3 by 3 grid is trying to do something similar. It’s a big structural smoke signal that says “When you read Doomsday Clock, remember how good Watchmen was!” In fact, it mainly serves to remind us of how unlike Dave Gibbons’ Gary Frank’s art is. (I am prepared to concede that Brad Anderson colours a bit like John Higgins). Mercifully, Doctor Manhattan is wearing the same v-shaped thong he had on during the Vietnam sequences of Watchmen. (Marionette helpfully points this out.) Dave Gibbons slightly more cartoony art deftly sidestepped the problem of male nudity: we could see that Manhattan was stark naked without feeling that the picture was particularly indecent. I look forward to seeing how Gary Frank’s slightly more realistic art will deal with the Big Blue Penis Problem.

Everything now hangs on what Rorschach and Batman say to each other next issue.  Will we get a clever and witty scene in which both characters mutually critique one another? Or will they just endlessly quote lines from older, better comic books?

But honestly. The Comedian?

Andrew Rilstone is a writer and critic from Bristol, England. 

If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider supporting Andrew on Patreon. 

if you do not want to commit to paying on a monthly basis, please consider leaving a tip via Ko-Fi.

Pledge £1 for each essay. 

Leave a one-off tip

 WATCHMEN AND DOOMSDAY CLOCK ARE COPYRIGHT DC COMICS. All quotes and illustrations are use for the purpose of criticism under the principle of fair dealing and fair use, and remain the property of the copyright holder.

 Please do not feed the troll. 

A Right Wing Racist Writes

....Richard Smith is looking forward to the Colston Hall name change - how about Hally McHallface or Star Bucks [sic]. And would you like Bristol renamed next year too, since a lot of its wealth in the past was made from the slave trade, and sugar and tobacco?

Of course neither [correspondent]mentions the significant philanthropic contributions that Colston made to Bristol...and neither acknowledges the realities of the times that Colston lived through and that his involvement with the slave trade should be seen in that light.

But then should we be surprised that the Countering Colston arguments are so one-dimensional and biased, because behind them is the sort of anti-establishment anti-capitalist slant of the Bristol Radical History Group[?] Looking at its website shows how they would like our history rewritten with conscientious objectors the only true heroes of war, Churchill the evil war-monger who incited WW2, and the renaming of the Colston Hall the first "domino" to fall.

...Colston was a significant person in the history of Bristol whose name should continue to appear, though his slave trade involvement should be highlighted in the context of the times he lived in as well as his philanthropic contributions. 

And before you call be a right wing racist, I am an educated liberal Bristolian with a passion for history, Bristol, education, and fairness. 

J. E Hill 
Evening Post Jan 18

An Ignorant Outdated Racist Writes....

I am getting totally fed up with the non-Bristolians of lower Clifton etc imposing their views on true Bristolians over historical events that happened more than 300 years ago.

Now they have finished their uni courses and settled down here, they seem to think they are the best thing since sliced bread because they are so-called educated and can impose their minority views on us!

For the non-Bristolians who want to have a rant at me because in their eyes they think I am an ignorant outdated racist (which I am not) I am actually a fairly successful career person who was born in this great city of ours but detest when the former uni students demand our history is changed because of their unrealistic left wing views. 

Bristol Evening Post 17/1/2018