Doomsday Clock # 7

PLAYER CHARACTERS

SATURN GIRL

Comes from: The DC Universe, 36th Century
Group affiliation: Legion of Superheroes
Powers: Telepathy
Objective: Keep history running according to the correct time line from her future perspective.

RORSCHACH II:

Comes from: The Watchmen Universe, 1992
Group affiliation: Ozymandias
Powers: Being a badass
Objectives: Help Ozymandias locate Doctor Manhattan.

JOHNNY THUNDER

Comes from: The DC Universe, 1945
Group affiliation: The Justice Society
Powers: Used to be able to summons up a magic genie.
Objective: Reestablish contact with his magic genie. Believes the green lantern (see below) is related to his lamp.

Magic Items: Green lantern

The green lantern once belonged to the golden age Green Lantern who was Johnny Thunder's team mate in the Justice Society. (However due to the intervention of Doctor Manhattan, the golden age Green Lantern never existed and was therefore, presumably, never in the Justice Society. The green lantern has been impregnated with McGuffin Particles due to its contact with Doctor Manhattan.)

NON PLAYER CHARACTERS

OZYMANDIAS

Comes from: The Watchmen Universe, 1992
Group affiliation: Himself
Powers: Rich genius.
Objective: a: Find Doctor Manhattan;
b: Persuade him to return to the Watchmen Universe
c: Prevent Watchmen Universe being destroyed in a nuclear war for real this time.

Magic Items:

1: Nite Owl's Owlship

Automatically deposits Ozymandias at the exact spot in the multiverse where the plot requires him to be.

2: Bubastis

Bubaastis was killed by Doctor Manhattan but has been cloned by Ozymandias. The Bubastis kitten has been impregnated with McGuffin Particles due to the original's contact with Doctor Manhattan.

BATMAN

Comes from: The DC Universe, present day
Group affiliation: Himself
Powers: He is ther goddamned Batman.
Objectives: a: Prevent Ozymandias destroying the world.
b: Catch crooks.

VILLAINS

THE JOKER

Comes from: The DC Universe, present day
Group affiliation: Leader of all the criminals in Gotham City
Powers: Mad, evil. Has more or less infinite supply of former Batman bad guys under his command.
Objective: Kill ther Batman

THE COMEDIAN

Comes from: The Watchmen Universe, 1992
Group affiliation: Doctor Manhattan
Objective: Last orders were to kill Bubastis

The Comedian was killed in the Watchmen universe, but has been resurrected in the present day DC Universe by Doctor Manhattan

The Comedian has been impregnated with McGuffin Particles due to his contact with Doctor Manhattan.

THE MIME and the MARIONETTE

Come from: The Watchmen Universe, 1992
Powers: Unclear
Group affiliation: Came to the DC Universe with Ozymandias with the intention of helping him solicit Doctor Manhattan's aid. Currently allied with the Joker

SCENARIO

When the scenario begins, Mime and Marionette and a severely wounded Comedian and ther Batman are located in the Joker's secret base.

Ozymandias will pick up Saturn Girl, Johnny Thunder and Rorschach in the Owl Ship.

Bubastis is attracted to anything and anyone which has been impregnated with McGuffin Particles (i.e anything which has been touched by Doctor Manhattan.) This should eventually lead the party to the Joker's base.

If all the objects and people impregnated with McGuffin Particles (e.g Bubastis, the Comedian and the green lantern) are brought together then Doctor Manhattan will be forced to manifest.

When Doctor Manhattan manifests he will info dump the following facts:

1: Ozymandias does NOT have cancer after all; this was a ruse to persuade Rorschach to join his scheme.

2: Rorschach's parents' marriage was destroyed by his father's involvement with Kovacs. This information was withheld from him by Mothman.

3: Manhattan refrained from killing the Marionette during the bank robbery not out of simple compassion but because he used his precognizance to see what her child would do in the future.

4: Marionette is pregnant again; Manhattan will not say which child the prophecy refers to.

5: Manhattan knows that he will encounter Superman in one month's time: his precognizance fails at this point and he does not know if this means he will be killed, or that he will somehow destroy the world.

Once it is clear that Manhattan will not intervene to save either Watchmen-earth or DC-earth, Ozymandias will announce that he has a plan of his own.

Because the last one went so well.

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

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Doomsday Clock #6

I sometimes come to the end of a comic book and say "This handles the first meeting of Winnie-the-Pooh and Paddington Bear in an obvious and predictable way; any fan could have written it themselves." The proper reaction to Doomsday Clock is more like: "This copies the superficial style of Watchmen in an obvious and predictable way; but it is written very much better than any fan would have done."

Which raises the question "Why is Geoff Johns, who can obviously write a bit, wasting his time on this thing?"

Anyway.

This issue establishes a back story for Marionette and Mime, the two Watchmen-universe super-villains introduced in issue #1. This is in itself an obvious and predictable copy of the superficial style of Watchmen; which dedicated several issues to establishing the backstories of individual characters. The flashback to Marionette's childhood copies the style of those flashback episodes in such an obvious and predictable way that it set my teeth on edge.

Doctor Manhattan's dad made watches; and that imagery feeds into the Doc building his weird artifice on Mars; his non-linear perception of time; Einstein's line about becoming a watchmaker; the title of the comic....and so on, to infinity and beyond. Marionette's father made -- I wonder if you can guess -- puppets. (An immigrant-run marionette shop opposite an immigrant-run cut-glass shop seems like something out of the 1930s rather than the 1970s, but possibly all superhero flashbacks take place in that period known as The Olden Days.) When Rorschach was a little boy a group of bigger boys called him whore-son and he stabbed one of them in the eye with a pencil. When Marionette was a little girl some bigger girls called her dad a creepy child molester and the boy from the glass shop over the road smashed one of their heads open with a bottle.

Marionette's father is forced to pass protection money, or possibly drug money, or possibly bribes between the mob and some bent coppers. He does this by, er, hiding wads of cash inside his puppets. He is so ashamed of this that he ends up taking his own life. Marionette finds him hanging in his shop as if he were a puppet himself. And we are all puppets, don't you know, only not all of us can see the strings. I wonder if some day that you'll say that you care?

But once we were told about the origins of Rorschach, Doctor Manhattan or Ozymandias we felt we understood those characters a little more; and the more we understood the characters the more sharply the Watchmen setting came into focus. We saw that Rorschach was not just a vigilante: he believes that good and evil are absolutes but that they were invented by humans and imposed on an amoral universe. This to some extent explains his actions: when he chooses to die rather than compromise his beliefs we understand why. I suppose that this story tells us that Marionette and Mime are very dedicated to each other because of a shared trauma in their childhood; and that they became criminals because Marionette's father was driven to suicide by corrupt cops. But really: we're back in that monochrome universe where "Because a baddy killed his daddy" is a good answer to the question "Why would a brilliant multi-zillionaire dress up as a bat every night?"

Yes, you can blackmail me into empathizing with two characters by telling me that they had horrid childhoods; but the question "Who are these people? Why should I care about them? And how do they fit into the story?" remains entirely unanswered. They are currently hanging out with the Joker's entourage, which merely underlines the fact that they are not very much more than Poundland Harley Quinn knockoffs.

Meanwhile, in the present day, all the villains in the DC Universe or possibly Gotham City are gathered together in a villainous convocation. They get one panel each. Here's the Penguin; here's the Scarecrow; here's one I don't remember.

There are off-hand references to the Green Lantern and all his enemies having left earth and Wonder Woman having been forcibly returned to Paradise Island, which is either a witty allusion to Dark Knight Returns or else isn't.

Then the Comedian turns up and everyone gets shot.

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

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Doomsday Clock #5

Batman meets Ozymandias on the Owlship.

Batman says to Ozymandias: "You killed billions of people as part of a crazy, self-aggrandizing scheme." 

Ozymandias says to Batman "You spend all your time arresting individual muggers and supervillains, but have never tried to do anything positive to improve the world."

The consequence was that Batman falls out of the Owlship, is ripped apart by an angry mob, and handed over to the Joker. 

And the world said "We think its all a big conspiracy by the American government."

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.

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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.

 Please do not feed the troll. 

Doomsday Clock #4

"A Young Guy has been placed in a mental institution. His Dad was killed in a Horrible Disaster, shortly after befriending a Notorious Vigilante. The Young Guy meets a friend of the Notorious Vigilante who is also in the institution. The Vigilante's Friend gives the Young Guy some combat training and a copy of his Father's diary.  The Young Guy eventually takes on the identity of the Notorious Vigilante and goes after the Crazy Genius who caused the Horrible Disaster which killed his family. But when he finds out that the Crazy Genius is terminally ill, he makes an uneasy alliance with him."

Doomsday Clock #4 contains a story. Not a great story: but definitely a narrative; one which would make sense even to someone who didn't know the difference between "Earth-2" and the "New 52". It is therefore the best issue so far. 

Like Watchmen itself, it is very, very dense: too dense to really understand at a single reading. Like Watchmen it keeps jumping between the present day and the character's memories, showing how things in the past continue to influence things in the present. Like Watchmen, it involves a criminal being given a Rorschach test by a psychiatrist. Twice. But unlike Watchmen the flashback structure is spread across two different universes, which makes everything just that little bit more confusing.

Last month, our hero, Fake Rorschach, was trapped in Arkham Asylum as a result of a ruse by ther Batman. This month we learn that Fake Rorschach (who traveled from Watchmen-world to DC-world with Ozymandias) is in fact...

SPOILERS

....Reggie Long, the son of Doctor Malcolm Long who psychoanalyzed the original Rorschach in the original graphic novel. His parents were killed in Ozymandias's attack on New York, and he saw the giant alien squid himself. As a result, he was placed in a mental institution where he came to know Byron Lewis, the original Mothman, who had also been institutionalized. (Mothman appears in a couple of panels in the original Watchmen; he was a member of the original Minutemen team. He has a slightly bigger role in Before Watchmen, but I don't care about that.) The relationship between Reggie and Byron is pretty well done. They first meet when Reggie is thinking about jumping from the prison roof; and Byron appears to be planning to do the same thing. But of course, Byron is not really trying to kill himself -- he is testing his moth-glider wings. There is a tolerably Moorish subtext here: both characters are in their own way looking for the Light; and light is what moths, by their nature, are drawn to. But we keep seeing an image of a bug flying into a light and getting zapped by a bug trap. The scenes of the emaciated Reggie Long, on the roof, in the rain, thinking about jumping, recall the concentration camp scenes in V for Vendetta, possibly intentionally.

There is, I fear, a little bit of dot-joining going on. Geoff Johns needs to get Reggie to the point where he can plausibly impersonate Rorschach; but Rorschach was the ultimate bad-ass. So we get Mothman teaching Reggie the fighting techniques of the Minutemen; and Mothman taking trips "over the wall" on his glider wings and bringing Regggie the notes about Rorschach that his late father left conveniently on his desk. He even provides him with boarding passes which will take him most of the way to Ozymandias's base at the South Pole. (Reggie is, understandably, a little cross with Ozymandias once he finds out that the giant blue squid which killed his parents and landed him in a mental hospital was a fake.) It's all a bit contrived, but plenty of superheroes have had less convincing origin stories.

The whole thing is framed, rather confusingly, with scenes in which the present-day fake-Rorschach is interviewed by a psychiatrist in present-day-DC-Universe Arkham; so we get to go through the whole "What do these pictures make you think of?" routine twice.

The Arkham shrink turns out to be ther Batman and the mysterious telepathic lady in the next cell turns out to be Saturn Girl from the Legion of Superheroes. She springs Reggie out of Arkham. 

There is still a subplot about how lots of people think that all the superheroes were deliberately created as part of a conspiracy by the American government. I hope you are keeping up.

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.

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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.

 Please do not feed the troll.