WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for Doomsday Clock #1 by Geoff Johns, Gary Frank and Brad Anderson, on sale now.


After over a year of teasing from DC Comics, the controversial and eagerly-anticipated quasi-Watchmen sequel Doomsday Clock is finally out and it answers many of the questions left unanswered at the end of Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons and John Higgins’ masterpiece while presenting many more mysteries to decode.

REVIEW: Doomsday Clock #1 is a Well-Crafted Watchmen Successor

But the biggest reveal in the pages of Doomsday Clock #1 isn’t a shocking return or a surprise twist (sorry, Rorschach fans). The biggest mystery unfolds over the course of the entire issue, as we learn what happened to the world in the near-decade since Ozymandias dropped a genetically engineered psychic space squid on Manhattan, killing three million people... and ushering in world peace.

Look On My Works, Ye Mighty

The ending of Watchmen remains one of the most shocking and revelatory endings not just in comics but in all of science fiction. Alan Moore admits to nicking it from an ending of The Outer Limits, where a scientist plans to turn himself into a monstrous looking alien invader in order to terrify the nations of the world into unity. However, what Moore, Gibbons and Higgins did with a similar story took it above and beyond the original influence. Keep in mind Moore hadn’t seen the episode, he’d merely read about it in a book about essential American cult television. The shock doesn’t just come from the plan or the number of dead, it comes from Ozymandias’ casual attitude towards mass murder and the off-handed way he admits, “I did it thirty-five minutes ago”.

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The scientist's plan in that The Outer Limits episode goes awry — his spaceship crashes and he’s shot by hunters in the forest. And ss we discover in Doomsday Clock #1, Adrian Veidt’s plot similarly didn’t go according to plan, with far more disastrous results. Watchmen ends on an ambiguous note, leaving it up to the readers whether Rorschach's journal is discovered and the plot exposed or not. However, Doomsday Clock #1 confirms that what’s now known as The Great Lie was exposed by The New York Gazette, which only served to send the world into further chaos.

RELATED: Doomsday Clock's Rorschach Resurrection, Explained

Since then, Ozymandias has been out of the public eye, hiding from the many world governments and law enforcement agencies that would see him arrested and tried for the murder of three million and the tens of thousands who suffered permanent psychological damage. We see a raid on his Antarctic base Karnak, and though unsuccessful, the soldiers discover an incredibly important plot element in the form of an x-ray seemingly showing a tumor growing in the patient’s brain.

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That Boundless Wreck

We first encounter Ozymandias hiding out in Nite-Owls abandoned bunker where he’s working with Rorschach on a final, desperate plan to save the world. Having recruited the supervillain Marionette — who brought along her unhinged mute husband, The Mime — Ozymandias laments the fall of his empire, noting the irony in the name he took for his costumed identity. In the fiction of his world, Adrian Veidt took the name Ozymandias as a reference to the Egyptian pharaoh Rameses II, but the name has a more symbolic meaning beyond that. Moore named the character — originally based on Charlton’s Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt — as a reference to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem of the same name, about a monument to the pharaoh proclaiming his legacy’s immortality, only for it to have been worn away by the sands of time.

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The penultimate issue of Watchmen takes its title from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous poem, but the debut issue of Doomsday Clock takes its title from a different poem of the same name. At the same time as Shelley was writing his Ozymandias, his friend Horace Smith was writing his own — a common practice among literary circles of the time was to challenge each other to broach the same subject. Smith’s Ozymandias is a lot less subtle than Shelley’s, pointing out that just as their society looks back on the ruins of ancient Egypt, one day in the future someone will look back on London the same way. This could be a self-aware nod from Geoff Johns to the fact that he’s a much more literal and bombastic writer than Moore, but it’s likely included due to its more overt themes of the fleeting nature of modernity, as the society of Watchmen — with all of its electric cars and other future technology — begins to crumble.

The Lone And Level Sands

Veidt himself is also heading towards a similar fate, as he recently discovered a brain tumor that is not only slowly killing him as it spreads but it’s taking away what is more precious to him, his treasured intellect. With no other recourse and the world on the brink of oblivion, Veidt has one plan left; a hail mary to save the world: find Dr. Manhattan and convince him to return. Jon Osterman has been missing since the mid-eighties, last seen by Veidt himself when he told Ozymandias that he was “leaving this galaxy for one less complicated”. The implication on the next page is that universe is indeed the DC Universe, as hinted at way back in DC Universe Rebirth #1.

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It’s ironic that Adrian Veidt spearheaded the effort to break down Dr. Manhattan’s relationship with humanity by manufacturing cancer in those closest to him, only for Ozymandias to now need him to return after developing cancer himself. It’s a punishment he deserves — the least of what he deserves for what he’s done to the world — and by being forced to humble himself in front of the being Rorschach refers to as “god” is a suitable atonement for his sins. We now know what Ozymandias’ next move is, but we don’t yet know how he’s going to achieve it or what an unpowered common criminal like The Marionette has to do with Dr. Manhattan’s return, but we’ve already seen that as smart as Veidt is, he isn’t as smart as he thinks he is and he doesn’t always foresee the consequences of his actions.