Watchmen Is Doomsday Clock's Least Interesting Aspect

SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for Doomsday Clock #5 by Geoff Johns, Gary Frank, Brad Anderson and Rob Leigh, on sale now.

There’s a lot going on in Doomsday Clock, so much so that it can be hard to keep up. With the series set one year in the future of the current DC Universe, there are obviously some changes that have taken place in the intervening time. But although we’ve only seen glimpses of mainstays like Superman, Lex Luthor and Batman, it’s obvious that the DC Universe of Doomsday Clock is a very different place to the one we’re familiar with.

Against that backdrop, we’ve got the ongoing story of the Watchmen characters transported across dimensional boundaries; with Ozymandias and Rorschach split up but continuing in their search for Doctor Manhattan, Marionette and The Mime let loose in Gotham City and the wildcard that is the resurrected Comedian.

However, the stories of the Watchmen characters are only really made interesting in how they play off the events happening in the DC Universe. At times, it seems like the story wants to be more about the DC heroes and their struggles than anything else. In fact, you could go so far as to say that Doomsday Clock would be a better and more interesting story if it focused on the heroes and villains of the DC Universe... and had nothing to do with Watchmen at all.

One Year Later

The world of Doomsday Clock is reminiscent of the DC Universe immediately following Infinite Crisis, where the entire publishing line jumped one year into the future under the “One Year Later” banner. Immediately, fans were faced with a powerless Superman, a reinvigorated Batman and a secret agent Wonder Woman, while the effects of Infinite Crisis played out throughout the line. Bart Allen was the new Flash, Holly Robinson was the new Catwoman and Jaime Reyes was the new Blue Beetle. The Teen Titans went through a year-long roster shake-up as Robin and Wonder Girl struggled to cope with the death of Superboy, and many heroes were still missing following the events of the Rann-Thanagar War.

Ostensibly, the weekly series 52 was supposed to answer a lot of the questions posed by One Year Later, although whether it was successful in that is up for debate. (Most of the dangling plot threads were hastily tied-up in the four-issue World War III miniseries, where all four issues were released one the same day.) However, that doesn’t change the excitement created by the One Year Later initiative and it seems that in some ways Doomsday Clock has taken that idea and inverted it. One Year Later was, one the whole, a very optimistic time in the DC Universe as the heroes looked forward to a brighter tomorrow.

Over a decade later, the time-jump in Doomsday Clock is much more pessimistic with superhero conspiracy theories running rampant and a metahuman arms race threatening to ignite a new Cold War. We’ve already seen some small steps towards this new world in titles such as Detective Comics, when The Victim Syndicate revealed Clayface’s role in the Gotham Knights, but in a year’s time, it seems that the DC Universe is going to be a much less friendly and much more hostile place for superheroes.

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Geoff Johns has stated that he sees Doomsday Clock as a response to what he sees as a criticism of the DC Universe leveled by Watchmen, and honestly, that’s not a bad place at all to start with a story. However, Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons and John Higgins didn’t need to use the heroes of the DC Universe to level that criticism, and literally doing a sequel to Watchmen where the characters of that universe cross over into the DCU seems like the easiest and laziest way to rebut their tale.

Everything else about Doomsday Clock works really well as a response to Watchmen. The global tensions rising due to The Supermen Theory conspiracy and the metahuman arms race which has seen countries around the world draft their own superhero teams, for example, is a really smart way to mirror the Cold War tensions of Watchmen without using those characters.

The use of both Johnny Thunder and Saturn Girl as representatives from two different, more optimistic and outright heroic times contrasts well against the grim and gritty state of the world. Thunder’s desire to bring back the Justice Society of America is a metaphor for a return to a simpler, more outwardly noble era of superheroes who existed before titles like Watchmen led to superhero comics becoming more morally grey.

It’s possible to do a story about Watchmen without using those characters. Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely and Nathan Fairbairn’s The Multiversity: Pax Americana was one of the most insightful and flawlessly structured pieces of comics-as-criticism of all time. By using the Charlton characters which Watchmen was based on, Pax Americana told a story that wasn’t just a criticism of Watchmen but a criticism of criticism, with the message that you can take things apart to see how they work but you can’t enjoy it in the same way every again.

It’s understandable why DC wanted to bring in the Watchmen characters for Doomsday Clock; when Batman discovered The Comedian’s button in DC Universe: Rebirth #1 it got people talking and helped rocket the Rebirth initiative into the success it ultimately was. However, Rebirth was really great without that buzz, and Doomsday Clock could be great without the Watchmen characters. Instead of being the near creatively bankrupt retreading of a classic and complete story — and in doing so, going against Moore’s wishes and needlessly bringing up the shady practices with which DC kept a stranglehold on Watchmen as a property — Doomsday Clock could have been Geoff Johns’ masterpiece; a love letter to everything great about superheroes and the DC Universe. It still can be that, but it’ll always be tainted by the unnecessary use of Watchmen’s world and its characters.

KEEP READING: Doomsday Clock’s International Heroes Of The Metahuman Arms Race, Explained