When DC Comics' Rebirth initiative kicked off in May 2016, Co-Publisher Dan DiDio mentioned that the Watchmen quasi-crossover would play out over the next two years. We know now that the 12-issue Doomsday Clock miniseries will run from November 2017 through at least October 2018, which is a few months longer but arguably still in the ballpark. On balance Rebirth's combination of apology and audacity has proved successful for DC, and certainly more well-received than the New 52's wholesale changes. Doomsday Clock must both sustain Rebirth's momentum and bring some closure to its changes.

RELATED: DC's Rebirth/Watchmen Could Revitalize the Charlton Heroes

Even so, we're starting to wonder what DC will do once the dust settles. If nothing else, Doomsday Clock will establish just how the world of Watchmen relates to DC's superhero cosmology. In turn, that relationship will likely determine how DC uses the Watchmen characters going forward. Thus, Doomsday Clock can either aggravate or put to rest a controversy that has raged among comics readers for years: whether DC will continue to exploit Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' perennial bestseller, or once again set it apart. Today we'll look at previous DC epics to see how they might inform this decision.

The Crisis That Never Was?

Psycho-Pirate remembers
The Psycho-Pirate remembers the Multiverse in the epilogue of "Crisis On Infinite Earths"

When DC got the rights to use Charlton Comics' superhero characters (Blue Beetle, Captain Atom, the Question, Nightshade, Peacemaker and Peter Cannon), it wanted Moore and Gibbons to feature them in their own miniseries. Naturally, DC planned to integrate these characters fully into its superhero line with 1985's Crisis On Infinite Earths, and so Blue Beetle and Captain Atom were given prominent roles. Because Watchmen would change all of the Charlton properties significantly, Moore and Gibbons crafted new characters to replace them (even if readers could still see their inspirations).

Appropriately enough for a story about time, a series of dates separates Watchmen from the rest of DC's superhero books. Although Crisis' 12 issues spanned calendar year 1985, much of its in-story action took place in July 1985. Whether by coincidence or design, Watchmen's main plot happened mostly in October and November 1985, and it was published from May 1986 to August 1987. We've discussed these dates previously with regard to both their real-world and in-story ramifications, but for now we'll just remind you that even if Watchmen's May 1986 debut wasn't enough to place it squarely post-Crisis, the in-story October 1985 time frame certainly would have. Having just eliminated its Silver Age multiverse, there was no way DC could justify either putting Watchmen on its own Earth or claiming that its events were an "untold story" from the pre-Crisis days. Moore and Gibbons were working outside the main superhero line, period.

RELATED: DC's Doomsday Clock Plans Were Nearly Canceled

If that sounds a little tenuous, a more practical aspect of Crisis has a clear implication for Doomsday Clock: The former was designed specifically to be forgotten. Except for memories of the red skies, fighting the Anti-Monitor and mourning colleagues like Barry Allen, nobody on the rebooted DC-Earth was supposed to know anything about the "Crisis" as chronicled in DC's superhero books. Accordingly, we hope Doomsday Clock writer Geoff Johns is keeping Crisis' self-immolating legacy in mind. Just as the post-Crisis DC titles didn't need to refer back to the cosmic twists and turns that helped make them possible, so the post-Doomsday Clock DC Universe shouldn't have a big blue naked milestone sitting in the middle of its newly revised timeline.

Put more simply, Doomsday Clock should help DC's superhero line maximize its potential while at the same time writing itself out of future storylines. The original Crisis involved DC's existing super-people in order to help readers bridge the gap between the old and new timelines. Flashpoint and Rebirth each did something similar, including Barry Allen helping to "create" the New 52 and the New 52 Superman dying to make room for his predecessor. Neither example should be taken as precedent for keeping the Watchmen characters around after Doomsday Clock, because we're talking about the Flash and Superman, two pillars of any DC shared universe. The main superhero line got along for over 30 years without a Watchmen crossover, and there's no reason to think it can't survive indefinitely without Moore and Gibbons' creations.

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Who Watches Earth-4?

In fact, the current DC multiverse already has a set of Watchmen counterparts living on Earth-4. As told in Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's "Pax Americana" chapter of Multiversity, this parallel Earth is home to post-Watchmen versions of Captain Atom, Blue Beetle, the Question, Nightshade and Peacemaker. While they aren't quite in the same places narratively as their mature-readers counterparts, they do have a couple of structural advantages.

Earth-4's post-'Watchmen' Captain Atom
Earth-4's Captain Atom, from "Multiversity: Pax Americana" by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely

First is their aforementioned spot in some of DC's prime celestial real estate. If DC ever wanted to have the Justice League visit a Watchmen-esque parallel world, Earth-4 is just a few dimensions down. (The reverse has already happened. Prior to Multiversity, Earth-4's Captain Atom showed up in the Morrison-written Final Crisis.) This also allows DC to avoid the considerable backlash it's already endured from the Before Watchmen miniseries. The Charlton characters entered the DC superhero line as residents of the pre-Crisis Earth-Four, so why shouldn't they (or versions of them) exist on the "updated" Earth-4?

Indeed, the Pax Americana characters were never intended to be one-offs. Morrison told CBR in 2009 that originally, each Multiversity special "would be the bible for what could potentially be an entire comic line for each of these Earths." Intentionally or not, this was a kind of inversion of the pre-Crisis parallel worlds, which assigned wide swaths of preexisting stories to places like Earth-Two (DC's Golden Age), Earth-S (Fawcett's superhero books) and Earth-Four (Charlton Comics). It's all to say that the Pax Americana versions of Captain Atom and company are pretty much there for the taking. They're just not as famous (or as ostensibly off-limits) as the Watchmen characters.

Elseworlds and the Multiverse

The Justice League in 'Kingdom Come'
The 'Kingdom Come' Justice League, by Alex Ross

DC's current multiverse goes back to 2007 and the fallout from the previous year's Infinite Crisis. Therefore, thanks to Crisis On Infinite Earths, for more than 20 years the DC superhero line went without a proper multiverse. (To make things easier, we're not counting Hypertime, the catch-all cosmology that popped up briefly from about 1998-2000.) Instead, DC scratched its multiversal itch with the so-called "Elseworlds," spiritual heirs of the Silver Age's "imaginary stories." Among other things, Elseworlds miniseries and specials made Superman a Soviet hero, a medieval knight and a sports star, transplanted the Justice League to the Old West, and turned Batman into a vampire and the man who caught Jack the Ripper.

One Elseworld became part of a thematic trend promoting "classic" takes on DC characters: 1996's Kingdom Come was the cautionary tale of an alternate near future, extrapolated from then-current DC continuity. As depicted by writer Mark Waid and artist Alex Ross, Superman's retirement led not only to a generation full of super-juvenile delinquents, but to a couple of nuclear explosions in the American heartland. While today we're not that interested in how well Kingdom Come has aged, its metatextual message is worth noting. Essentially (and not surprisingly), Kingdom Come argued that the timeless nature of DC's core characters needed to be preserved in order to avoid them being overshadowed by trendier up-and-comers.

Kingdom Come's four issues came out during summer 1996, when Waid wasn't quite halfway through his first stint as Flash writer, Morrison's retro-fueled JLA was preparing to launch in the fall, and the James Robinson-written Starman was repurposing Golden Age history for its hipster hero. At the time DC was starting to lean hard into Silver Age nostalgia -- in 2000, Waid even wrote a period-piece miniseries called Silver Age -- but it didn't last. By 2004 DC's biggest event was the infamous Identity Crisis, wherein writer Brad Meltzer and artists Rags Morales and Michael Bair used a Bronze Age Justice League two-parter as the springboard for a sordid tale of rape, murder and altered memories.

RELATED: Why Are Fans Embracing DC's Rebirth After Rejecting Before Watchmen?

In this respect Geoff Johns and Phil Jiminez's Infinite Crisis was supposed to be a sort of course correction, reestablishing cherished DC beliefs like "Superman is inspirational" and "Batman isn't a jerk." To that end it presented the Earth-Two Superman initially as a reactionary scold, lecturing the current generations about proper behavior. Infinite Crisis also brought back the Superboy of the old Earth-Prime as an omnipotent narcissist and, to a certain extent, a caricature of the modern superhero fan. Despite Infinite Crisis' message about re-learning the timeless lessons of the past, it was also fairly violent, with a couple of characters beaten to death and others impaled, amputated and/or beheaded.

Again, though, we mention Infinite Crisis mostly for its metatextual aspirations. Prior to Infinite Crisis, Johns had written Green Lantern: Rebirth, the six-issue 2004 miniseries that rehabilitated Hal Jordan after he'd wandered for ten years in the wilderness of other omnipotent identities. Naturally, this presaged an extended run on the relaunched Green Lantern title, which in 2010 spun out its own line-wide crossover. Although Blackest Night was concerned primarily with power ring-fueled zombies, Johns and artist Ivan Reis also tried to convey a more uplifting message about the healing power of life itself. Thus, Blackest Night ended with the revival of several characters killed during various DC events, including Aquaman, Hawkman and Hawkgirl, Max Lord and Martian Manhunter.

That removal-and-return cycle should sound familiar in light of the New 52's transition to Rebirth. Presently, the conventional wisdom has Johns using the Watchmen characters to mess with DC's timeline and/or set things straight. In furtherance of the latter, the Rebirth books have brought back the original version of Wally West and the post-Crisis, pre-Flashpoint versions of Superman and Lois Lane. On the other hand, where the Earth-Two Superman and Superboy-Prime wanted to give the DC of 2005 a makeover, apparently Doctor Manhattan engineered the New 52 to screw it all up. Given Johns' penchant for big-event metacommentary, it's hard not to see him blaming Watchmen for DC's grim tendencies over the past 30 years. Moreover, it's an argument Johns may not want to have, considering the amount of grimdark in his own work. We don't think Doomsday Clock will be as simple as it seems, and we're hoping that Johns and penciler Gary Frank give it a good bit of nuance.

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One and Done

Finally, we turn to what may be the greatest superhero crossover ever attempted, 2003-04's JLA/Avengers. Writer Kurt Busiek and artist George Pérez produced a work that honored the two companies' characters, acknowledged the changes visited upon them over the years, and created a framework through which fans could "just imagine" virtually any combination of Leaguers and Avengers. For four 48-page issues, it was a joy to read and remains a pleasure to revisit.

Such sweet sorrow
The bittersweet ending of "JLA/Avengers" by Kurt Busiek and George Perez

Regardless, JLA/Avengers ended on a bittersweet note, because Busiek and Pérez saw the DC and Marvel Universes as forbidden lovers (personified by DC's Kismet and Marvel's Eternity) whose union would have very bad consequences for all creation. In other words, enjoy it while it lasts, because it can't last forever. (JLA/Avengers did leave something behind, which Busiek and a small army of collaborators addressed in the year-long Trinity miniseries; but that felt like the exception which proved the rule.)

We think JLA/Avengers' star-crossed coupling is an excellent way to approach Doomsday Clock. The 12-issue miniseries will be one-and-a-half times as long as JLA/Avengers was, and we hope Johns and Frank use that space wisely. This sort of once-in-a-lifetime meeting should be just that. Doomsday Clock should work through all the fannish impulses (Question/Batman/Rorschach, Blue Beetle/Booster Gold/Nite Owl, Silk Spectre/Nightshade/Black Canary, etc.) and try its best to address larger fan concerns. Above all, though, the miniseries should be the last word on Doctor Manhattan's involvement with Superman and the rest of the mainline superhero books.

RELATED: 15 Insane Ways DC Changed Its Universe

In short, Doomsday Clock needs to get everything out of its system so that no one feels the need to revisit it ever again. If DC thought it was tempting fate with Before Watchmen, it's really sticking its corporate neck out with Doomsday Clock. As such, Johns and Frank should take their best shot, because the chance may well never come again.

Ever since its first issue appeared in May 1986, Watchmen has occupied a unique place in DC lore. It was a superhero comic that both honored and demystified the idea of superheroes. It was a comic book about the mechanics of comic books which played with the medium's possibilities even as it stuck to a superficially rigid structure. It was a story of hope set in a world which had been drained of it; and its real protagonist was a cynic who fancied himself an idealist. Watchmen is just about the last kind of story (whether pre- or post-squid attack) which should lend itself to being visited periodically by DC's workaday super-folk. To do so would be to reduce it to something like a playing field, or at most a set of comparison points.

Doomsday Clock may have profound effects on DC continuity, but like Crisis On Infinite Earths it should be designed to be forgotten. Like Kingdom Come (which was enshrined in the current DC multiverse on Earth-22), Doomsday Clock may facilitate a nostalgia-fueled restoration, but it doesn't need to make room in the multiverse for Watchmen; and anyway there are Watchmen-style characters over on Earth-4. While Doomsday Clock does have the potential to rewrite reality a la JLA/Avengers, instead of setting up future crossovers it should make the most of its singular opportunity.

Look, we're fans too, and while we might not have been crazy about this idea, we're curious (even in a sort of Mythbusters will-it-explode? sort of way) to see where it goes. We still think Watchmen and DC's mainline superhero titles are just too different to support any long-term relationship, so instead we'd like to see the best work which Johns and Frank can draw out of the pairing. Here's hoping that comes to pass.


How do you expect Doomsday Clock to leave its participants? Let us know in the comments!