Title: Doomsday Clock
Issue: Volume 1
Date: 2019
Publisher: DC Comics
Writer: Geoff Johns
Artist: Gary Frank
Colorist: Brad Anderson
Letterer: Rob Leigh
Editor:Brian Cunningham, Robin Wildman
Hardcover collection of the first six issues of Doomsday Clock, a DC-Universe/Watchmen crossover.
So first of all, The Watchmen did not need a sequel. It stands very well on its own, and the self-contained story and universe of the Watchmen is in some ways part of the point of why it is so good.
That being said, a lot of this was entertaining, even if in places it felt a bit like reading Watchmen fanfic.
We get a new Rorschach, and he's a pretty interesting character. We get a new pair of costumed criminals from the Watchmen universe with a solid backstory and pretty interesting chemistry between them.
We also get the return of a number of key Watchmen players, including (of course) some brought back from the dead).
And we get Superman, the Batman, the Joker, and a bunch of DC heroes and villains. The Watchmen world (I'm sure it's been given an Earth-Number, because of course it has, but I don't know which it is and whether it's a number between 1 and 52) is descending into nuclear war after Adrian Veidt's attempt to force world peace has, to the surprise of no one as Lex Luthor snarkily points out, collapsed under the weight of human nature.
And things aren't much better on Earth, um, is it 1 or 2 these days? Anyway, in whatever slightly-off version of the standard DC Universe this is, there is a conspiracy theory that claims that almost all superheroes and villains are actually government agents simply playing their roles while the US government, well, controls them.
This conspiracy has taken hold of the public consciousness and the result is anti-superhero (dare we say, anti-mask?) sentiment in the streets and rising international tensions. In short, similar circumstances that the Watchmen world faced in the original story.
And somewhere, Doctor Manhattan is manipulating things from behind the scenes.
This collection covers six issues and spends a lot of the time introducing the new characters, which is fine because they're pretty interesting. The rest of it alternates between a fairly intriguing plot with many moving pieces, an assortment of bits that are just violence for the sake of showing that various characters are violent, and bits from a series of Nathaniel Dusk noir films that play a similar role in this series to Tales of the Black Freighter.
Overall, this was an interesting enough story to keep me entertained. It's certainly no Watchmen, but that may be an unfair standard of comparison. A lot of attention to detail went into this, it's visually effective and introduces new characters that hold their own in the company of some iconic creations.
Rating: 6/10
