"Nothing Ever Really Ends"

The phrase originated as a thought-provoking statement. But having looked over DC Comics' Doomsday Clock by Geoff Johns & Gary Frank it seems to be repurposed into a threat.

I didn't really want to read Doomsday Clock, but as a contributor to The Grand Comics Database I read a little bit of anything - anything which isn't already indexed at the GCD. I noticed they lacked indexing on the three Doomsday Clock trades (one 2 volume hardcover set and one complete softcover collection). I put holds on them at my library and received them immediately - a little odd, considering it's one of the 'hot' comics of 2020 and I'm currently about one month in on my wait for Jonathan Hickman's first X-Men trade.

I had no great expectations for this comic. I'm one of those who think Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons' Watchmen was a perfect comic that could only be diminished by revisiting. If DC characters must meet Watchmen characters (and they don't have to, no), then that issue of The Question where the Question tries to imitate Rorschach is about as far as I'd like to see it go.

It's a very slavish attempt to recreate Watchmen's format - 12 issues, told mostly in 9-panel grids, text features in the back. These are creative decisions Johns & Frank would never have made on their own - it's simply parroting what fandom expects from a Watchmen comic. The entire project is a very safe one, a conservative attempt to have the characters' universes brush up against each other. Moore & Gibbons' complex storytelling where words & images were deftly intertwined is not recreated.

And indeed, if you want a conservative DC Comics writer you could look no further than Geoff Johns. 20 years ago he was a mere fanboy-turned-writer. But in these twenty years he's... not changed, really. He was the company's Chief Creative Officer prior to writing this series. But I was struck by how much Doomsday Clock reads like his 20-year old JSA comics. Not because the JSA cast are here (although they are) but because he still writes his conflicts to a point where the solution to the problem (for some reason) is a double-page spread of various super heroes posing.

There might be a great story to be told about how Watchmen influenced the direction of the DC Comics characters even before the company tried to fuse them into a shared universe. But considering the tone the series is going for -- the attempt to be reconciliatory towards the two universes -- it shouldn't have been written by a fan service writer. As Moore's own reaction to Watchmen's popularity was to move from deconstruction to reconstruction, I feel a better story could have been told by a reconstruction writer -- that is, Kurt Busiek, Grant Morrison, Mark Waid, Tom Peyer or someone of their ilk. Doomsday Clock takes the path of least resistance. It's the sort of comic where, if the Joker should appear, the 9-panel grid has to be abandoned because, wow, the Joker, oh my goodness, who could have imagined seeing the Joker in a DC Comics book, my expectations are shattered.

Ultimately I realize I am not the target audience for Doomsday Clock. To be fair, no one in comics fandom is the target audience. The target audience is the executive board of Warner Bros.