What is the point of Doomsday Clock? It can be read as a treatise on hope and optimism overcoming despair and darkness in the superhero genre, but it really leans into the despair and darkness in the execution. If it’s supposed to pave a path for the larger DC Universe, the paving is taking a very long time. After a year and a half, the rest of DC’s line hasn’t shifted anywhere closer to the events of the miniseries, which has slipped from shipping every month to every two months to every quarter. The creative team is succeeding if the point of Doomsday Clock is to cash in on Watchmen’s popularity to drive interest for yet another continuity-juggling event comic, but as the series continues, a fascinating new dimension emerges in the shadow of real-life events.
No, I’m not referring to anything involving the USA and Russia, a political conflict integral to the Doomsday Clock plot. I’m referring to writer Geoff Johns’ relationship with DC Comics and Warner Bros, which is in a very different place now than it was when the seeds for Doomsday Clock were first planted. DC Universe Rebirth #1, the one-shot that shut the door on the New 52 and brought Watchmen into the core DC Universe, was released in May 2016. Two months later, Johns would be named President of DC Entertainment. Doomsday Clock #1 was released in November 2017, and eight months later, his tenure as President was over. The success of the Wonder Woman movie was rapidly spoiled by the failure of Justice League, and in the shadow of Marvel Studios’ unprecedented success, the weak performance of a movie starring Batman, Wonder Woman, and Superman doomed Johns in his leadership position.
Johns excels as a creator, and once he left his roles as President and Chief Creative Officer, he was quickly rewarded for his writing. He co-wrote the story for the surprise smash Aquaman, and his first writing credit for a DC feature film grossed over a billion dollars worldwide and helped rehab the studio’s image. But reading Doomsday Clock #10, you get the impression that Johns doesn’t look back at recent years fondly. This issue is steeped in resentment and regret, with Johns emphasizing the dark side of Hollywood fame and the mistakes that were made when DC launched the New 52 and used it as a template for its cinematic efforts. There isn’t a one-to-one correlation between reality and the events in this superhero comic, but if Johns is going to introduce the idea of a “Metaverse,” in this issue, he’s asking readers to ponder how the story speaks to the circumstances of its creation.
Much of Doomsday Clock plays like standard DC vs. Watchmen fanfiction, but the book has become much more compelling as it builds a metanarrative about being the architect of a superhero universe. Johns has felt the rush of leaving an indelible mark on IP that reaches a massive audience, but he’s also experienced the backlash when that audience rejects his ideas and costs him his job. Doomsday Clock #10 is a tragedy about having the power to change the universe and discovering that you’ve used it to create something worse. Like Johns, Doctor Manhattan sees how the “Metaverse” has been altered in the past and decides that he wants to be part of that legacy. Manhattan feels more connected to Superman in the new timeline, but the “Metaverse” fights back, first by bringing back Wally West, then rallying all of the world’s heroes against a common foe.
One of my initial concerns with the Doctor Manhattan revelation in Rebirth, beyond the ethical minefield that comes with using any Watchmen characters, was the idea that an entirely unrelated property would be blamed for DC’s publishing missteps. Implying that Watchmen’s influence was responsible for the New 52 didn’t jive. A line can be drawn from Watchmen’s bleak take on superheroes to the grim and gritty superhero comics of the ’90s, but the New 52 was far more beholden to the latter, particularly on the art side. But as Doomsday Clock continues, my interpretation of the Doctor Manhattan arc significantly changes. He’s stopped being an avatar of the Watchmen universe and has instead become a stand-in for writer Geoff Johns, who uses the character to look at the rush of altering superhero universes and the agony of screwing them up.
DC Universe Rebirth #1 revealed that Doctor Manhattan caused the New 52 by altering the timeline, and three years later, Doomsday Clock #10 reveals how and why he changed it. After the last issue’s big showdown on Mars, the miniseries switches gears to move in an introspective direction for #10, which is split between three storylines: The primary thread is Doctor Manhattan arriving in the core DC continuity, seeing how it is changed over time, and choosing to alter it himself. The second thread follows Carver Coleman, an aspiring actor in the Golden Age of Hollywood whose life is changed when he meets Doctor Manhattan. The last story is the myth of Superman, told over and over again with slight variations. These all come together via Doctor Manhattan’s time-bending perspective, jumping across the timeline as he tries to acclimate to the curious temporal dynamics of this dimension.
The creative team of Doomsday Clock has been working together for over a decade, beginning with Geoff Johns’ run on Action Comics before The New 52. Artist Gary Frank’s work strikes a balance between classic superhero exuberance and more modern grit, and Brad Anderson’s coloring heightens those tonal shifts while matching the sharp detail of the linework. He makes powerful use of red and blue to build up to the life-changing meeting between Doctor Manhattan and Carver Coleman, and his color palettes play a vital part in distinguishing between different superhero eras as Doctor Manhattan sees Superman’s story change with each timeline shift. The last two issues have been especially strong showcases for Frank and Anderson’s versatility, with #9 giving them the opportunity to present large-scale superhero spectacle while #10 zooms in on specific characters for a story that still has huge implications, but is visually more contained and intimate.
The continuity manipulation of Doomsday Clock #10 is total nonsense. Naked blue god-man sees that imaginary timeline has been repeatedly changed, decides to stop railroad engineer from grabbing magical lantern and changes timeline even more. Along the way naked blue god-man discovers that this superhero universe isn’t part of the Multiverse, but responsible for shaping all of those parallel worlds. It’s a “Metaverse” that rearranges the Multiverse every time it changes, and by making his own mark on the timeline, naked blue god-man becomes the villain that the heroes need to destroy. Doctor Manhattan is not all that different from villains like the Anti-Monitor and Extant who have previously changed continuity, but he carries the gravitas of Watchmen and everything that book represents, from the artistic liberty that makes it a seminal superhero text to the corporate greed that makes it a prime example of the industry’s exploitation of creators.
Scenes from Carver Coleman’s Nathaniel Dusk film, The Adjournment, have been sprinkled throughout Doomsday Clock, serving a similar function as the Tales Of The Black Freighter interludes in Watchmen. Nathaniel Dusk is a private investigator character introduced by DC Comics in the mid 1980s and erased from continuity after Crisis On Infinite Earths, and Johns uses Dusk to integrate the relationship between comics and film into the Doomsday Clock narrative. Warner Bros. made its name with gangster films, and by incorporating an established DC character into the movie studio’s Golden Age, he draws a cinematic parallel to the comic-book Golden Age begun by the debut of Superman.
Hollywood is at the foundation of Geoff Johns’ comic-book career. He broke into the entertainment industry as a production assistant for Superman: The Movie director Richard Donner, who would join Johns as the co-writer of Action Comics in the mid ’00s. Johns would build his career as a power player at DC Comics, revitalizing dusty properties and penning hit crossover events that reshaped the entire DC Universe, and that knowledge would prove very useful to Warner Bros. as superheroes surged in popularity in both film and television. Like Carver Coleman, Geoff Johns got ahead in Hollywood because superheroes helped him see the future, but once you reach a certain level of power, you become a target. Carver is killed by his mother when she bashes his skull in with his Academy Award. Johns is fired by DC’s parent company after being set up for failure with a troubled production.
The roots of that troubled production start at Superman, and Zack Snyder’s Man Of Steel kicked off DC’s cinematic universe with a bleak, cynical worldview that was more distinctive than Marvel Studios’ work, but also not as appealing. As the first of his kind, Superman is at the core of the DC Universe, even if he’s not DC’s most profitable character (that’s Batman). There’s something particularly intoxicating about changing Superman, but if you go too far, there’s one hell of a come down. DC Entertainment felt it after Man Of Steel, and Johns felt it after the New 52. With all this context in mind, this narration from Doctor Manhattan gains autobiographical implications that makes Doomsday Clock more personal: “I have recreated the Metaverse. And it has turned against me. I see a vision of Superman in the future. He has found me. And he destroys me. Or I destroy the Metaverse.”
It feels like DC has turned against Johns in the past year, largely because of how it’s handled Wally West in the pages of Heroes In Crisis. Doomsday Clock #10 was released on the same day as Heroes In Crisis #9, giving readers some serious whiplash in how they present Wally West’s function within the DC Universe. In Doomsday Clock, Wally is universal antibody, fighting the Doctor Manhattan infection by remembering the world before the New 52. He’s situated as a beacon of hope, but in Heroes In Crisis, his trauma has driven him to mass murder. It’s a message completely opposed with what Johns is trying to say in Rebirth and Doomsday Clock, and seeing DC diminish Johns’ work while its still in progress is fitting given the book’s relation to Watchmen, a comic with a legacy steeped in conflict between publisher and creator.
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That’s a fantastic review Oliver, I’ve struggled with Doomsday Clock but did enjoy the tenth issue even despite being unaware of Johns’ relationship with DC and how it’s changed over recent years, and your insight in to it has made the issue all the more interesting.
This is a really interesting analysis, even if don’t necessarily agree with all the details. Something I don’t think is really hit on here, and apologies if I missed it, is that DC ran Metal and essentially had Scott Snyder take over as the core writer of the larger DCU mythology during the period when Johns was writing his own magnum opus that was supposed to redefine the DCU.
The arc and influence of Geoff Johns has been one of the most interesting metastories in recent years and I really hope, even if I know it isn’t likely, that someday there will be a longer article or something that really digs in what was happening in the shadows during his rise and seeming fall. It just feels like there is a really juicy story there.As a note on the Doomsday Clock itself, I think it does feature one of his core flaws as a crossover writer and the creative director is that he plays favorites bafflingly hard with those few characters. It also makes me react scoffingly at his attempts to cast Wally in the role he does here.
Two small sidenotes on things I realized while reading this. First I’ve always found it weird that Justice League is somehow counted as the end result of Snyder’s vision failing as not only are there indications that he had very little to do with it in the end, it is probably the most Geoff Johns film I’ve yet to see. And I do partially wonder if that played a role in what has happened since.
Second, and this is a larger point on him as a writer, I’ve always wondered if Johns had some resentment towards Batman being more popular than Superman. It is just that not only his take on the character often baffling, but he is almost insistant on featuring that take in so many stories he writes instead of just ignoring the character.
Batman is featured in the Green Lantern Rebirth story for the sole purpose of having Hal Jordan punch him and Guy Gardener shout “one punch!” to “make-up” for the time Batman punched Guy in JLI. People recognized it as petty and pandering at the time, but Johns has went back to that well more and more when doing his big events.
To be fair, that wasn’t Batman’s sole purpose in that story as he was also to be the antagonist hero questioning Hal and constantly shown in a negative light despite having completely valid concerns. Not that that doesn’t make Hal knocking effing Batman out with one punch any less ridiculous.It is also a weird moment in retrospect. Before that Johns had been using Batman in his work to always highlight how his heroes’s approach was always superior to Bruce’s, but it only started to become that level of hostile after GL: Rebirth.
Not that that doesn’t make Hal knocking effing Batman out with one punch any less ridiculous.Is it ridiculous because it was unnecessarily violent or because it would be impossible? If the former, I agree. If the latter, GL rings allow them to go against Superman level enemies so Hal knocking out Bruce in a single hit isn’t far fetched. It is also a weird moment in retrospect. Before that Johns had been using Batman in his work to always highlight how his heroes’s approach was always superior to Bruce’s, but it only started to become that level of hostile after GL: Rebirth.Is it weird that, even if I don’t really like the idea, I do respect Johns for not being a Batman asskisser like so many writers are prone to being?
That was one among many of the reasons I didn’t like GL Rebirth. Most stem from the re-introductuon of Hal as a fearless warrior/badass that in my years of reading GL comics he never was.
No matter how many great stories result, I’ll never understand the ressurections of Barry and Hal. Both Wally and Kyle were great, and I thought DC had really shown something by replacing two of their classic characters.
They had such a great thing going where the torch had been passed to a third generation of heroes, and they shit all over that to bring back the most boring versions from the 80s. Reading reprints of the Hal Jordan comics I never understood what made him so special; Kyle was the last Lantern and had this huge burden to shoulder with no real guidance or preparation. Then I read old stories that flat out stated how Hal was the greatest lantern, just because. He fought Sinestro or something, but he’s from Earth and he’s the best.
Totally. They got rid of Hal for good reasons, but Geoff wanted to pretty much undo the first Crisis and the most significant change from the Death of Superman storyline.I was also bummed when they brought back Kara and threw away Peter David’s amazing Supergirl run.Bah. I’m coming off bitter despite spending the last month immersing myself in 21st century DC via DC Universe…but being a little bitter does have its charms.
Well, Crisis was a huge mistake long term. Multiple earths was never confusing to 7 year old me.
The overall goal of one Earth was pointless, but the story had a lot of meaningful elements that affected the characters greatly for the rest of the century. Multiple Earths could have existed again without rolling back every other significant change since the Crisis.
It also fucked up the LSH and removed Supergirl from continuity. I agree that every change after Crisis did not need to be undone, but Crisis needed to be. Conversely, I am hoping that the Crisis on the Arrowverse actually does combine some universes.
He can’t write characters he didn’t grow up loving, that’s the problem. Johns is one of those writers who grew up loving comics and can use his encyclopedic knowledge of those old books to patch together “new” stories by retelling the same basic shit only with one twist, giving him the “Geoff Johns puts a new spin on [silver age character!]” But the twist is usually just a juxtaposition of an existing character trait or status quo. That stupid “one punch” thing with Batman and GL is a great example. Johms doesn’t create anything truly new. He just takes stuff he remembers fondly (which is almost exclusively silver age heroes or something Alan Moore wrote as a one-shot), holds it up to a mirror and declares it a bold new direction. Jim Lee has a similar problem, but at least he learned a while back to stop trying to write and just draw stuff.
I agree more with you on Barry than Hal. My big problem with Hal was the complete lack of respect for the character when he was turned and went on a murderous rampage and the loss of the GL corp. If he had gone out as a hero, that would have been cool. Rayner never seemed more or less interesting than Hal to me. OTOH, Wally was cool, although I preferred Bill Messner Loebs run.
The way I look at it, they could have rehabilitated Hal’s reputation without resurrecting him. I’m also of the opinion that while Hal was great as Green Lantern, he was a shitty human being, so unlikeable that I cheered when he was finally properly dead.As for Wally, he was just a better character than Barry, who always struck me as a bore – not just a “boy scout” but singularly uninteresting.
The infuriating thing about bringing Barry back is that they did a Mark Waid story, “The Return of Barry Allen,” that showed exactly how much Wally had grown and why it would be a huge step backwards if Barry returned. But that came out in the 90s, slightly past when Geoff Johns fell in love with Bronze Age heroes from the 80s, so it gets thrown out and ignored.
I understand bringing back Hal after the horrible way they killed him off. Barry, however, died a hero and was ably succeeded by his protege. They should’ve left that alone.
Actually, Hal/Parallax sacrificed himself to relight Sol and save Earth. Pretty heroic death, I’d say. Even Bats gave him props for that.
Hal went from being a generic Mary Sue-ish character to a villain to someone who was redeemed as the Sepctre, and they could have left him like that forever. They had a good character with a lot of years as the only Green Lantern, and Kyle eventually resurrected the Guardians and the Corps so they could go back to telling cool space stories about weird and random alien adventures. Then Geoff Johns brought back Hal because, I guess, Olli came back and they might as well bring back everyone.
As shocked as I was about how Hal’s time as GL ended, I grew to really like Kyle. By the time Rebirth happened, I’d moved on.
There are two different Snyders being discussed in this thread, and I think you and the OP are referring to different people, possibly unintentionally.
He had very little to do with it in the end because what he’d done was so bad that even that final product was better. And even if you somehow think otherwise, there’s so much evidence leading up to it that points to how poorly he managed the franchise.
But…Johns wrote Batman: Earth One…which is incredibly respectful to the characters mythos and an extremely interesting reboot for him.
Thde film was basically complete. Whedon came in and for some finishing touches and a few reshoots, but it is mostly Snyder.
There are conflicting reports on that.
https://screenrant.com/zack-snyder-cut-justice-league-changes/
Interesting. I was not aware of that. And some of those changes were likely detrimental. Having said that, given MoS and BvS (as well as the decision to not lay the proper groundwork for a JL film, which is not Snyder’s fault), JL was not likely to transcend the quality of those first two anyway. Given BvS, I am surprised he wasn’t immediately removed from JL.
Doomsday Clock just reads like bad Watchmen fanfic to me.
there’s really no good reason for it to exist. But in comics now anything that can happen, happens
I would love a book like Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story chronicling behind the scenes the period leading up to the Nu52 and beyond.
With 30+ years of hindsight, I think Crisis has proven to be a mistake. For DC, it’s probably had worse effects than the grim and gritty 90’s that grew out of Watchmen.
I know most creators consider continuity a pain in the ass, but for a long running shared universe, a few narrative ground rules are probably for the best. Every hard reboot of the DC line since then seems like it shakes off more readers than they gain in the initial excitement, and the potential to wildly fuck things up far exceeds the odds that you’re going to substantially improve upon 70-80 year old characters who are more popular than the Beatles. Which seems like it’s been borne out by every major reboot.
God knows not every decision Marvel has made has been perfect, but it’s way easier to erase a mistake like the clone saga if the old version is still walking around just off-panel.
It’s striking how much the Doomsday Clock pages above are intertwined with the actual publishing history of DC Comics’ characters — when you’re playing to an audience that aware of it, is there that much point in trying to do deck-clearing exercises on the continuity?
i think it will be interesting to see how things like the digital archives offering unlimited access to decades of previous stories impacts things like line-wide continuity.from my perspective, as someone who was a comics fan in the 1980s, things like CRISIS seemed like a reasonable response to the fact there was all this history out there and, unless you had an unlimited comic book budget and an airplane hanger to store it all, there was just no way to grasp it all. at best, you could obsess over one or two characters and maybe cobble together a comprehensive understanding of their particular part of the tapestry… but to have complete mastery of the entire history of something like DC comics? there was essentially no way to possibly do that for the typical fan.but now, with not just wikipedia but things like the archives? all that story and history is basically available for anyone willing to put the time into looking for it.
But that history was a positive. Seeing references to older stories and tracking down back issues and knowing there was more out there. Amd reading character histories in zines like Amazing Heroes was always great.
Pathetic loser.
The bigger question is: why do superhero comic books today spend so much of their time referencing and recapitulating stories that even their current, diminished, aged 20s-to-30s target audience is too young to have read when they first appeared?Whatever the reason, the Big Two have winnowed their readers down to a dubious core that seems to desire, over and above an interesting or engaging story, constant proof that the writer of a story has read all the “right” Wikipedia articles. These core readers appreciate most the opposite of engagement or personal investment in a story or its characters; they want to be the first on the block to stand removed and say, “That full-pager there is a reference to when Bullseye stabbed Elektra,” preferably online, so they can seek unrewarding approval in the face of existential despair. And of course, everyone who will read what they write already knows it’s a reference, even people who have never read Miller’s Daredevil, because comic book readers are a tight circle of wagons these days, and half or more of Daredevil stories across the intervening decades are just build-ups to some hack version of that one page from one old comic book, a single page that’s heading into its 40s with more cultural currency in its medium than anything… well… current. Hey, how about that Watchmen? Remember Watchmen?!In the sense of what most cape comics readers want now, endless repetition free of uncomfortable novelty, Geoff Johns truly is the spirit of the age.
While I would argue that it is a bit more complicated than this, I also do feel that from the DC part this is the ultimate legacy of the Didio/Johns era and their fixation on Silver Age versions of the characters just being the bestest. While I’m certain there were financial justifications, for me it is hard to argue that there wasn’t this regression backwards during their time.I also felt they had these bizarre decisions when it came to attracting to new readers. When the Dark Knight came out and became this cultural phenomenon, the Batman books were completely mired in the Morrison run which was utterly inaccessible to new readers. And instead of at least attempting to put out a new Batman book or anything to ride that momentum wave, they just doubled down on Morrison. Don’t get me wrong, that book drew numbers, but why not even try to open up that avenue to the outside?Writing this, I wonder if one of the things that made Snyder’s run such a megahit was that you really didn’t need to know that much to understand what the hell was happening.
Accessibility has never been the issue. The cost and the LCS model were the main issues.
I’m genuinely curious where you feel like Immortal Hulk falls into your take. On the one hand, there are massive amounts of extremely deep cuts into Hulk lore in the books. On the other hand, it also feels like a new take on the character that’s driving it in a new direction.
It is, while pandering to the wiki-reading walking comic encyclopedia you’re talking about, also definitely an uncomfortable novelty.
I’m only reading two books on a regular basis right now, though, Saga and Immortal Hulk.
Is Immortal Hulk that good? I’ve been thinking about checking it out.
It’s pretty good. The story is interesting, and is (at least) apparently focused on moving Banner’s character(s) in a new direction.
The art is fucking incredible. Like, look at this fucking panel:It’s a great example of what I was talking about. On the one hand, if you’ve read enough Hulk books you notice different faces from different versions of the Hulk clearly represented in the mess. If you haven’t, it’s still an amazing piece of freaky horror art that we haven’t really seen in Hulk books before.
Immortal Hulk is flat-out excellent. Yes, it does borrow heavily from what came before, but it’s a strong concept and really is fresh.
I agree with you-it seems like today’s comics from the Big Two are for the most part, a remix or a sample heavy version of a band’s greatest hits. Most of the stuff I’m reading these days is a boring riff on whats come before. There are exceptions, but they are few and far between.
Why does Hollywood want to reboot or remake so many movies? I imagine DC looks at what worked and decides “yeah, Hal Jordan sold better than the current guy, bring back Hal Jordan.”
Jonathan Hickman commented on that recently regarding the X-men books- they were telling stories about other stories. X-men Gold is really the worst offender, but the O5 back to present was also a good one (and I’d argue Wolverine and the X-men was also part of it, bringing the X-men back to the mansion and barely registering what happens outside the mansion). At one point, creators and editors stop trying to build something new and instead trying to recreate the past magic of their childhoods.
That’s true, but it isn’t much different from the rest of navel-gazing, nostalgia-obsessed pop culture out there these days.
That awareness of continuity points to a deeper problem, I think – each time DC has tried to clear the decks with a continuity reboot, they’ve done it… in continuity, with a narrative detailing how and why the universe was changed within the context of the fictional world. Which means they’ve never actually cleared any decks, because that deleted continuity is still all there, as something that once existed but now no longer does, but it still completely accessible to a clever enough storyteller. Things don’t get simpler that way, they just add new layers of complexity.
With 30+ years of hindsight, it’s a moot point.
Moot points, like technical correctness, are the best kind of points.
I’d argue this is a sizzling hot take as it utterly ignores that Crisis is probably one of the core reasons we still have a DCU and the company didn’t fold due to financial reasons.
I see this claim a lot, and people tend to take it gospel on some pretty shaky evidence. It seems to start from the highly questionable premise that the reason for DC’s weak market position in the early 80s stemmed from its impenetrable continuity and not the DC implosion of the late ‘70s caused by opting for bigger, more expensive books during a recession.
And while I certainly believe that Crisis led to a sales spike and the data is patchy, there’s evidence suggesting that what “saved the company” in terms of market share was Marvel’s own financial collapse in the ‘90s.
COIE was needed and was successful for a decade and a half. The problem was Silver Age fanboys getting DC jobs and undermining it 15 years later.
Crisis was fine, if they had kept discipline and tweaked things instead of zero hour, infinite crisis, new 52…. It’s the problem with an industry that’s run 80+ years. Either you stay consistent and eventually lose fanbase slowly, or shake things up for jump on points and piss off the old timers. Crisis fixed a ton of problems. Introduced new ones. Everything changes with each new writer, or editor/EIC… creative types, egos, yadda yadda yadda, a story as old as serial fiction. None of this will last forever, nor can it. I actually hope he has the foresight to make that a message here. No one loves Batman, they love a few versions of batman, and will dislike other’s takes on him. Or superman, or any of them. It’s like a book series where you love characters and someone else writes books 4-6 and a new person for 7, then a 4th for books 6-9 and so on.
“if they had kept discipline and tweaked things instead of zero hour, infinite crisis, new 52….” The real issue with crisis is that established that the DCU wasn’t going to do this; it was going to just wipe everything and start over every so often. It might have been fine if they had done it once and stopped, but realistically, that genie was never going back in the bottle. Change is vital to keeping properties fresh, but doing it within the framework of continuity requires a bit more thoughtfulness and lessens the risk that you’re going to damage or eliminate core elements of the characters that will be difficult to recover once it’s over.
But… One clean up reboot is understandable. Gold/bronze/Silver age superman was just obnoxious. The same idea with the fantastic four reaching space in 1961, or Captain america being unfrozen after 16 years or so and being out of the ice almost 60 now. You do need to tweak things from time to time because of the passage of time or bad writing. But a line wide reboot… every 5 years to see if a new take sticks?
Still not pinning it on Crisis. I mean, Crisis lasted 10-15 years before they gave up and started the cycle anew. Crisis on Infinite earths wasn’t the problem as much as New 52, their attempt to ape Marvel’s Ultimate universe, was the breaking point until Rebirth just ended all the good will the had. Mind you, the Ultimate Universe seems to have been an attempt to update stories and get them ready for the movies but didn’t touch the prime/616 universe. DC’s mostly made decisions based on what the parent company really wants. Marvel had that issue (and may again if Disney ever gets aggressive, but with their wild success I doubt they’ll do so for the foreseeable future).
I personally think the modern comic book industry is really about catching lightning in a bottle, training kids to want their merch, and setting up future movies/scripts with their plots. It hasn’t been stand alone since the first X-men movie came out.
You know it was almost universally seen as a mistake by the fans at the time. But in my opinion it did a lot of good things — bringing the JSA history into the main storyline, killing Barry Allen and promoting Wally West (who was a vastly more interesting character as the Flash), and Byrne’s reboot — which in the form of the expanded DCAU via SAS and then Justice League Unlimited, became the best version of all the properties.
Of those three things, I’d argue that only maybe the first has found general acceptance. But even granting them all, the question is then “Did this require a line-wide reboot to do?” For 90% of it, I don’t think it did. Barry being replaced just needs him to go away somehow, and the DCAU seems like a weird thing to credit to crisis since the Superman tends to be the least well-regarded of the core series. The original and still critical champion, BTAS, actually demonstrates the opposite, as it borrows the most from, and indeed, directly adapts, more from the O’Neil/Adams stories than anything else.
Hit Superman with some new neon kryptonite to power him down a bit, and you’ve solved 80% of his problem, to the extent that one existed. If it’s necessary to bring over Shazam and the JSA, just do it without starting from zero. Dimensional chaos results in pieces of these other Earth’s getting transplanted onto the main one. Boom, done. Indeed, dimension hopping as the go-to solution to unbearable continuity snarls has a number of advantages over cancelling everything for a new universe. Individual creators can do it or not, semi-permanently or not, at their own discretion, without huge changes being forced on everyone by the 2-3 strongest voices at the company.
Which is really the point. A vast character history with a lot of disparate elements that you can pick up or put down as needed is a strength, not a weaknesses. If there’s something in there you don’t like, you don’t have to use it, but quietly leaving it there for the next guy seems like a better plan than loudly destroying it.
i… generally agree.Now i think reboots are a good thing, but i think they should happen completely and not half heartily.Marvel’s Ultimate universe showed there was room for two versions of the same world… until Marvel sort of ruined the Ultimate universe by cribbing it’s most popular parts for the regular marvel universe.Tell 10 years of batman stories where he slowly become more and more bitter fighting crime and then dies, forcing Dick Grayson to take over. When he does announce a Batman reboot. Tell a more optimistic story this time but also have the Dick Grayson batman world still existing. AS other superheroes reach their given end more reboots happen and their reboot characters get shown/announced and their comics kick off.
It wouldn’t if DC had taken it seriously. It is impossible for the writers to keep in track with the continuity if it is left for always changing editors to decide about it.
“…you’re going to substantially improve upon 79-80 year old characters who are more popular than the Beatles.”FUCK.OFF.That is the singularly most tard AND willfully ignorant thing I quite possibly EVER read in the ENTIRE history of EVERYTHING.The Beatles changed culture, not just popular culture. CULTURE. batman, Superman. Spiderman etc HAVE NEVER and WILL NEVER come close to having even an atoms worth of impact on popular culture that the Beatles have had.Take you Comic Book Guy idiocy and fuck yourself in the butthole with it.
Interesting. Because of his involvement with the Watchmen film adaptation, would it make sense to see Dr. Manhattan as a proxy for Zach Snyder?
One of the problems that always seems to plague DC—on the comics side, anyway—is their absolute insistence that every single bit of continuity inconsistency/change must be addressed, often in an event comic. On some level, it’s interesting in sort of a meta “how will they write themselves out of this predicament?” level, but I can’t think that this is interesting for anyone but comics nerds.Marvel, on the other hand, just kind of changes stuff on the fly, sometimes with little to no explanation offered until much later, if any is offered. Or sometimes, the explanation is ridiculous, like the the reason that Ultimate Universe Miles Morales was brought over to the main 616 continuity when it reformed (after a big explosion):…was because he gave a hungry Molecule Man a three-week-old hamburger, which earned him favor. This way of storytelling may be annoying to some continuity-obsessed fans, but it does keep the story moving.In case this makes me sound like a big Marvel fanboy, I will balance this out with a compliment to DC’s style of storytelling: they are far more ambitious. They seem to actively aim to tell important, epic stories. This isn’t to say that Marvel doesn’t have its share of great story arcs in their catalogue, but it always seems like more of a happy accident: an ambitious story that manages to be popular enough that it lasts long enough to be told. Final note, unrelated to the previous nonsense: I am starting to grow weary of Tom King. Heroes in Crisis was an interesting idea for a story that didn’t actually need 10 issues, considering most of the plot seems to happen in the first two and last two issues. His run on Batman suffers the same problem; the 6 or so issues (honestly I’ve lost count) devoted to his Psycho Pirate-induced nightmares have just killed the pace of the story. There are advantages to taking your time with a story, but there is also a point when editorial got to step in:
DC Comics came up with the idea of treating a marketing-driven revision of a product line as an in-story, “real” event, so I guess it doesn’t surprise me that, after everyone and their cousin in sci-fi/fantasy fiction has lifted the idea from them, they seem obsessed with proving they can still do it harder, louder and more awkwardly than everyone else.
Tom King has done some very good work, but from the beginning of Heroes in Crisis I have felt I was relieving Identity Crisis all over again. “Important” writer tells “Important” story tackling “important, mature” subject while making characters act wildly out of character to tell it; everyone oohs and ahhs because “Important” writer didn’t start out in comics and is therefore a “grown up”; and then five years later the hangover sets in and everyone realizes the “Important” comic was simply not very good and the “maturity” was just edginess. We don’t see much of Brad Meltzer in the superhero world anymore now that Identity Crisis has been reappraised and I won’t be surprised if Tom King is no longer a thing in 2024 when the same thing happens with Heroes in Crisis. The bottom line is that way too many people who are responsible for OKing comics projects and hiring new talent are deeply embarrassed that they are in comics and will let anyone who seems like an “adult” do anything he wants because of it.
There was that run of Wonder Woman right at the start of New52 that was basically a huge Greek epic, involving very creative renditions of the old Olympian gods. That was awesome, and seemingly fresh.Then that ended and I think the next story was a fight with Cheetah…the woman who’s really mad about being a real life furry (or something). The new artist made WW look like a teenager and the story was forgettable and in no way referenced the big stuff that just happened.I gave up on comics soon after. Not just over that, but mostly how no other story was as epic as that one.
Have you checked out ODY-C?
*dry heaves*
I haven’t read DC in years, but if Geoff Johns is paying lip service to hope and optimism, starting tomorrow, while indulging his sweet tooth for gore and cynicism right now, then he’s exactly where I left him.I like the image of him using Dr. Manhattan to explore his relationship with WB. It sets up a six-issue, five year-long miniseries where it turns out that Superboy-Prime isn’t just a feckless blogger, but someone whose help Dr. Manhattan would turn out to need in his very near future.
“This Superboy tells me that actually, it is about ethics in comics journalism. I am intrigued. I subscribe to his YouTube channel.”
I haven’t cared for Doomsday Clock but this issue oddly worked for me. I guess probably because I’m a sucker for any story that references/points out how odd the “sliding timescale” is in comics. I didn’t care much for Al Ewing’s Ultimates a few years back but then they made it a story point that the team had detected problems with the timeline and was going to fix them and then had Galactus come up and say “nope nope you don’t want to do that, guys” and I loved it.
So, now there are 2 Wally Wests, a black one and a white one?
Yes.
*sigh* Comics.
If it makes things easier, they’re cousins and the black one goes by Wallace.
Yes, they are cousins named after the same great-grandfather
I’m Regular Stormy.
im bizarro stormy.
I GET THIS REFERENCE!!
I just want it to finish the fuck up so I can finally read it. I was looking forward to it but didn’t want to wait month to month(s) for completion. After all the delays, I’m glad I did but still eager to finally dive in.
I like some of his work. His whole work on the Green Lantern books including the War of Light/Lanterns and Darkest Night was great, made GL relevant once more. I’m enjoying this so far, but I really don’t think it’s going to redefine the status quo again, so…
The reason the JSA was never formed/never existed, I see where he’s going, but it’s not going to be for everyone. I think everyone, DC fans most of all are just reboot/ret-con fatigued. He’s also big on nostalgia and the past which, again, everyone seems to have to have their take with. I’d say just sit back, enjoy the show and ignore the whole ‘THIS WILL REDEFINE THE DC UNIVERSE FOREVER… or until the next event does, in just a few months’ part.
A huge reason the DCU is what it is today, good or bad, is because of the outsize amount of power Geoff Johns has been given since Infinite Crisis (if not before then) to mold it into what he wanted (which has largely been about bringing back characters and events he liked as a kid in an “edgy” way and pissing on anything anyone else worked to make between 1985 and his Ascension). He was aided and abetted by Dan DiDio and to a certain extent Grant Morrison in this, but the bottom line is that Geoff Johns the manager gave Geoff Johns the writer the plumb assignments of redefining all of the company’s top tier characters and ultimately the entire continuity (on no fewer than three occasions, now). Putting aside the ethics of the management scheme at DC, it is next-level deflection that Johns has now spent 10 issues of a miniseries essentially blaming a fictional character for stuff he did.Let’s not forget that this is the same man who brought back Superboy Prime to represent complaining fanboys who wanted everything back the way they remembered and then proceeded to bring back characters and origins (Barry Allen, Hal Jordan, the pre-Crisis Superman) that had been effectively phased out decades beforehand and that only people his own age cared about.The amount of “who me?” in his career is kind of astonishing, and meanwhile his own writing has contributed to the fact that the main fanbase of superhero comics are people in their middle age and above.If this truly means he is being cut out of the company he helped turn into a museum for middle age fan service, good riddance.The only sad thing is that this series is better than it has any right to be and all it’s doing is reiterating the same pitch we got 15 years ago with Infinite Crisis and 6 years ago with the New 52 and 3 years ago with Rebirth: “We know we’ve made DC comics a bleak and nihilistic place and we’re sorry—but we just can’t help ourselves.”
I haven’t read any of Doomsday Clock yet because I was waiting for a few issues to build up before loosing sight of it completely, but at this point I just read comics based on the creative team. I don’t care about universe continuity, I just want the same artist & same writer to actually see a story all the way through. Johns has always been one I can depend on in that regard, and am genuinely excited by DC’s Black Label and him writing for it.
I’m guessing if Dr Manhattan used the same plot of Ozzymandias in Watchmen and everything about multiversal crisis are his fabrication. Looks like Dr Manhattan got to the main DC Multiverse before Crisis On Infinite Earth.
Wait, did I read this right? Did they write Alan Scott out of history here? Did he never become GL?
One of my initial concerns with the Doctor Manhattan revelation in Rebirth, beyond the ethical minefield that comes with using any Watchmen characters, was the idea that an entirely unrelated property would be blamed for DC’s publishing missteps. There is no idea I find more tiresome in all of comic books than this one. Watchmen is not some untouchable masterwork. There is no more an ethical minefield at play here than any other comic book featuring characters created by another author, including Watchmen itself. Alan Moore lives to complain about how publishers are always trampling over his rights as a writer, but he didn’t seem to care so much about JK Rowling’s or Ian Fleming’s authorial rights when he made Harry Potter the antichrist and James Bond a rapist in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I barely care about Doomsday Clock, which has mostly felt like 10 well drawn issues of nothing happening, but the idea that Alan Moore’s legacy needs, or even deserves, protecting is ludicrous. Especially given how little care he has shown when using and reinterpreting other authors’ characters for his own works.The history of comic books is built upon iterating upon the past; anything and everything, especially Watchmen, is up grabs.
“….Watchmen, a comic with a legacy steeped in conflict between publisher and creator.”Which only exists because Alan Moore is a simpering pederastic twerp who apparently wants people to stop reading and hasn’t even a kindergartners understanding of even the most basic and simplistic concepts of finance and business.
new52 is exactly why i havent given a cent to dc comics in 9 years. they just wont actually drop it. no matter what, they always still have it lingering. it’s stink is on everything.even doomsday clock wont get rid of it.the real way to get rid of it, is for jim lee to go.
It sounds like the reviewer is bringing in a lot of his own emotional baggage into this review. Judging the comic not on its own basis; but on that of every bit of DC comic and movie history in the past 50 or so years. A rather heavy burden to expect one comic run to make everything you personally have disliked all better. As a story standing on its own merits; I rather like this run so far. Johns seems to be working well with the materials he has at hand to craft an interesting narrative. It might have been better as a ‘what if’ story; but it’s not over yet; so I will withhold judgement on that until it is. Perspective; you see; is important.