Doomsday Clock #4, or, Making a Rorschach

Pancake batter in alley this morning…

Doomsday Clock #4 narrows the narrative to focus in on the mysterious second Rorschach, Reggie, and how the vigilante’s mantle was remade and taken up again after the events of Watchmen.

In its early pages it reintroduces us to that distressing sense of dread that permeated the pages of Doomsday Clock’s first issue as we see a family watching a mushroom cloud erupt on a nightly news broadcast. At the same time we’re introduced to a young boy tasked with living in that dread, with growing up in the shadow of that mushroom cloud. We meet Reggie as a boy whose strategy is to keep his head down and power through, who doesn’t fight because it never occurs to him to fight.

Reggie, as a boy and later as a young man, is a passive being, one who doesn’t engage with the world around him, one who can hardly be made to impose his will on anything, even when he is clearly in the right. He is not an invader, a conqueror, an aggressor. He’s a good kid. Perhaps a harmless kid. Perhaps not. He may not be an aggressor, but Reggie is not a protestor, an objector or a defender either. The world is imposed upon him, leaders, laws and institutions are imposed upon him and Reggie continues to keep his head down. He may mutter, he may grumble, but he never engages with the forces of antagonism, instead content to be quietly antagonized.

This passivity, extrapolated outward, paints the picture of a populous that allows itself to be brought to the brink we see in Doomsday Clock #1.

In becoming Rorschach, in being taught how to fight, Reggie becomes an active participant in the world around him. Through Reggie’s transformation into Rorschach II we get insight into the original Rorschach and that character’s place as an agent of action in Watchmen. Rorschach, then as now, was a questioner, a participant. On its face, the entire first issue of Watchmen is an introduction to a cast of characters committed to remaining passive in the face of mysteries and questions, Rorschach the only among them willing to grab hold of the dangling thread.

And yet, with mosquitoes and Mothman alike, we see in this issue what that pursuit can lead to and we’re given the impression Reggie himself knows what fate may befall those unwilling to ignore questions and mysteries.

We know Ozymandias. We know Bruce Wayne. We know Lex Luthor. Now we have an idea of who Rorschach II is and what he’s bringing to the table as the mysteries of Doomsday Clock thicken at the close of its first third.

Doomsday Clock #2, or, How to Keep it Real in a Fictional Universe

Ah yes, my favorite Watchmen character: Box of Assorted Clothing and Cosmetics

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming. Spoilers ahead for Doomsday Clock #2…

The second issue of writer Geoff Johns and artist Gary Frank’s Watchmen/DC Comics crossover event Doomsday Clock spends very little time exploiting the sense of dread and impending doom so masterfully curated in the debut issue, instead seeing those nuclear fears realized and moving on to an examination of a  spectrum of perceived reality amongst superheroes.

In the opening panels we’re introduced to the concept of a sort of identity vendor within the Watchmen Universe who sells costumes and monikers, which, Doctor Manhattan aside, is all a superhero really is in the Watchmen Universe. Rorschach, the Comedian, Ozymandias, names and costumes the lot of them. And yet, even within the world of Watchmen there is a spectrum of realness and legitimacy which those characters have and so many others who buy monikers and costumes do not.

The new villain introduced last issue, the Mime, is a personification of this sort of nebulous discrepancy between real and fake superheroics in a world that only actually has one real superhero. Last issue we saw the Mime retrieve his pantomimed “guns” from a storage locker and this issue we see them in action, so to speak. Watching security camera footage of a bank robbery carried out by the Mime and the Marionette, we see him successfully coercing information from a bank teller by miming pointing a gun at her. We never see him fire psychic bullets or whack anyone with an invisible pistol, but the gun is perceived by the bank teller nonetheless. There or not, in effect the gun is real.

Perhaps then, in the Watchmen Universe, the reality of a superhero or supervillain is a matter of imposition of will, a scale of how deftly one can wield their own imagery and mythos within the world around them, their true power being influence. We see this influence reflected in the same bank robbery in a picture of the bank teller’s son, who we see cradling an Ozymandias action figure. Ozymandias is not only a moniker and a costume, it is a moniker and a costume that penetrates the surrounding culture, that means something to the world around it.

In crossing over to the proper DC Universe, Ozymandias, Rorschach, the Marionette and the Mime enter a world in which that influence and legitimacy might just translate to something more, something palpable. In the DC Universe, the Mime’s pantomimed lock pick works.

DC’s universe has always carried with it the weight of myth, their characters less a reflection of the world outside our door than monuments to ideals and beliefs. It’s fitting then that Doomsday Clock seems interested in exploring the potency of myth as its narrative moves across universes more and less like our own.

In its inaugural issue Doomsday Clock concerned itself with very real world fears. Its second issue sets up an exploration of what effect, if any, very unreal world stories have on those fears. When Batman saves Gotham, what effect does that have on the DC Universe? What effect does that have on a separate fictional universe in which Batman is a fiction? What effect does that have on our world, here and now, and how real is the effect of that fictional salvation, particularly in the face of very real dread?

And to think at this point Doctor Manhattan hasn’t even gotten involved in the proceedings. Two issues in Doomsday Clock promises to be one wild ride.

Doomsday Clock #1, or, True Grit

That guy who’s way to excited for the Justice League movie.

When the intermingling of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s comic book classic Watchmen and the rest of the DC Comics universe was first teased last year in the comic DC Rebirth it was immediately framed as a battle between hope and grit, between the wholesome hope of old school Superman and the intellectual grit and despair of Doctor Manhattan. After 30 years, the Superman of yore was finally going to stick it to the grime and misery that has pervaded superhero comics since the heralded arrival of The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen and bring back hope and color and fun.

Enter last week’s Doomsday Clock #1, the first issue in the aforementioned crossover, written by Geoff Johns and illustrated by Gary Frank.

Much of the first issue of this twelve-issue limited series is concerned with setting up the status quo of the world of Watchmen after the events of the original series, and it’s a status quo that is a slog to internalize. Set in 1992, the world we’re shown in Doomsday Clock is a frightening one. It’s funhouse mirror reflection of our world today make it particularly upsetting and paranoia-inducing. I found myself becoming more worried about the real world and what could become of it while reading the pages of Doomsday Clock. And then I found myself wondering, “is this what it was like to read Watchmen in 1986?”

One of the first comic books I read, I encountered Watchmen on a summer vacation in 2008, after having seen the trailer for the then-upcoming film adaptation during repeated viewings of The Dark Knight. It blew me away and still does every time I read it, but for me it will always be something of a period piece. The world it satirizes and discusses is one that predates me and so while I can read it and understand that it is gritty and grim, that grit and grim has always been mostly aesthetic rather than directly indicative of the world around me.

And perhaps that’s the problem. Perhaps that’s why so many were quick to sick a colorful, smiling, curlicued Superman at the patient zero of grit and grime like a cheerful attack dog. Where the vein of bleakness in Watchmen was a direct reflection of the world that produced that work, in many works since then that darker tone has become an imitation of Watchmen itself, a reflection of a reflection that loses its poignancy somewhere between mirrors.

Doomsday Clock #1 isn’t the condemnation of grit some might have expected, rather it’s a recontextualization of it. A reminder of why Watchmen was the way it was. Doomsday Clock is more a reconstruction of the equation behind Watchmen than the end result. The darkness in this first issue isn’t an imitation of its predecessor, it’s an imitation of its own time and place, which makes it incredibly effecting.

As a reader, by the end of Doomsday Clock #1 I felt more concerned about the world than I had before I read it. That’s a vulnerable and unpleasant journey to be taken on by a story. After Doomsday Clock’s first steps I’m left to wonder about what I suspect will make or break this story: what will the issues to come do with the vulnerability the first issue elicits from me, and how authentically will it be done? One expects some semblance of hope to prevail, but would that hope ring as true as despair does here?

Classic funny books!

Clas

The Late Scapegoat, or, The New 52: An Obit

I don’t know, some kind of sports joke or something?

The New 52 is dead. And it seems like some folks are celebrating.

The 2011 DC Comics publishing initiative more or less rebooted the entire line of comics back to issue #1. It was a pretty ballsy move, not because it reset the numbering of comic books that were on their nine hundredth plus issue, or because it retooled seventy plus years of continuity, but because with the New 52 DC Comics made an executive decision to make an appeal to prospective new readers rather than continuing to placate existing ones.

It’s a debatable decision. It’s easy to spin it as corporate interests turning their backs on longtime, loyal fans in favor of younger blood. Maybe that’s exactly what happened. But as the younger blood in question I can’t help but mourn the euthanizing of the New 52.

I read my first graphic novel well into my teens and dabbled in further readings once a summer or so until The Dark Knight trilogy concluded and I wanted more Batman. I read the pillars of Batman mythology before moving on to Superman books and then I found my way to Geoff Johns’ Green Lantern, which got me hook, line and sinker, so much so that when I caught up on the trade paperbacks I couldn’t wait for the next one and decided to brave a real live comic book store and pick up actual floppy comic books.

I had no intention of reading any other book, but when I looked down the rack at the Batman comics and the Aquaman comics and the Justice League comics they weren’t at issue #999 or even issue #99. They were on issue #12. That didn’t seem so daunting. I could catch up with that. And I did. And now I read comics.

Sure, now I understand that the number on a comic doesn’t really mean as much as the creative team does and that Detective Comics #69 isn’t required reading for Detective Comics #666 (I’m assuming) but back then if I’d looked down the rack and seen Batman #1,000,000 my curiosity would’ve been far outnumbered.

But the reset numbering wasn’t fandom’s biggest point of contention with the New 52. The New 52 didn’t do a hard reset on continuity. Green Lantern, for instance, pretty much picked up where it had left off. Batman had an eerily similar status quo that alluded to events in old continuity without ever firming establishing a timeline. The biggest overhaul, however, was the idea that in New 52 continuity superheroes had only been a whole “thing” in the DC universe for five years. So books like the Teen Titans, featuring a lineup of teenaged former sidekicks, got pretty confusing, as did the fact that Batman had four Robins after being active for only five years.

Condensing the timeline squashed and confused a lot of character histories and dynamics that had been established over the course of decades. Popular properties like the Teen Titans never really got to shine and for many the convoluted, sloppy continuity of the New 52 was to blame.

Enter last week’s DC Rebirth, the 80-page one-shot by Geoff Johns and a stable of top-shelf artists (Phil Jiminez, Ethan Van Sciver, Ivan Reis, Gary Frank) that ended the New 52 in style. The book is built on the sentiment that in the New 52 DC Universe “something is missing.” It calls the New 52 to task for being dark and brooding and hopeless and apparently pissing on the lineage of DC’s greatest heroes.

It’s a great book, but it can be a bit much when it comes to flogging the New 52. For fans who were brought into the fold with the New 52 it kind of feels like being invited to a party by an acquaintance and then watching them extensively apologize to the assembled for inviting you.

The New 52 is not to blame for DC’s lineup of gritty books any more than it is to blame for fans of the Teen Titans not getting an iteration of the team they like for the last five years.

That all comes down to what’s on the page.

I’ve got no problem with the New 52 coming to an end, but people have gone far beyond letting the door hit it on the way out. Changing continuity doesn’t just magically make a publishing line more optimistic and fun. Declaring the New 52 over doesn’t just magically make the Teen Titans great again. It comes down to the individual comic books themselves.

When I’m reading an awesome issue of Batman I don’t give a shit what the status of the Multiverse is, or whether Superboy Prime is canon or who was responsible for Flashpoint. The only thing that matters is what’s on the page.

The New 52’s condensed continuity might have been contradictory and convoluted but it didn’t terminated the potential for a cool Teen Titans story any more than it guaranteed the certainty of an excellent Batman book. Whatever “something” was missing from the New 52 had nothing to do with the state of the DC Universe or its continuity.

All the New 52 did was turn the gaze of the DCU toward the uninitiated because comic book fans get old and die and have to be replaced with new comic book fans.

I loved the New 52, but I’m excited for DC Rebirth because of the wealth of new talent and creative teams it’s bringing to its characters. For better or worse when the spiffy, post-New 52 Teen Titans book shows up on stands it’ll be that talent that will be on display on the page creating the story, not a publishing initiative and not continuity.