Doomsday Clock 3: Dr Manhattan’s Here – Don’t Get Excited – UPDATED!!

First, the Good News…

Doomsday Clock No 3 by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank. DC Comics

♦ Tripwire’s Peter Mann continues his month by month examination of DC Comics “sequel” to Watchmen.

UPDATE: Apparently, according to Bleeding Cool (yes, I know…) this title is now bimonthly making a mockery of my byline. My personal opinion is that as an artist Geoff Johns felt that its release schedule should reflect the sensation of time passing slowly that you get when you read it. How this slippage of a keystone piece of the Rebirth plan will affect all of the titles that were planned to tie into it I don’t care know. If you want to get your schadenfreude on, go and look at the comments on BC. 

This issue starts with another retread of The Comedian’s death at the hands of Ozymandias. Only at the end of this plunge to death, The Comedian is ported to what may very possibly be the DC Universe, and plunges into the ocean instead. In the final panel of this four-page sequence Doctor Manhattan (well, his legs anyway) appears behind The Comedian. Assuming this is some time in the past we now move to the future and Ozymandias and The Comedian battling it out in Luthor’s office. This continues until Ozymandias exits via the window to get away from The Comedian. So, the good news: Frank’s art is several notches above what he’s done in previous issues. This issue provides no opportunities for making jokes about where things are placed – the action flows smoothly from one scene to another with none of the radical changes in position/perspective on the scene that we had in the first two issues. The bad news is that the story proceeds at a sluggish pace, confirming this comic’s place in the “most decompressed storytelling ever” Top 10.

Last issues meeting of ersatz Rorschach (Nu-Rorschach?) and Batman continues, and sadly doesn’t improve matters much, although Rorschach, who is basically “stock black kid number five,” is finally unmasked. And we all say: Who? Nu-Rorschach gives Batman Kovacs’ journal and Batman reads it overnight. Finally, the Batman does something which strikes me as being the most out-of-character thing I’ve seen him do since Len Wein’s Clayface story straight after the Engelhart/Rogers run on Detective Comics.

Parallel to this Marionette and Mime walk into a bar in the Joker’s territory, and mayhem predictably ensues, so we can see how very, very bad these characters are. My problem is that I’d completely forgotten their names since the last issue and had to look them up from my previous review. This is not a good thing. You make villains effective by making them inherently interesting. Trying to graft some element of interest onto them by having them kill a room full of villains in various ways is not going to work. It’s a dull cliché, and it was a dull cliché 20 years ago.

I’m pretty certain that what Johns thinks he is doing is weaving several threads together in this book, what is actually doing is making things annoying. We now have a thread about an old man called “Mister Thunder” (Johnny Thunder from the JSA? Do we care?) who appears to be in a nursing home for the elderly and/or mentally infirm. He thinks his granddaughter and son are coming to take him out, the rest of the residents are watching more of this “Superman Theory” tedium, and a battle breaks out over the TV in the lounge, as one group of residents want to switch to an old black-and-white movie. And now we are sucked into a new thread about Carver Coleman and his series of Nathaniel Dusk (more DC self-referential nonsense) movies.

So, we wrap up with a betrayal (see how I try to avoid spoilers here – I’ll go into this in more depth next month), Ozymandias on the run, both Luthor and (apparently) The Comedian in hospital, and the tedious Marionette and Mime are off to meet the Joker. We have seen Doctor Manhattan’s legs. Whoop-de-do. On the plus side Gary Frank’s art has improved, and so, to be fair has the colouring. One of the odd things I note is really untidy panel borders. I mean really untidy – lines outside the borders, the borders themselves either carrying on too far or being truncated. Really messy stuff.

Finally, the mystery of who Nu-Rorschach is. While asleep at the Wayne mansion, Nu-Rorschach has a dream in which he sees this:

Which is the same view as this in Watchmen 12:

It seems to me there are two possibilities.

1. Nu-Rorschach is a random commuter on the way home, or
2. Nu-Rorschach could be the boy at the newsstand. Because if you look at this:

Is the boy dead, or is the guy at the newsstand just covering his body?

I have to say, when you read a comic and this is what you come away from it with, it’s not really event of the year, is it now?

Peter Mann