Episode 1679 Talkback - Off the Racks: Doomsday Clock #1
Adam_Murdough
Posts: 506
Enclosed are the Geeks' first impressions of Doomsday Clock #1, the initial phase of a year-long DCU/Watchmen mash-up brought to you by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank. Listen now. The clock is ticking... (43:51)
Hrrm... Listen here.
Hrrm... Listen here.
Comments
I was surprised no one mentioned that in the very first panel of Doomsday Clock #1 we see a narration caption that reads, “November 22nd, 1992… or maybe it’s the 23rd,” giving readers a starting point for the story being told. This date puts the start of Doomsday Clock right at the release of one of DC Comics' most well-known storylines, Superman #75. This connection gives the title "Doomsday Clock" a whole different meaning, perhaps referring to the villain Doomsday, and to the death of Superman, and ultimately to the death of “hope” in the DC universe. Would like to know @Adam_Murdough's thoughts on that.
It’s been established that in the Watchmen universe that DC Comics characters exist as fictional characters in comic books, just like our reality.
Here’s an excerpt by Night Owl aka Hollis Mason from his autobiography 'Under The Hood,' found in Watchmen #1,
I’m convinced that the era that the Doomsday Clock series takes place in is a major plot point of this maxi-series.
The story is set in late 1992. There's no good reason for the political overtones of real-world 2017 to be in there. The very idea that somehow we "got there quicker" in the fictional universe makes no sense. History and reality do not exist on a pre-determined linear timeline. Adding in the superheroes, super technology, telepaths, and "alien invasion" of the Watchmen universe would not have caused the real world to accelerate political discourse by 25 years. Instead the politics of fictional 1992 would be completely different from our 1992 or our 2017. The fact that it happens to resemble 2017 is not interesting but rather lazy on Johns' part.
I also want to express my annoyance at hearing the same tired "the '80s were so bad" rhetoric on the show. This was brought up in order to play off the political overtones of the original Watchmen. Here's a real history lesson: By the time Watchmen was coming out, the USSR was already going through Perestroika and Glasnost. The Cold War tensions had died down immensely. The idea that Watchmen was playing off of very real nuclear tension is absolute bunk. By 1986 things were more peaceful between the two superpowers than they had been in 40+ years. That doesn't mean that the political elements in Watchmen were "bad" in inordinate. Not at all! They weren't--they were great and very insightful and a wonderful commentary on the recent past--but they were part of a fictional world.
The '80s are often portrayed as a bad, dark, scary time, and yet for some reason all the historical happiness indexes were a lot higher then than in later times. For some reason middle-class people in the '80s felt a lot more comfortable and a lot more confident about starting families and having many more children than they do now. We look back on all this time as if the people were constantly huddled under desks expecting the bombs to drop. If they were constantly fearing nuclear war, why were they still having so many more kids than middle-class people do today? If they genuinely expected the world to very possibly end, they wouldn't've kept having so many children. And why were they taking fewer anti-depressant drugs back then? Yeah there were geopolitical tensions, but this "it was so scary back then" doesn't add up. It seems like you guys just want to implicitly blame conservatives for everything, like how Margaret Thatcher gets "blamed" for punk music and Judge Dredd, even though both things started years before she took office. I had to laugh when Chris expressed absolute befuddlement that things in the fictional Doomsday Clock universe could be bad under a left-wing president Redford. Yeah, I mean, in the real world the closest we got to nuclear war was during the Cuban Missile Crisis under "Saint" JFK, but don't let anyone tell you anything other than Reagan was the real danger, probably more dangerous than Stalin and Khrushchev, right guys?
I'm sorry, I'm not a conservative or liberal and am pretty certain that I would never have voted for any of these various presidents if I was of-age during their elections, but all the political commentary presented here is not worthwhile at all.
It's interesting that CGS has recently spotlighted Jack Kirby and his struggles to get his artwork back. I wonder if in the future we will be discussing Moore & Gibbons' Watchmen rights in the same way?
Maybe the CGS crew might talk about the ethics of this comic in future episodes?
In fact, Moore has mostly turned his back on the industry and no longer speaks with Dave Gibbons.
Story here: https://www.wired.com/2010/07/alan-moore-watchmen/
I'm not reading Doomsday Clock. Not because of any indignence on Alan’s behalf, I'm just not interested.
edited to say: absolutely correct, as far as the way things end up in "Watchmen."
As stated in the "Reading Watchmen" annotations by some guy named Chris Beckett (cheap plug here, for a website that brings me no money), on page 32, panel 3 of issue 12 it's confirmed that Robert Redford is the "RR" mentioned on the news headline brought up by @Pants.
LINK
note: There are roughly 78,000 more words on Watchmen across the rest of my site.
And, since there's no context--only explanation--offered with my annotations, here's the page itself that confirms it's Robert Redford.
Thanks, as always, for all the work that goes into the podcast. It is much appreciated.
chris
Alan Moore from the Wired.com article above:
“They offered me the rights to Watchmen back, if I would agree to some dopey prequels and sequel”
He turned them down. His prerogative. I am more in line with Gibbons, besides the characters are all essentially anagrams of DC owned Charlton characters in the first place. I’ve come to believe that the pragmatic decision would be to have begun negotiating from that DC offer Moore refers to in the Wired article.
As for the DC (Doomsday Clock) series, I was so impressed with Rebirth #1 and this premise that I’m on board until it falls off the rails.
As a whole, it all feels like incredibly elaborate fan fiction...taking the subtle hints and foreshadowings of Watchmen (such as the artfully hinted-at possibility of someone using Kovacs' diary to blow open Vietch's conspiracy) and just...going there immediately. There's none of Moore's original subtlety or complex "clockwork" machinery at work here, which I guess shouldn't surprise me with a writer like Geoff Johns, who built his career crafting big, loud, audacious Event Comics. It's like recruiting Michael Bay to direct a quiet Indy film. I would've much rather seen a guy like Tom King get to write a work requiring the subtlety and complex layering a merging of the DC and Watchment universes requires.
The portrayal of this president in Doomsday Clock is toothless satire. If Johns wants to attack Trump, he should have put him in the book and stuck it to him, like Moore did with Nixon.
Of course then he'd have to think up why he was president in 1992...
Nope. No in your face real world politics in the original Watchmen to be found. ;)