Doomsday Clock! What do you think so far? (SPOILERS)
BionicDave
Posts: 377
Didn't see any threads already created for this, and since it's a 12-part event, I thought I'd open one up.
I thought issue #1 was quite intriguing, and I'm excited to see where this is going. But this chapter also felt decompressed. I hope future ones read tighter.
I have zero hypotheses for who this new Rorschach is. Has there been anything during these Rebirth months to give anyone a clue? Maybe it's someone we've never met. Maybe we'll never(ish) even find out this one's identity. Hurm.
Johns' creation of these new characters Mime and Marionette is equally interesting. Like Moore's original main characters, these two are patterned after Charlton Comics ones. (While DC acquired Charlton's in 1983, it didn't let Moore use them for Watchmen, asking him to create his own analogues instead.) The weird thing is, Mime's and Marionette's obscure antecedents - Charlton's Punch and Jewelee - were themselves recently used in Tom King's Batman title. That can't be coincidence. What a multiversal amuse-bouche! I just wonder what it is about Marionette - and not Mime - which Adrian Veidt feels is so important for allowing him to find Dr. Manhattan.
And while I liked the Superman stuff to close the issue, his final line about never having had a nightmare before seemed pushing it lol. Dramatic, yeah. But come on. Clark has nightmares.
What did you think of Doomsday Clock #1?
I thought issue #1 was quite intriguing, and I'm excited to see where this is going. But this chapter also felt decompressed. I hope future ones read tighter.
I have zero hypotheses for who this new Rorschach is. Has there been anything during these Rebirth months to give anyone a clue? Maybe it's someone we've never met. Maybe we'll never(ish) even find out this one's identity. Hurm.
Johns' creation of these new characters Mime and Marionette is equally interesting. Like Moore's original main characters, these two are patterned after Charlton Comics ones. (While DC acquired Charlton's in 1983, it didn't let Moore use them for Watchmen, asking him to create his own analogues instead.) The weird thing is, Mime's and Marionette's obscure antecedents - Charlton's Punch and Jewelee - were themselves recently used in Tom King's Batman title. That can't be coincidence. What a multiversal amuse-bouche! I just wonder what it is about Marionette - and not Mime - which Adrian Veidt feels is so important for allowing him to find Dr. Manhattan.
And while I liked the Superman stuff to close the issue, his final line about never having had a nightmare before seemed pushing it lol. Dramatic, yeah. But come on. Clark has nightmares.
What did you think of Doomsday Clock #1?
Comments
I enjoyed the first issue, though admittedly it poses far more questions than it answered. The art was great, and like @BionicDave - I found it intriguing. I am sticking it out.
Nevertheless, what I saw I really liked. Bringing Rorschach as a new character makes total sense. Several of the heroes in Watchmen are passed down; why not Rorschach too?
I liked the issue enough to start rereading Watchmen.
Based on the fact that Bernie was a black character in Watchmen, and its the sort of cutesy continuity bow that Johns can't resist tying.
For J'onn, it's because he's been out of sight for a while and can change shape.
But that's lazy theorising - why can't Rorschach not be both? Maybe Bernie in the original series was Martian Manhunter all along!
Sent back in time to undermine Watchmen while Dr Manhattan convinces Mike Carlin to kill Superman and bring him back with long hair. TRULY HISTORY'S GREATEST CRIME.
I think Rorschach is Bernie too. If it is true then it will be interesting to see how he went from reading Pirate comics to believing he is Rorschach.
For newer readers, I can certainly see why the story doesn’t seem like all that big a deal. And for me in 2017, thirty years after the fact, Watchmen isn’t even the best thing Moore has written (that would be From Hell), much less the greatest comic of all time. But the storytelling is still as impressive as ever. The structures, and patterns, and mirroring, etc., of the story are still amazing even by today’s standards. On some levels it did for comics what Citizen Kane did for film.
I read TDKR around the same time I read Watchmen, and it’s never done much for me. Again, there are some storytelling aspects I can get behind, though not to the level of Watchmen.
Eric brought up From Hell as his favorite Alan Moore work. For me it's Swamp Thing. In fact I really enjoy most of his DCU work over his creator owned(and Watchmen) work.
For me, his four works of Watchmen, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, V for Vendetta, and Superman (Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?) are so awesome that I get shivers merely typing those titles out. And now I'm gonna reread some over my holiday break lol. Life's too short not to.
As for Watchmen specifically, I do agree that it may have more impact if you're of a certain age (which I am) (pass the prune juice) and if you had read it back in the day. It blew my 16 year-old mind. As for Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, that also rocked my world, even though I've always had a problem with Miller's anti-Superman take. But the mastery of art and writing in TDKR was so damn seductive to me that it overwhelmed my hero allegiance. That's one mark of a fantastic artist, I guess: he/she can deride something you love and still make you love how it's done.
First, we don't know that he died. In the final panels before the explosion we see a character that might be him, with Gloria, but are we for sure it's him? In the previous panels he was wearing a helmet and he's not in this one. Even if we assume it was him, we don't see his dead body in the next issue which shows bodies everywhere.
Additionally we *do* see Bernie die with the newstand owner.
More importantly though, there's nothing from the book that would suggest Bernie would become an adventurer. His character wasn't very motivated to do good, he just reread the comic trying to figure out what it meant.
But Malcolm Long because obsessed with Rorschach and at the end of the book had had somewhat of a epiphany and decided to help others (we see him heading towards a fight to break it up).