watchmen

[SPOILERS for Watchmen ahead, if anyone needs to be warned still]

So I spent some quality Twitter time on Sunday botching an observation I had about Watchmen. Basically, what I said was that, as a counterpoint to the idea that Dr. Manhattan was the only superpowered being in the Watchmen universe, there was also that island full of psychics, also gifted with supernatural powers that don’t exist in the real world.

Couple things wrong with that. One thankfully dawned on me all by my lonesome without someone having to come in and say “DUH MIKE YOU SO STUPID.” No, not thing about psychic powers being fake, that’s totally true, but the bit of business about “island full of psychics.” It’s an island of artists recruited by Adrian “Ozymandias” Veidt to generate horrible images that the “alien” brain would be prgrammed with, and then transmit upon teleportation to its destination, adding mental trauma to the physical destruction.

Wait a second, gonna add a spoiler warning to the beginning of the post here in case anyone still hasn’t read Watchmen.

Okay, done. Anyway, that’s the deal. I tried to amend my original statement by saying brains of psychics were cloned or whatever to make the alien brain, and one of my oldest internet pals, Mr. Dan Kelly, reminded me that it was just one psychic used in the alien brainn production. Specifically, a “human sensitive,” to use the actual phrase that Veidt initially uses. Basically the same thing, since the purpose is to send out a “psychic shockwave [to kill] half the city.”

My intent, to demonstrate that Dr. Manhattan was not the only superpowered being on Earth in this fictional universe, was correct. Just the details were wrong, and to what degree of “psychics” were implied to exist. Though Veidt does reference in issue #12 (or Chapter 12) that the event will affect other sensitives for years to come, but as will be shown in a moment, he may not be the most reliable source of information. LOOK, I’M GIVING MYSELF HALF CREDIT, SO THERE.

But then there’s something I haven’t considered. Twitter pal Bob Clark had some comments about Watchmen, and the character of Adrian Veidt specifically, to which I hadn’t paid enough attention. That Veidt himself, with all his grand schemes and plans and such, his controlled manner and his poise, is just totally off his chump. Bob notes that we’re so used to Rorschach being, quote/unquote, “the crazy one,” that we overlook the fact that Ozymandias is even more so. Ultimately, as Bob says, there might not be any “psychics” at all, just Veidt, in his unbalanced state, thinking he has access to a psychic brain, to go along with all the other improbable plans he’s made.

In the text, it’s left vague enough as to whether any “psychic shockwave” actually occurred. The death total is three million, but perhaps that was caused by the very act of the teleportation event itself. On Veidt’s wall o’monitors, we hear refernces to “the insane” (which, you know, who wouldn’t be knocked off kilter by a giant freaking alien suddenly appearing in town), and about a “pregnant woman convinced her unborn child was eating her” (again, losing one’s cool in reaction to an out-there event like this wouldn’t be surprising). Anyway, just trying to say, Bob could be right, maybe Veidt just believed psychics were a thing, and the actual physical element of this plan was enough to cause the mental trauma being reported.

Or maybe psychics are a thing here, because comic books. I mean, not trying to be a debunker or anything, just found Bob’s interpretation interesting and worth considering, particularly in the context of what this says about Veidt’s own state of mind.

There’s also the point made in the story (again, by Veidt, so take it as you will) that the psychic’s brain that was used for the “alien” was made “bigger and more powerful” by his science guys, so who knows what they did to it to make it generate the effect (not necessarily psychic, but perhaps something sufficiently physically disrupting to nearby brains) that could injure or kill. Again, despite the real world trappings of the series, it’s still a comic book, and the ol’ “comic book science” card is in play here.

Thanks, Bob, for the interesting thoughts on Watchmen. Always glad to see it can still stir up conversation after all this time!

By the way, the psychic’s name is given as “Robert Deschains,” in case you need it for your next trivia contest.

“Wait…that was a year before…did…did Watchmen copy Squadron?!?”

And yes, there are some similarities, particularly in the short-version high-concept description of “what if SUPERHEROES were REAL!?!?” But these are definitely two different entities, with varying agendas and executions, and I’m pretty sure Watchmen was being developed without any knowledge of Squadrons Surpreme‘s existence. If anything, I’d say Alan Moore took more inspiration from the political/social implications of his own Marvelman stories, not to mention the novel Super Folks.

Plus, let’s not forget that the idea of “superheroes in the real world” was an idea that had been floating around in comics for a while, not just the idea of what the very existence of superheroes do to the world around them, but simply “what would an actual real life superhero be like?” Not nearly to the extent of Squadron Surpreme or Watchmen, of course, but it was there. Superheroes tackling issues beyond, say, punching Kanjar Ro in the nose for the 80th time…pretty much the entire Denny O’Neil/Neal Adams run on Green Lantern/Green Arrow was this very thing, talking on drugs, overpopulation, pollution, etc.

The shared Marvel Universe was founded on a version of this, with heroes existing in real cities (primarily New York) instead of invented places like Metropolis or Gotham City. Even little things like Peter Parker catching a cold but still having to go out and fight crime as Spider-Man, or worrying about money, or worrying about how superheroing is impacting his normal life…all humanizing problems presented in a superhero context that directly address the issue of “what would doing this sort of thing actually do to someone’s life?”

A long time ago, on this very site, I noted that the very act of putting actual human beings into the costumes and acting out the stories made the 1960s Batman TV show just as much as deconstruction of the genre as anything Watchmen did.

And even further back…that Wikipedia lnk to Super Folks mentions Moore admitting inspiration from the Mad Magazine parody “Superduperman,” itself a relatively savage demolishing of superhero tropes. And there’s the issue of All-Star Comics where the Justice Society of America addresses the topic of disabled veterans.

And, look, there are countless other examples and I can probably spend all day typing them in here. But the point is…as a medium for expression, of course comics, even superhero comics, are going to try to make their stories more relevant and relatable to real world issues. Sure, having two 12-part “maxi-series” at around the same time dealing with the same sort of thing, kinda sorta, was unusual timing, but more coincidental than anything else. Just sort of the natural outcome of what had come before. Both series were above and beyond what we’d seen in the past, of course, but not entirely without antecedent.

So there I was, just searching the term “comic book” on the Amazon Music app, as one does, when this came up:

Now I realize this may not be new to some of you, but given that my musical awareness pretty much had an expiration date of sometime in the early 1990s, this 2015 release from Jahmbi featuring a design inspired by Watchmen was a surprise to me.

Their Facebook page describes their sound as “METAL (Experimental),” and you can see just how experimental by trying a sample here. You may want to keep your speakers turned down low until you can gauge the volume of what is about to ensue.

Anyway, just one more thing to note in the ongoing list of strange Watchmen ephemera.

So I haven’t really said a whole lot about Doomsday Clock beyond my “wonder how it’s gonna sell” post back in September. Well, I can tell you now, after three issues of it have been unleashed upon an unsuspecting world, that it actually is selling very well, thank you, and even the second printing of the first issue is moving briskly.

That’s all just basic, non-opinionated stuff, I realize. I haven’t really come right out and said anything specifically about the content of the series, beyond some joking around, mostly because…well, I’m a retailer. I sell these things for a living. Not that this comics blogging doodad is an official part of my store or anything, but certainly a non-zero percentage of my customers are aware that I spend a small portion of my free time typin’ funny about funnybooks here. And I’ve seen enough examples of other retailers slagging off, say, Mutant Shenanigans: Alpha on their official store blogs/online newsletters/review columns etc., and then wondering a month later “huh, Mutant Shenanigans: Alpha isn’t selling at my store…wonder why?”

Not that I plan on really slagging it all that much, but the other day I did say this on the Twitters:

“Haven’t really said much about the actual DOOMSDAY CLOCK series itself, but it’s sort of a combination of ‘woefully misguided’ and ‘absolutely fascinating’ (in that I obsess a bit over out-of-context Watchmen usage).”

There’s…a lot of meaning that can be packed into my use of the phrase “woefully misguided.” That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s something that’s not entertaining in some fashion. Take, for example, Crisis on Infinite Earths, a series I like quite a lot. Sure, at the time we all probably thought it was a good idea, taking what was an overly complex/high entry cost shared universe and paring it down into something a bit more comprehensible. However, it could be argued that it turned out to be quite misguided, a stripping away and recataloging of crazy ideas and wild imagination that, in the decades since, DC Comics has been trying to undo, and in some way making it far more complex and difficult to enter than whatever problems Crisis was supposed to solve.

As such Crisis and its impact became problems mostly in hindsight, starting with small things (“whoops, we fucked up Hawkman, sorry everyone!”) and quickly ballooning into much larger issues (“oh, hey remember continuity? Here’s some more different continuity!”). Doomsday Clock‘s…quirks, shall we say, were anticipated well ahead of time. We were all watching that person in the scary movie, reaching a hand out to the door handle, while we shouted “NO, DON’T OPEN THAT DOOR!” Reasonably sure we all foresaw the inherent awkwardness of combining a singular, self-contained work by creators at the peak of their skills with a decades-old haphazardly-assembled, repeatedly rebooted, shared universe to the point of using the former as another tool to shore up the latter.

Now this is all sounding relentlessly negative, and I’m really not trying to be. As I said about the Crisis series I was using as an example, I enjoyed that comic. Outside of the nostalgic feelings I have for it, Crisis remains beautifully drawn, and a solid final “hurrah” for the DC Universe that was, before the DC Universe, of which there was no stopping them now, took over. Now, the Doomsday Clock itself I’m finding enjoyable in a weird way. As noted above, as a dealer, I’m happy with it sales and interest from my customers…I’m having people coming specifically to pick up this comic. As a responsible comics fan, I should probably be upset that the property being exploited without creator consent…yes, the work is technically DC’s but rights were dangled in front of Moore/Gibbons with no real intention of giving those rights to them so long as the comic sold.

As an irresponsible comics blogger and pop culture…observer, I guess, since “wallower” makes me sound bad…I am as I said in my tweet, “absolutely fascinat[ed]” by the Watchmen characters being exploited out of context (as in this Heroclix set, or this comic where DC-by-way-of-Charlton-Comics superhero the Question meets Rorschach). And this Doomsday Clock series, along with the two-year teasing/weaving of Watchmen material into the regular DC Universe, is sort of the ultimate “out of context” usage of the characters. Yes, it probably shouldn’t have been done. Yes, this isn’t really adding anything to the original work.

Nonetheless, seeing these characters and these situations and these attempts at aping the style and storytelling of the original remains oddly and strangely compelling, in a way that DC’s previous Watchmen event “Before Watchmen” was not. In “Before Watchmen,” the characters were working toward an endpoint, the events of Watchmen itself. The creators working on those comics couldn’t deviate too far from the paths already designed for these characters…not to say they didn’t take them in directions that could be deemed outside their original intentions, but at least they were mostly remaining within the constraints of an already-established fictional milieu.

Doomsday Clock escapes that by being “the sequel,” with all that open road ahead, and oh yeah we’re totally crossing over with Justice League characters so we’ve got, like, multiple universes to play with now. (Okay, I’m not unaware of the irony that this sounds like the opposite of my criticism of Crisis on Infinite Earths.) There’s no longer the worry about putting the pieces back in place…now they can scatter them about however they want. The fascination I mentioned before is in how this new creative team is playing with others’ toys, how they mimic what’s come before, how they change what’s been established, and so on. (You know, like superhero comics in general.) I genuinely am curious how this mixing of worlds will play out, not just plotwise but in just the simple mechanics of decisions made in putting together this event.

Even by duplicating the original’s format by including the text-heavy backmatter, you don’t get the same sense of that world-building the original worked so hard to establish. Much of what made Watchmen, aside from its deconstruction of the superhero genre, was its attention to detail, from the technological/political impact of Dr. Manhattan, to maintaining consistent physical settings (like just having the same street and building layouts from issue to issue), to little things like Dan wondering where the hell all his sugar cubes went (taken of course by Rorschach in a previous issue, and eaten by him throughout the rest of the series).

Doomsday Clock is a different animal with different purpose, and the depth of the original has been replaced mostly by trivia (“hey that guy’s daughter is Elasti-Girl from the Doom Patrol!” and other such nuggets that end up in clickbait listicles breathlessly detailing those Easter eggs “you may have missed!” somehow despite them basically being shoved in your face and captioned “THIS IS A REFERENCE TO SOMETHING”). The new series appears to be primarily about reclaiming superheroes from the legacy of Watchmen and similar descontructive attempts, in that the last two years of DC’s overarching storytelling has positioned the previous “New 52” continuity reboot as a literal attack on the DC Universe by Dr. Manhattan.

Not saying that isn’t a valid, and in its way, clever method of approaching real world publishing strategies within a fictional universe, though it strikes me as odd putting a decades-long best-selling property into an antagonistic position against their main line of books. Granted, we haven’t see the full story yet, so perhaps there’s a “redemptive” conclusion yet to come that corrects this negative portrayal. Especially if they plan on keeping any of the Watchmen characters around in the DC Universe after everything’s all said and done. (Hello, Rorschach Team-Up.)

Anyway, Doomsday Clock. Probably shouldn’t have happened, but here it is regardless. It’s a weird thing that will almost certainly end up only as a footnote in the original Watchmen‘s history. It remains, however, a crazy amalgam of a comic, not quite as Watchmen-esque as it wants to be, but tonally strange enough to not feel strictly like a DC superhero comic either. So long as it’s a one-shot thing à la that Simpsons/Family Guy crossover, which was another peculiar mixing of styles that kind of worked okay once, that’ll probably be fine. But, to repeat myself, “Hello, Rorschach Team-Up” is not a thing I said entirely facetiously.

Oh, and by the way, if Doomsday Clock takes place a year ahead in DC continuity (well, more like 18+ months ahead now that it’s gone to a bimonthly schedule), and Superman is getting his red trunks back in Action Comics #1000 (due out in just a few months), does that mean that cover to Doomsday Clock #1 pictured above is already out of date? Or, in a variation of what I suggested here, maybe instead of fighting over the trunks, Superman actually lends them to Dr. Manhattan. “Now, now, sir, you can’t go walking around Metropolis like that!”

I know we’re all supposed to be outraged at DC continuing to repurpose Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen, but man, I just laugh and laugh and laugh at this:

…partially for the chutzpah…well, okay, mostly for the chutzpah of DC to even do this, and partially out of my own curiosity over how it’s even going to work, and partially out of my own misguided love for weird permutations of the original story, like, say, this toaster.

And seeing this cover finally got me to put together a gag involving that title “Doomsday Clock” and its superficial similarity to a particular piece of dialogue from a page in Preacher:

Ever since Doomsday Clock was announced, I had this stupid idea in my head. And now here it is, in all of yours.

Anyway, I have no idea how I’m going to order this. Well, that’s not entirely true, I do know how I’m going to order this, I’m just not sure how it’s going to sell. With that Batman/Flash crossover “The Button” associating DC’s use of lenticular covers with “special Watchmen tie-in events,” using lenticular covers for the Mr. Oz storyline coming up in Action Comics, where the Watchmen tie-in may not be as strong as had been presumed*, may lessen the sales boost said covers may give to Doomsday Clock.

Or I’m just overthinking it. While that Mr. Oz storyline may or may not have solid ties to the overarching Watchmen thing, Doomsday Clock is totally being pushed as “SUPERMAN VERSUS DOCTOR MANHATTAN” which should drive sales to even those folks who feel like they weren’t getting enough Watchmen content in that Action story. Boy, I’m sure assuming a lot about that Action comic I haven’t read yet.

At any rate, I’m reasonably certain sales will start out strong, but 12 issues over presumably a year (or a year-and-a-half, if not more) is a long stretch to keep interest up, even in something as wildly out there as a Watchmen/DCU crossover. There’s gonna be some attrition unless there’s a big sales-driving surprise partway through, and even then, who knows. There’s the kind of comics marketplace insight that keeps my two or three readers coming back.

I was looking back at some of my old Watchmen posts on this site, and from this entry in 2010 I quoted an excerpt from a DC press release:

“However, DC comics co-publishers Dan DiDio and Jim Lee said, ‘Watchmen is the most celebrated graphic novel of all time. Rest assured, DC Comics would only revisit these iconic characters if the creative vision of any proposed new stories matched the quality set by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons nearly 25 years ago, and our first discussion on any of this would naturally be with the creators themselves.’”

I don’t know what conversation DC had with Gibbons about this, but I’m sure any conversation with Moore probably ended with him slamming down his rotary phone after shouting “don’t call me again!”

I am curious as to what’s going to happen once DC no longer has this Watchmen subplot running through their series and special events. Will we finally get that epic multi-part storyline teaming up current Batman with Dark Knight Returns Batman? Then again, DC just wrapped Dark Knight III, and I think they’ve threatened a IV, so that franchise is still going on. Maybe…Rōnin joins the Titans? Angie Thriller becomes a…I don’t know, Indigo Lantern? Daniel from Sandman teams up with the Justice L…oh, wait.**
 
 

* I won’t “spoil” what Mr. Oz’s reveal might be, but you can Google around and see what people are assuming. Or look here on the Tweeters where I just straight up say it, back when it was still a crazy idea and not the likely correct one.

** Yes, I know they asked Neil Gaiman. Yes, I know Sandman is technically in the DC Universe. Let me have my little joke.