Doomsday Clock #1-2

I keep coming back to a phrase my friend said regarding Doomsday Clock #1: it’s not a sequel to Watchmen, but rather a response to it. It’s not the continuation of the story but instead it is a story that is framed by the lingering effects of a seemingly untouchable icon. Most interestingly it isn’t an attempt to extend the context of the original—a near future world that is in fact a reflection of the Reagan/Thatcher present. Doomsday Clock is of our moment. It is a narrative that is more influenced by the tragedy of Wikileaks and the phenomenon of fake news than anything from Alan Moore or Dave Gibbons, at least thus far. Geoff Johns drops us deep into the mire of media exhaustion. The constant march of the present renders nothing sacred and the Great Events™ unravel in real time over the wire. It’s just yesterday’s news but the response of the truth coming out casts a pall over the day-to-day.

I’m still skeptical of reactionary attitudes bleeding through the panels. Superhero comics, even when pronounced as progressive (or should I say liberal not leftist) almost always betray a regressive, even adolescent, attitude toward the complexity of politics. This is most evident in the use of protesters, a major visual and thematic force in Doomsday Clock (just look at the cover of #1!). While nowhere near as heinous as Frank Miller’s “pond scum” remarks, the attitudes are on the same spectrum: protesters are at best well-meaning dupes, reacting to what information is delivered to them on mainstream media. The superheroes—or metahumans as we’re calling them now—must continue to do their noble work despite being decried—spit on like returning Vietnam vets—and always the protesters hinder the slow turning wheels of justice. In an interesting switcheroo the protesters are out of vengeance and vigilantes are out of justice, when in the real world the opposite is true. Not all protests are de facto righteous or even right, but the depiction of all mobilized community action as pawns of global-media manipulation is straight out of the right-wing reactionary playbook. It was Russian-Bots! However, the extent of this remains to be seen as Johns rightly presents the protests of Doomsday Clock as a direct reaction to leaking news that Ozymandias murdered millions of people. 

Doomsday Clock #2 unfurls another layer of this exploration of mediated political truth through another popular theme in Superhero comic books: supposed real-life reactions to superheroes. I guess I should say vigilantes. I’m curious to see where this goes in the remaining 10 issues, especially after Johns and artist Gary Frank (whose faces are so precise in their expressions!) situate Batman in the same vein as Moore placed his heroes. After Watchmen it became de rigueur to position superheroes in contemporary political discourses—what if they were real how would people react? This continues to fascinate in an age of “alternative facts” where every bit of information that doesn’t benefit one’s position is at best fake news and at its worse folded into Anti-Semitic globalist conspiracies of cucks and libtards. Would visual confirmation of “metahumans” even be believed?

Batman presents a unique case here that Doomsday Clock #2 picks up on. In the past year it has become increasingly fashionable to paint Batman as a traumatic figure, as a blatant fascist, as, what Rorschach calls “a monster”. Tom King explores this through the Bat-family characters who push back on Batman’s paranoid, hyper-vigilant isolationism and Sean Murphy is attacking it directly in Batman White Knight. My favorite though is the film The Lego Batman Movie, which uses the licensed characters to explore queer trauma responses and modes of healing. It remains to be seen how far these writers, including Johns, will go. Batman, after all, is a major DC property and one of the most iconic characters in the current lexicon. These explorations of his fascism and deranged attitudes are never taken to their logical conclusion, but nor is Batman ever redeemed. It’s an endless play of interesting ideas that ultimately seek to maintain Batman’s supremacy as a badass.

reference:

1. Doomsday Clock #1 w. Geoff Johns p. Gary Frank Pub. Nov. 22, 2017 Read 1/1/18
2. Doomsday Clock #2 w. Geoff Johns p. Gary Frank Pub. Dec. 27, 2017 Read 1/2/18
3. image credit: Doomsday Clock #2