‘Doomsday Clock’ Shows That DC Will Never Understand ‘Watchmen’

It was a big week for Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, in a weird sort of way. Two different projects based on arguably their most famous work wrapped up just days apart – the first season of HBO’s take on Watchmen, as well as the DC Comics miniseries by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank, Doomsday Clock, that promised a bold new take on the characters and situations presented therein.

The HBO finale drew near-unanimous raves from fans and critics, who hailed it as a daring, unconventional way to play in the world the original series created while still asking relevant and interesting questions about power, race and destiny.

Doomsday Clock, on the other hand, landed months late with an ignominious thud. Even DC’s biggest fans had to admit that the story’s climax which featured Superman fighting off an army of villains before the universe was rebooted once more, fell flat.

So let’s dig deep into both to see what we can learn. Warning: below be spoilers for both TV show and comic book, so read at your own risk.

Who’s Watching

Let’s take a paragraph or two to discuss Watchmen and why, more than thirty years after it was first published, it’s still important to fans and DC Comics. Alan Moore was an up-and-coming young writer turning heads on Swamp Thing when he pitched a story using the stable of characters DC had just bought from out of business rival Charlton – Captain Atom, the Question, the Blue Beetle and the like.

DC already had plans for those heroes, so Moore and artist Dave Gibbons created knock-offs and set them loose in an alternate Earth, just different enough from ours to seem alien but familiar. A diverse cast of former heroes and ordinary people, including a psychologist and a newsstand owner, criss-cross as the Earth comes to the brink of global thermonuclear war, only to be unexpectedly united by a tragedy engineered by one of their own.

The thing with Watchmen is that it’s a virtuoso demonstration of how Moore was punching way above his weight class in the 80s. Every page of the book is impossibly dense and layered. It’s easy to dismiss the book as “what if superheroes were real,” but that’s just a fraction of what Moore and Gibbons did within the frame of a murder mystery starring spandex-clad vigilantes.

Getting It Right

There was a lot of nervousness around HBO’s Watchmen before it hit the airwaves. The live-action Zack Snyder movie is rightly condemned as a tone-deaf, lurid adaptation that floundered even as it tried to remain scrupulously accurate to the source material. But HBO’s series would not go down the same route. Instead, showrunner Damon Lindelof wanted to explore what the world would be like after Adrian Veidt dropped a fake alien in the middle of New York City to stop World War III.

Watchmen the comic was an attempt to wrestle with some of the issues occupying the world’s psyche in the 1980s – the Cold War, mutually assured destruction, and the like – through the prism of a world where one extraordinary man, the godlike Dr. Manhattan, can change everything with the blink of an eye. The HBO series starts with Manhattan off the table and a strange twist on the masked vigilante formula, with Oklahoma police officers working in costumed disguises to protect their identities.

It then moves to some very unusual places as it slowly re-introduces a handful of the prime movers of the original series. What’s fascinating about the series is how it once again takes a genre trope – instead of a murder, this one is the disappearance of a man named Will – and uses it as a skeleton to wrap a number of dizzying, surreal set pieces and character moments around.

One of the key metaphors of the original Watchmen is clockwork – Dr. Manhattan’s father was a watchmaker, and he was fascinated by the tiny, precise mechanisms that let us observe the deterministic passage of time. The TV show gave us a similar clockwork universe, made of springs, wires and gears that coalesced in the end to show us something that we’d only been seeing in parts. Was it perfect? No, but it was good, and true to the spirit of its inspirations, and that’s enough.

You’re Doomed

Doomsday Clock was announced as a series that would have ramifications that would ripple through the DC universe. The company teased it in the 2016 Rebirth special and the Button one-shot, where the Comedian’s blood-stained smiley face would wind up in the Batcave, linking the mainline universe with the Watchmen one for the first time. The series itself would be twelve issues, written by DC’s chief creative officer Geoff Johns and drawn by Gary Frank, who would adopt the nine-panel grid Gibbons used.

The events of Rebirth, which changed or removed characters from continuity once again, were revealed to be the fault of our old friend Dr. Manhattan, who traveled to the main DC universe, attracted by the myth of Superman. Once there, he starts to tinker with the timeline even more, bringing us into a universe where heroes are mistrusted by the government and eventually responsible for horrible civilian deaths.

It all culminates with a big face-off between Superman and Doctor Manhattan, preceded by a huge spandex brawl delivered in incomprehensible two-page spread. The book’s weird fixation on gore and “mature” action is on full display here, but it accomplishes nothing but padding out the page count. Eventually Superman – because he’s a good guy – doesn’t punch out Manhattan, who then sees the error of his ways and puts all of the Rebirth changes right to reboot the DC universe once more.

It also lets Manhattan peer into the “metaverse,” the sliding timeline that is constantly updated with each reboot. He not only peers into the past iterations to see Kal-El crash to earth in the 1920s, but also into the future as he lands in 2038, 2025, and so on.

The thing is, though, this isn’t a problem that needs to be solved to tell a good story. It doesn’t really matter that much what year Superman landed, because comic book time is elastic. We suspend our disbelief just like we suspend our disbelief that a man can fly. DC’s endless attempts to explain and retcon their history have resulted in diminishing returns year over year.

If you ask DC fans what the best Superman run of the 21st century was, many of them are likely to answer Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s All-Star Superman, which was also twelve issues, divorced from any continuity or cross-overs. That let the creators just tell stories about these iconic characters. That’s exactly what the original Watchmen let Moore and Gibbons do.

And that’s why HBO’s Watchmen works. They’re not trying to tie it into other HBO shows like The Righteous Gemstones, or even really setting up future seasons (although the finale certainly leaves a door open). They’re just taking interesting characters, putting them in situations that make for good stories, and calling it a day. It’s a lesson that the comics business could really stand to learn.

And we’re not even going to get into the real ending of Doomsday Clock, in which Dr. Manhattan steals the baby of two sociopaths, raises it on Mars, transfers his godlike powers into it, names it Clark and then drops it on the porch of Dan and Laurie Dreiberg from Watchmen. That’s just a bad story waiting to happen, and we’ll cross that bridge when DC decides they need to flog Watchmen one more time and tell it.

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