Doomsday Clock #10 was
unusually packed in reinterpreting DC history, and there are so many facets to
it, I will split my comments into two posts. In this one, I will focus on the
major players in the issue and what seems to be the message of the issue, at
this late stage in the game, comprising a lot of the message that Johns intends
for the series. In a second post, I will comment on the Justice Society and the
striking – to me – omission of Batman.
Doomsday Clock
#9
featured one of the most sprawling casts the DCU can muster, with a huge force
of superheroes taking part in a showdown on Mars. Issue #10, in contrast,
shrank the whole story down to a few principal characters; though a few
characters from the past and some from this story had extended cameos, almost
all of the major narration focused on a few men. These characters are not merely
playing roles in this story. Johns uses them to deliver a reframing of the
history of superhero stories. It is probably most instructive to see these
major characters in the issue as archetypes, standing for major eras in comic
book / heroic fiction. The focus of the issue is primarily about the use of and
messages conveyed by Johns' use of the following: Nathaniel Dusk, Alan Scott,
Superman, and Doctor Manhattan. Along the way, there is heavy use of Carver
Colman, the actor who plays Dusk in the movies.
The
story intertwines, in a legitimately weird way, several different substories
– some of them classics of the superhero genre – some more obscure
stories from the past, one – of course – Moore's Watchmen, a comment on the superhero genre, and then the main plot
of Johns' work that we're discussing here – Doomsday Clock, along with the side plots and stories within a
story. All told, we have nearly a dozen separate fictional universes wound
together into one larger story. But, unlike the pre-Crisis or Morrisonian DC
Multiverse, these worlds are not parallel. Part of what Johns is doing here,
within his story and no doubt to launch a reframing of DC's sub-universes is to
discard the notion that all these separate universes are separate but equal.
C'mon, we always knew that Earth 3 and Earth 19 and Earth whatever were not
universes equal to Silver Age Earth One. Most of the universes in the
Multiverse are and always were derivatives of the main DCU. Johns is advancing
the conversation in this issue by recognizing that in the cosmology, the main
Earth is special, and other things flow from it.
The
story has so many threads going, of such different kinds, that the issue alone
needs a map of them, or at least a list. It goes as follows:
1)
DCU timelines, keying around the origin of Superman:
Golden Age 1: Superman debuted in
1938 before Alan Scott
Golden Age 2: Alan Scott debuted in
1940 in a world without Superman
Silver Age: Superman debuted in 1956
in a world without Alan Scott
Byrne: Superman debuted in 1986,
long after Alan Scott
Birthright: Same Golden Age
backstory as GA2
Secret Origin: Same Golden Age
backstory as GA2
Wally West and Johnny
Thunder remember this
New 52: Same Golden Age backstory as
SA
Rebirth: Same Golden Age backstory
as SA
Seemingly inevitable reboot: Same as
Secret Origin?
2)
The Watchmen Universe
3)
The Nathaniel Dusk universe
4)
Carver Colman's story: He inhabits various DCU timelines, possibly all of them,
though we only get direct indications of his intersection with the first two
DCU timelines, and after that, at least in the one we last saw, he is dead.
One
of the jarring aspects of the story is how profoundly obscure Dusk and Colman
are, and yet Johns elevates them to central roles in the story. The Colman plot
takes a man of no particular importance and gives him one of the most
influential roles in DC history, with the (in some respects) godlike Dr.
Manhattan pairing up with him in a strange and somewhat incomprehensible
partnership, meeting once a year in the same location. It is easy to see how
Dr. Manhattan's vision of the future provides a pivotal, life-changing boost
for the career of Colman, but less obvious why the company of such an
unimportant man would be a draw for Dr. Manhattan. Similarly, the Dusk sideplot
is, on the surface, a distraction from the main story, of no causal
relationship to it. Neither Colman nor Dusk seems of interest on a par with the
superbeings who headline the series. Why did Johns give them these roles?
For
Dusk, the answer is clear: He is an archetype of the detective genre. His kind
starred in comic books, novels, and movies, peaking in approximately that
order. The "D" in DC stands
for "detective" and that hearkens back to 1937, a little over a
year before the debut of Superman. One of the detectives who launched the Detective Comics title in issue #1 was
Bruce Nelson, name-checked by Johns in the end materials in Doomsday Clock #3. Nelson and other,
generally similar, tough guys who tackle crime appeared in the monthly title
for 26 issues until they were overshadowed by, and ultimately replaced and
virtually eliminated by a new feature in that title — Batman. Ultimately,
old-style detectives did not survive contact with the likes of Batman; he
immediately took over the cover art of the title and the conventional detective
stories inside the issue rapidly became scarce, as well. A similar rise and
fall took place in the movies, as well, with the film noir genre starting to peter out during the same mid-50s
timeframe that, in Johns' story, sees the onscreen death of Nathaniel Dusk. Dusk
serves as a single example of that kind of character, standing in for comic
book Bruce Nelson (whose run ended in 1940), and movie detectives like Nick
Charles, Mike Hammer, and Sam Spade, whose popularity also rose then fell (but
later enjoyed various revivals).
Dusk's
story, though, is packed with references to the meta-story arc that Johns gives
us about DC history, most obviously when he is given a glass globe representing
a "world" from the past, and he smashes it while using it as a
weapon, with the voiceover narration echoing a Crisis on Infinite Earths tagline, "Worlds live. Worlds
Die." Just as various DC timelines (and eras) have died, just as the eras
of comic book and movie detectives ended (or, at least, greatly waned in
popularity), Dusk's storyline came to a definitive end in The Adjournment. Moments after Dusk shatters the globe, he is shot
in the back, and his world – his time as a detective in the movies, anyway
– also dies.
Much
the way that Batman and other costumed heroes ended the run of Bruce Nelson and
his kind, Dr. Manhattan elevates, then indirectly ends the life of Carver
Colman. Colman initially feels (literally) blessed by the presence of Dr.
Manhattan in his life, wondering if the erstwhile superhero is an angel. But
from the beginning, their association takes Colman down a tragic path. Colman's
movie success brings him fame and riches, but his fame combines with secrets
and lies to attract the blackmailing that ends his life. Colman receives from
Dr. Manhattan in much the way that Faust received from Mephistopheles, getting
precisely what he wished for in the short run, but damnation in the long run.
Clearly,
the rise and fall of Dusk and the actor who played him, Colman, are told in
parallel fashion, both killed from behind in successive panels after being
betrayed by a woman they loved. As I have suggested that Murray Abrahams plays
a part intended to parallel that of Dr. Manhattan, we see them occupy the same
position in that pair of panels. However, Abrahams is actively the killer,
facing Dusk and pulling the trigger, while Dr. Manhattan passively brings about
the end of Colman, with his back turned as Colman is killed. As Dr. Manhattan
himself narrates, he could have stopped it, but did nothing. He is a being of
inaction in a world where the heroes practice action.
"Action"
is the title of the issue's story, and it should be interpreted on a few
different levels. It is yelled by the director on the set, and it is what, in
Dr. Manhattan's formulation, distinguishes Superman from himself. It is, of
course, the title of the series that launched Superman, the title whose first
issue appeared on the newsstands on April 18, 1938, the very date during which
Dr. Manhattan appears in the DCU. Johns also slipped the title of the famous
comic book into the climactic dialogue at the end of Infinite Crisis, with Superman telling Superboy Prime that being
Superman is "about action." (Much the same synopsis of heroism
delivered a couple of years later in Batman
Begins: "It's… what we do that defines us.")
Dusk
and Colman are no-name characters used as archetypes in Doomsday Clock, and Dr. Manhattan is also an archetype, created by
Alan Moore to make a comment of his own. It may be easy to forget reading Doomsday Clock in 2019 that, if there is
a single character that Dr. Manhattan was meant to represent, it was Superman,
at least Superman as he was when Moore plotted the story around 1984. Blue,
buff, godlike, weirdly dysfunctional in relationships with women, incapable of
symmetric relationships with the people closest to him, phenomenally
self-absorbed (as Moore has Superman say of himself in Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, "over-rated and too
wrapped up in himself"): These are the characteristics of Bronze Age
Superman that Moore packed, with distaste, into his rendition of Dr. Manhattan.
Dr.
Manhattan is toxic, and he was meant to be. Moore was trying to use him to tell
comics fans, see how sterile, self-serving, and off-putting your heroes really
are. Johns turns Dr. Manhattan loose in his interactions with Colman, all of
his godlike powers ultimately availing his friend nothing when he watches
unconcerned as Colman is murdered by his own mother.
Remembering
this, consider the question that Dr. Manhattan has asked of the blackout
following his upcoming encounter with Superman: Does Dr. Manhattan destroy the
universe or does Superman destroy him? The interesting thing is not to take
this as the headline on a "versus" thread – how do the powers of
the two characters match up in a fight – but how do the two visions of a
comic book superhero square off? And here, I think we return to the message
that Morrison closed on in Final Crisis,
with Mandrakk representing, for the most part, Alan Moore in that story and Dr.
Manhattan representing Moore's worldview in this one. If Moore was right, the
superhero genre was on a path towards oblivion way back in 1985. This is 2019,
and the good guys haven't given up yet, so Johns has plenty of room to take the
opposite side of the argument.
And in case there's any doubt where that is going, the final lines of the end materials, featuring the screenplay of The Adjournment give it away: Dusk, seemingly shot dead during the scenes that were filmed, survives the shooting and recuperates to walk again. The good guys aren't dead yet.
And in case there's any doubt where that is going, the final lines of the end materials, featuring the screenplay of The Adjournment give it away: Dusk, seemingly shot dead during the scenes that were filmed, survives the shooting and recuperates to walk again. The good guys aren't dead yet.