Doomsday Clock is DC Comics’ next big event, bringing the Watchmen characters created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons into the DC Universe proper in a story that has been years in the making.
The first issue, from writer Geoff Johns and artist Gary Frank, is already out and readers may be surprised by some of the elements introduced to the Watchmen universe including new characters and a huge reveal that will have fans talking until the second issue.
Johns met with a small group of press at New York Comic-Con to discuss the first issue of Doomsday Clock and some of the themes readers will discover. He also spoke about some of the new elements he and Frank are introducing.
SPOILER ALERT! If you haven’t read Watchmen or Doomsday Clock #1 you may want to turn back now.
“There’s more humor in this book then people expect, a lot of quirkiness as I like to call it, and it’s important because people misunderstand, that they feel that things that are serious are realistic and I don’t think that’s true,” Johns said. “I think people laugh and smile everyday even in the face of all the shit we have to deal with.”
At the forefront of all that quirkiness is Rorschach, a character who died at the end of Watchmen but has somehow returned in the pages of Doomsday Clock. As readers learn in the first issue, this Rorschach is someone completely different.
“Much like Watchmen, where there’s another Nite Owl another Silk Spectre, in my mind there can be another Rorschach,” Johns said. “And it also preserves one of the best moments in the original comic, which is [Rorschach’s] death. But the character and his voice is so iconic I wanted to do another version of it.”
There’s a part in the first issue where the new Rorschach has to prove he isn’t the original. He does so by simply removing his glove to reveal he’s African-American. This reveal will certainly get a lot of readers talking, and when one reporter asked Johns whether the decision to make Rorschach African-American was a conscious effort to bring diversity into the story, Johns said, “It is, there’s more to that but it is. I mean, The Mime is also Hispanic. I think the story needs it, I think the characters need it. There’s a lot that’s going to happen with it, so it’s not just ‘hey he’s black’ and we move on. It ties into a lot of things in the story.”
The Marionette, along with her husband The Mime, are brand new characters introduced in Doomsday Clock with ties to the old Charleston characters the original cast in Watchmen were based on. Johns promised the roles Mime and Marionette play in the story will be explained, but it was a joy for Johns and Frank to add to the Watchmen universe.
“One thing Al and Dave did so beautifully was take these echoes of Charleston characters and one of the things that freed Gary and I to do this story was to introduce new characters,” Johns said. “And there are these old Charleston characters called Punch and Julie that became the inspiration for these characters like The Question was for Rorschach. And they’re very different characters [from the comics characters they’re based on] but there’s an echoes there and it kept the consistency with what [Moore and Gibbons] established. The rules they established storytelling and universe wise we are really trying to maintain.”
Doomsday Clock #1 drops Nov. 22.
Have you read the first issue yet? What do you think of the new characters? Let us know in the comments section below.
