Review: Doomsday Clock The Complete Collection

Doomsday Clock The Complete Collection by Geoff Johns
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Nice try but misses the mark

If there was anyone who I think could possibly create a worthy successor to Watchmen it would be, Warren Ellis. I would have Mark Millar as a second option. I enjoy Geoff Johns other works greatly but he’s not the person who could do a sequel to Watchmen justice. With that said his best shot at doing a Watchmen sequel would be if he somehow combined it with the DC universe. That is what this book tries to do.

It fails but at least it tried.

The problem is that Geoff understands Watchmen from the point of the original source material. That is the characters that inspired Watchmen that Alan Moore used as the template for his story. Geoff knows those characters very well but doesn’t know them in the form that they are in during the Watchmen story. He does try to build on what Moore did by adding MiracleMans Kid MiralceMan in the form of Black Adam but it doesn’t work. In the end he tries to keep the Watchmen universe going but in a more Hopeful manner. Unfortunately he doesn’t get that the Watchmen aren’t built off Hope. That universe is built off pure possibility with Hope being just one of many possible outcomes. That’s why the ending of Watchmen is so ambiguous. Geoff trying to only leave that world with Hope goes against the grain of what made that world such an amazing book to read.

That’s why Ellis or Millar would have done a better job if this was a follow-up to Watchmen. It is better then that terrible HBO adaptation but it’s far from what it could have been. Even if you look at it like s Superman story, which is what it really is, it’s still just a nice try. I don’t think Geoff was trying to imitate Alan Moore but he did try to maintain some of the tone that Moore used in Watchmen. It didn’t work out well for Johns. It just points out how different he is from Moore. I appreciate that about Johns. His work is more aspirational then Moores is. I just hope that next time everyone just stays in their own wheelhouse. So for now this version of a Watchmen sequel falls short of what came before it but that was always a possibility.

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