Doomsday Clock #5

[history79]

Comments

[captainbellman]

I'm still wondering what all this has to do with Doomsday. Or, for that matter, Clock King.

[goattoucher]

If only...

[jaxjyls]

Wasn't Superman supposed to pay a big part in this series?

[matrix_dragon]

"Oh, what have you 'heroes' done to make the world a better place?"

Fuck right off with this horseshit.

[wizardru]

I don't know, Adrian, what day of the week is it?
Is it 'Stopped Darkseid from finding the Anti-Life Formula Friday?', 'Prevented Ares from committing Global Genocide Tuesday' or just 'Repelled invaders from another space/time/continuity Saturday'? Oh, wait, you're here, so question answered.

[matrix_dragon]

Plus, the mass murderer is spewing the nonsense at Bruce, who, when not being written as BatDick, has often used his wealth in productive ways as well, with charities, help programs, efforts to try and improve the world in ways besides stopping the latest mass murderer from deploying a giant psychic squid into the middle of the city.

More than that though, I'm irritated by just who wrote this story pulling out that old piece of nonsense. Geoff Johns has been in a position of narrative authority at DC for nearly 15 years. More than once, he's done a routine like this. 'Superheroes aren't real heroes!' 'Oh, it's so grim and gritty and dark!' Every time, he acts like this is some unfortunate development that he's going to change, and every time, he follows up with stories that just keep that approach going. This is a cycle he's had going for a long time, and there's nothing particularly new here because of it.

[lego_joker]

To be fair, it's not like the trend started with Johns. It goes at least as far back as that old GL/GA issue where the old guy confronts Hal about Not Doing Enough for black people, ignoring the fact that he's... you know, probably saved everyone on Earth a dozen times over.

[strejdaking]

When O'Neill did it there, he was breaking new grounds in placing Silver Age heroes in real life context. Doing the exact same thing with the exact same amount of nuance forty years later is ridiculous.

[jlbarnett]

ideally that sort of stuff would be shoved in his face.

[locuatico]

or if they want to go with the "you may stop a bank robbery, but do you try to stop the societal problems that lead to the bank robbery in the FIRST place? huh? HUH?" and the answer is: Yes, a lot of the time. Wayne industries does a lot of genuinely humanitarian work.
I think my favorite moment in the aftermath to "Cataclysm" was Bruce telling the other board directors (who were concerned that wayne industries wasn't making profit due to all the aid they were doing for gotham) that he would not let Wayne industries make one cent while GOtham was still rebuilding.

There is also the fact other superheroes do, in fact, help with the "real problems". Superman has been shown wanting to help most crooks to reform amd do humanitarian work (not to mention all the times he has reported what he has seen).

Many writers have shown Wonder Woman willing to get involved into more messy problems such as the conflicts in the middle east.

One of my favorite Flash scenes is him literally rebuilding an apartment building after it had collapsed so the people would not go homeless.

Then there is the fact that, as someone mentioned, it would probably have more meaning if Johns himself wasn't at least partially responsible for pushing this "but ARE they heroic enough?" narrative.

[crinos]

One of the very first things Superman does in the comics is barge into an apartment where a man is beating his wife and kicks the assholes ass. He then goes and exposes a Senator who is being bought off by fifth columnists to keep us out of world war 2.

[locuatico]

While that is true. You could argue that said characterization of Superman is not the same as the Superman of the last decade.


I preffer to think of the time he visited Gotham during No Man's Land.

One of the first things he does is to fix the power plant so Gotham can have energy once more (which was a very reasonable idea). when that fails because Gotham's anarchy problem was bigger than he expected, he changes tactic by going around as Clark Kent and teaching agriculture so people can grow their own crops and help them survive.

[strejdaking]

I'm more upset they would Adrian into such an obvious strawman.

[tcampbell1000]

Admittedly, this is more or less Adrian's point of view in Original Watchmen, and it's not a philosophical point worth dismissing out of hand. I have no problem believing that Adrian still feels proactive, world-changing action is a moral duty, even if he has deep regrets about the way he executed it.

The problem here is that this debate is rigged by the fact that it's set in the DC Universe, and there's no unrigging it, no matter how earnestly one might want to. Reading the stories of superheroes month after month basically requires you to buy into the noninterference directive, because if your heroes change the world from the world we know too drastically, then you've essentially set a ticking clock on your narrative, and DC's entire business model is predicated on superheroes superheroing forever and ever and ever (and mostly the same superheroes, at that). Although it promotes many beliefs that have been labeled "liberal," there's something fundamentally conservative about its world. Maybe there has to be.

And that's why Doomsday Clock, for all that it really seems to be trying to cross-breed exciting pulp and real-world relevance, cannot serve both worlds fairly, because Watchmen is fundamentally liberal. It does not necessarily believe all change is good, but its urgency comes from acknowledging change is inevitable.

Johns seems to be trying to counter-rig things by making DC's world more like the Watchmen's before any Watchmen even show up, but unless you've been away from comics for a while, that ends up looking like the hasty plastic surgery it is. Anti-m(utant/etahuman) prejudice is usually Marvel's bag, not DC's.

[trooper924]

Hello darkness, my old friend....

(This just keeps getting more and more cringe worthy with every issue.)

[deathcrist2000]

I mean, it's going to be hard to top MOTHMAN FLIES INTO A BURNING BUILDING BECAUSE HE'S A MOTH AND IT'S A FLAME!!!!! but I'm sure Johns'll find a way.

[crinos]

*Sigh* Okay, I guess I have to explain this again.

Adrian, mate, in your world, Supervillains ARE A REAL WORLD PROBLEM. BRAINIAC IS A REAL WORLD PROBLEM. DARKSEID IS A REAL WORLD PROBLEM. ARES AND GRODD AND BROTHER BLOOD ARE REAL. WORLD. FUCKING. PROBLEMS.

You are not Deadpool. You are not Byrne era She Hulk. You are not Gwenpool. You do not. DO NOT. have the abiltiy to break kayfabe. When you say "Super heroes do not solve real world problems" that statement is, from your perspective, FACTUALLY WRONG. Because they do. THEY FUCKING DO. Even if that Super Hero only comes out when the Mushroom men of Venus come to invade Earth, Because if they exist in comics, the Mushroom men are a real problem in the comics.

When you have a character in a comic say something like "Super heroes don't solve REAL problems." You are basically admitting and drawing attention to the fact that this is a fictional story. You are actively breaking immersion. The argument makes zero fucking sense, it has never made any fucking sense. Stop fucking using it.

(Also, considering Adrian's solution to "real world problems" was "Drop a giant psychic murder squid on New York to scare everyone into playing nice" and we saw how well THAT turned out, Welll... People in glass houses should not throw stones Adrian. All I'm sayin.)

[alicemacher]

Yes, and what really annoys me is that in the previous issue (and earlier), Veidt was depicted as deeply remorseful for what he did (as he goddamn well should be). Whereas here in his confrontation with Batman, his attitude is more eh, I did what I had to do; it didn't work, but at least I did something, unlike you. To call this inconsistent characterization would be an understatement.

[crinos]

Well, that part seems to scan for me. Since Veidt being remorseful was in flashback (It seemed to be part of new Rorsharch's origin story) and Veidt seems to be the kind of smug self righteous shit who can convince himself he was right all along on anything i f he has enough time.

[zylly]

I’ve never seen the “real world problems” argument refuted in this fashion before. I like the way you think!

[crinos]

Well thank you.

The problem is that you can't really use that argument in the comic because it just continues to feed into the kayfabe breaking. I mean maybe if you were using a 4h wall breaking character like Gwenpool you could do it but otherwise...

(Ironically, in an issue of Champions where Gwenpool was guest starring, the Champions WERE dealing with a real world problem: Namely a racist cop who was committing and tacitly approving of hate crimes, which was making open bigotry more acceptable in his community and Gwenpool was the one who kept trying to come up with comic booky reasons why it was happenng, like Super villains or a hate plague or Skrulls.)

[lordultimus]

I'm pretty sure Veidt is supposed to be in the wrong here.

Whether or not that gives Watchmen proper respect is an entirely different question.

[crinos]

Oh, I know he's supposed to be in the wrong. But the point is that when people in comics talk about super heroes not dealing with real world problems it doesn't make any sense because, as comic book characters, they shouldn't know the difference.

I mean we live in the real world. We live in a world without aliens (that we know of) without magic, without super science and intelligent robots and mutant powers, where the only thing radiation exposure will do to you is give you six months to live. We know that the stuff in comic books isn't real. We know that.

But they don't. That's THEIR world. They grew up in a world where Superman is the last son of Krypton, there's a magical island filled with Amazons, Atlantis is a real and thriving culture, there was intelligent life on Mars at some point, and the worlds most notorious serial killer is a guy who looks like a circus clown. They should not be able to know the difference between real world problems and comic book problems, because to them, it should all be real world problems.

List of real world problems in the DCU: Curing Cancer, Global warming, stopping Starro the conqueror from enslaving Humanity, stopping Darkseid from enslaving humanity, world hunger, Terrorism (Which, along with the usual suspects, also includes groups like the HIVE and Kobra, and also guys like the Brotherhood of evil and whatever crew of jerks Captain Nazi has rounded up this week).

Now that's not to say this can't be brought up at all: There is a scene in Green lantern where an old Black man comes up to Hal and asks "You've helped the Orange Skins and the Purple Skins, who come you've never helped the Black Skins huh?" Now that actually makes sense, that is a legitimate complaint to have because it doesn't explicitly say that the Orange and Purple skins don't exist.

But when you have a character going "Super heroes don't solve REAL problems." You are very explicitly saying "None of what you reading matters, these characters are not real, this is all nonsense, and they know its nonsense." And unless that's your explicit point, that's not something you want to do in a comic.

[deathcrist2000]

"These "no-nonesense" solutions of yours just don't hold water in a complex world of jet powered apes and time travel."
-Grant Morrison

[crinos]

Heh, I love that scene, it was also the most succicent way I've ever seen of putting a team on the bus (Aside from what happened in X-men after M Day, when they literally put a bunch of depowered Teen mutants on the bus and then blew the bus the fuck up).

"Alright Ultramarines, you guys are way too edgelord for this crazy four color world. But here is a baby universe in need of protecting, maybe you'll have better luck there."

[zylly]

There’s a great bit in an early nineties GL (when the Coros was just a handful of Lanterns and rebuilding) where a Xunadrian confronts Hal with “what have you done for the orange skins”, taking him to task for focusing too much on Earth and not his galactic responsibilities.

[locuatico]

He is supposed to be wrong.
but the problem Crinos is reffering to is that veidt is making a criticism of modern superheroes mostly dealing with fictional stuff such as supervillains and alien invasions, rather than real-life problems such as world hunger, poverty and the ever increasing corruption in governments. But he is doing so while still retaining an in-universe perspective.

In the real world, when an earthquake happens, there are rescue teams that often includes volunteers. Nobody would accuse these volunteers of not dealing with "the world's real problems" or that earthquakes don't count.

Similarly, if there is an aronist on the loose, a firefighter would not be accused of playing hero because they are simply stopping the fires the arsonist is making

In-universe, an alien invasion is as real as an earthquake. To say Superman is not dealing with " the world's real problems" makes as much sense in-universe if it was reffering to him dealing with an earthquake or an alien invasion.

What Veidt is reffering to is that Batman's approach of things doesn't adress the wider societal problems that plague gotham that, ultimately, increase the crime rates and allows for crooks like THe Joker to go unpunished.
But, as an in-universe conversation, (that is, a conversation were neither of them is aware they are fictional characters or that they are in a story ) what veidt is saying is that stopping the joker (A "supervillain") doesn't count because the joker "isn't real", and that arsonists aren't real either.

And that is bad writing.



A better written scene would have Veidt asking Bruce how much has he tried to deal with the root of the problems (that is poverty and corruption), and telling him that stopping the joker won't solve anything if he doesn't try to fix Gotham's broken system as well.

[shadowpsykie]

i'm sorry... but I am NOT buying this whole... "DC Hates it's heroes" thing... also... What happened to the Remorse Adrian? and what are you doing with Dan's ship....

[icon_uk]

Well, I liked the Firestorm protocols being an international program amongst the nuclear powers

Why do we have old-school looking Killer Frost, when Frost is in the Justice League isn't she?

[zylly]

That's the Louise Lincoln Killer Frost, per some of the back material.

Like most of the back material, it makes zero sense and posits the existence of a lot of characters who were previously unaccounted for and now all of sudden now exist.

[miss_abnormal]

I think Jonhs is writing this (in terms of these characters that are suddenly popping up everywhere) as if this was all happening in the pre-Flashpoint (post-Crisis) DC universe. This whole situation might have worked better back then because there existed waaaay more superheroes (and supervillains). But the majority of characters that existed in the pre-Flashpoint universe don't exist in the New 52 (and Rebirth).

So now Johns wants to write a comic that takes place in a world that has gone through all the immense world-building that the post-Crisis/pre-Flashpoint universe had, but only has the New 52/Rebirth universe to work with (superheroes have existed for only 10 years, according to this issue); so he finds himself having to build a world the size and complexity of the post-Crisis/pre-Flashpoint universe in a few short issues , without even being able to use every page to build such a world (post-Crisis universe took about 25 years to build, or pretty much 80 years if you include all the bits that managed to transfer from pre-Crisis to post-Crisis; very little got transferred from pre-Flashpoint to post-Flashpoint, with exception to the Green Lantern mythos and sort-of-kind-of the Batman mythos, until things started to slowly change since Rebirth started).

[kalanyr]

Yes, I noticed that too. I actually came in to see if anyone else had the feeling that this issue was being written as some kind of weird Post-Crisis/Rebirth hybrid. There are a few bits and pieces that clearly indicate future stuff (like the Great Twenty instead of the Great Ten and Justice League of China) but there's way too many Post-Crisis references for them just to be the result of natural story progression in the gap size we have.

[strejdaking]

How the hell does that 10 years thing work? So like, have Clark and Lois met adn got married and had Jon before he became Superman?

[locuatico]

I remember when Martian Manhunter ongoing was released (around the middle of the Nu52 era, I believe).
THe first issue had him "dying" (he was alive.. sorta, can't bother go look it up) and there was this emotional scene between him and Superman... EXCEPT they had barely had any interaction in the Nu52 up to that point, so it was relying on the fact they had been long-time friends in the pre-flashpoint universe.

in contrast, one issue of Rebirth's Titans book had Wally West and Superman having a heart-to-heart, which worked BECAUSE both him and Superman remembered the old continuity and the fact they were good friends.

And that was one of my criticisms of the Nu52: They wanted to ignore continuity, but also have moments that aren't as meaningful without what had come before.

Or as Linkara put it: They did not commit.