Ever since the revelation that Doomsday Clock, Geoff Johns and Gary Frank‘s Watchmen follow-up with colorist Brad Anderson, would begin in the world of Watchmen and follow up on the story after Ozymandias was outed to the world as a fraud, some fans have wondered whether we might see other members of the cast again. On that score, Doomsday Clock has been pretty generous. Besides Ozymandias and a pair of new Watchmen universe characters based loosely on a pair of Captain Atom villains from the Charlton Comics days, fans have had a chance to see what became of The Comedian (?!) and who took up the mantle of Rorschach.
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In Doomsday Clock #11, out today, we finally got a look at what happened to two beloved characters from Watchmen, Dan Dreiberg (Nite-Owl) and Laurie Juspeczyk (Silk Spectre). They knew of Ozymandias’s crimes at the time they were committed, and while they did not support him (and, indeed, tried to stop it), once the “alien invasion” was underway they had to agree that it was better to let his plan play out than to watch the world descend into war. So they went along with the plan, and the last we saw, they were starting a new life together.
Spoilers ahead for Doomsday Clock #11, on sale today.
In the first issue of Doomsday Clock, while using Dreiberg’s old Owl-cave as a base of operations, Ozymandias claimed that the re-christened Hollises had no interest in joining his crusade to another world. That may well be true — but it’s equally likely that the truth is he never even approached them. In this week’s issue, fans got treated to a lot more information about the nature of Ozymandias’s plans for the DC Universe — none of it good — and one of the things we learned is that the Marionette and the Mime’s child, which has been dangled in front of them like a carrot in exchange for their participation in the plan, was never going to be returned to them.
(To be fair, they seem to have declared war on Gotham’s underworld, rather than actually participating in the plan.)
The only reason the Marionette and the Mime joined Ozymandias at all is that he claimed he could reunite them with their child, with whom the Marionette was pregnant when they were caught and sent to prison by Doctor Manhattan. Earlier in the series, it was revealed that Manhattan had spared her life, an inversion of a critical moment from earlier in his career when he did not stop The Comedian from murdering a pregnant woman in the final days of the Vietnam War. Instead of having grown as a being, though, the suggestion here is that Manhattan only spared the child for a more calculated reason.
“Jon revealed to me, over the years, that he had seen Marionette’s child’s future…this boy would be adopted by a couple and he would bring incredible joy to a woman who had been very important to Jon at one point in his life,” Ozymandias explains at one point in the issue. The thought serves as a caption on an image ofa clearly-older Dan and Laurie with a young boy.
The idea of Laurie (or more broadly, human love) serving as Jon’s tether to humanity is an important theme in the issue; it as revealed that Lex Luthor is dimly aware of a threat from another world because the photograph of Jon Osterman and Janey Slater that Doctor Manhattan had spent so much time with on Mars had somehow been duplicated dozens of times and left behind like a breadcrumb trail throughout the history of the DC Universe.
In any event, the big takeaway that you can glean from all of this is that Dan and Laurie are not only still alive, but that they have adopted a child who was originally the biological son of The Marionette and the Mime, and are in all likelihood living happily in superhero retirement.
Unless, of course, Ozymandias is lying, or mudered them, or any of the other things that you might expect Ozymandias to be capable of…!
Doomsday Clock #11 is in stores today. You can get it at your local comic shop or download it wherever digital comics are sold.
