‘Watchmen’ Has its Biggest Question Answered in ‘Doomsday Clock’ #1

Doomsday Clock, Geoff Johns’s forthcoming series that pits Superman against Doctor Manhattan, is a direct sequel to Watchmen.

The question of how Doomsday Clock would tie to Watchmen, and whether it would answer questions that lingered at the end of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s classic series, has been a quiet rumble among fans since the first hints at the series came last May in DC Universe: Rebirth, but the answers came tonight when DC released the first six pages of Doomsday Clock in black and white following a panel in support of the series at New York Comic Con.

Spoilers ahead for Doomsday Clock.

The ashcan edition handed out at the panel, from which the black and white pages were taken, starts out with an establishing caption that sets the story in November of 1992, years after the end of Watchmen in October 1985.

At the end of Watchmen, Rorschach’s journal — a framing device through which the character narrated the story in the series — was delivered to a right-wing conspiracy newspaper. Picked up by someone hungry for content at the end of the series, the question of whether Rorschach’s journal and its world-changing revelations would be published and/or taken seriously.

The answer, as it turns out, is yes.

In the preview pages for Doomsday Clock #1, fans see a newspaper headline decrying “the big lie,” a reference to the fact that Ozymandias’s plan to orchestrate world peace by manipulating humanity into believing they were being attacked by aliens. Ozymandias is the most wanted man in the world, and crowds of angry people are flooding into Veidt’s corporate headquarters.

That Rorschach appears in the book raises some interesting questions — mostly how he managed to survive being atomized by Doctor Manhattan — in light of the revelation that this story takes place after Watchmen.