Last week, I started a new series taking a look at the latest, hottest comics that I haven’t been reading much of in recent years. This is my attempt to dive into the deep end and see how much I can get caught up on, and how much has lost me for good.

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Taking a look at last week’s release list, I immediately knew which book I needed to read next: “Doomsday Clock” #10 by Geoff Johns, Gary Frank, Brent Anderson, and Rob Leigh.

Sure, it’s only a limited series of 12 issues, but it feels like it’s been coming out for years now. Given all its delays, it probably has been.

It’s also the book most mired in recent DC continuity, of which I know precious little. Maybe, I thought, it would be fun to throw myself right into the jaws of the scariest big cat and start there.

So let’s get to it!

“Doomsday Clock” #10

(Or, “What the Heck Is Going On With the DC Universe, Anyway?”)

The art is certainly nice.

I’ve always enjoyed Gary Frank’s work, going back to his run on “The Incredible Hulk” with Peter David, and then onto “Gen13” with John Arcudi and his own “Kin” series. (Even though the lettering in that series was a failed experiment of translucent balloons…) I also remember reading “Supergirl” (again with Peter David) and J. Michael Straczynski’s finest comics work, “Midnight Nation.”

Frank’s art style, at the foundational level, is still instantly recognizable in “Doomsday Clock.” It’s just mutated into a more baroque style. There’s more careful attention being paid to details and the linework. There’s a lot of crosshatching and careful texturing being done with pen and ink here. He’s inking himself, too, so he has nobody to “blame” but himself.

The Lateness

I don’t know all the details about what’s going on behind the scenes. It’s often very easy and simple to blame late books on an ornate artist. Surely, both penciling and inking these nine panel pages would make a monthly book an impossibility that somebody at DC Scheduling should have known better….

But we don’t know all that’s going on with the ever-shifting jigsaw puzzle of the DC Universe and the ever-amorphous shape it’s taken on. Does anyone at DC really know what’s going on? And if they do, are they right and will it stick this time?

The DCU Disaster

The DC Universe is a disaster, and one not even its most ardent fans can explain right now. “Doomsday Clock” is another piece of that explosion of ideas, concepts, and rewrites to the fabric of the DC Universe. Any attempt to make sense of it would be a fool’s errand.

This book somehow fits into that. It’s doing a whole “Watchmen” style riff to explain how Doc Manhattan is, I think, behind a lot of the changes to the DC Universe in recent years. I’d be all for that, if I thought it would stick.

In other words, all the failed starts and restarts the creators at DC have done over the years, it’s OK. Now, it’s something they “meant” to do. This book explains it all.

You see, Doc Manhattan has been fundamentally twisting the timelines up. He almost can’t help himself. So if you want to complain that things aren’t consistent or don’t make sense or seem to change willy-nilly, you’d be right. It’s all Doc Manhattan’s fault.

On a meta level, Geoff Johns is blaming every problem DC Publishing might have had going all the way back to the New 52, basically, on the naked blue guy from Alan Moore and David Gibbons’ maxi-series from 1986.

It’s both brilliant and slightly cutting, to read it in that style.

This is the patch for the fix for the Band-Aid (TM) for the DC Universe.

It all makes sense now, doesn’t it?

I hope it does for you, dedicated DC reader, because I’m mostly clueless. I skipped all those reboots and rethoughts and second chances. I’m OK with just hand-waving it all away and getting it right.

But are things “right” now? Will this fix a thing?

Borrowing the Style of “Watchmen”

Geoff Johns and crew do a good job in appropriating the Watchmen style for the series. There’s even a fiction-within-the-fiction element. This time, it’s a noir movie being filmed instead of a pulp novel about pirates. You even get some text matter in the back that most people won’t bother reading.

There’s the nine panel grid, and Rob Leigh’s lettering must be using Comicraft’s Dave Gibbons font, complete with the appropriate Doctor Manhattan lettering style with the blue backgrounds and double-walled caption boxes.

I’m not a hard core purist anymore. The damage is long done by DC when it comes to reviving Watchmen and integrating it into their main superhero universe. That ship has sailed, so there’s no point in getting mad over it anymore.

It’s interesting to see these creators work in that style in a series so very very very very very different from the original. “Watchmen” could be challenging to read at times, but it ultimately made a lot of sense, and delivered its ideas in very interesting ways from a craft point of view.

“Doomsday Clock” is getting all those superficial elements right. I have no idea what’s going on with this story, but perhaps it’s not fair of me to judge it. I’m dropping in 10 issues into a, what, 12 issue run? I don’t know all the ins and outs of the current DC Universe or any of the DC Universes from the last ten years. The whole thing is a rotten mess to me.

This book clears none of that up, but I appreciate the thought that’s going into it. I like it visually very much. I hope it achieves its aims and makes a positive change on the status quo of DC once and for all, for the sake of the DCU fans who’ve been left to tread water, hoping their favorite characters will make it out alive eventually.

I doubt that last part will happen. Even if “Doomsday Clock” does “fix” everything, something will slip through, or everyone else will just ignore it and go on their merry way.

C’est la vie, DC.

But it’s a very pretty book, I’ll give it that.

Though I could have done without Doctor Manhattan helping Martha create a child like this…