10 Reasons To Look Forward To Doomsday Clock
7. A Great Exploration Of How Comics Changed
In the early eighties, comics were hitting a pretty tough time.
The initial audience was getting older, and the comics still had a reputation as being content for children, so numbers fell and the comics were not being considered as a true art form.
Then, along came a series of books that changed that, including Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns and of course, Watchmen.
These books heralded a darker, more adult form of storytelling, and a grim and gritty semi-realism (after all, they can only be so 'realistic' when they're dealing with geriatrics swinging between buildings and big, blue, naked quantum god-men). It made older audiences more comfortable to read comics again, made critics sit up and take notice of the medium more and started the admittedly long and still in many respects ongoing road for the medium to gain respect.
With sales of these titles going upward, and later with the Watchmen collection remaining in print and continually selling well, many books across the medium began adopting the tone and direction of these kinds of titles.
This led to the grim 'n' gritty comics of the late eighties and nineties, and really, a style that has even persisted to this day.
But again, audiences are changing. As access to comics gets easier and easier thanks to digital technologies, and with the popularity of comic adaptations and superhero movies, audiences are becoming more diverse and younger again. But perhaps more than that, with the real world news all around us making the world feel darker and more oppressive, many are turning to comics looking for stories that are more hopeful and colourful again.
Doomsday Clock presents a perfect chance to look at this whole dynamic metatextually within the context of the story. Already, the story of Rebirth has suggested that the manipulations of Doctor Manhattan (or maybe someone else) has led to a generally darker tone in the DC Universe, with many connections, elements of happiness or legacy, removed or altered. But the universe seems to be fighting back against this, so Doomsday Clock may well include the idea of DC's darker elements fighting with its lighter ones.