Doomsday Clock #1: 10 Things Everyone Totally Missed

4. Marionette And Mime

Doomsday Clock Rorschach
DC Comics

Marionette and Mime are brand new characters to the world of the Watchmen, but they do fit in the convention of Watchmen character creation.

If we look at how the original characters were created as homages to Charlton Comics characters, a company DC had purchased and began incorporating into the DC Universe at the time, we can see the correlation: Nite-Owl is Blue Beetle, Doctor Manhattan is Captain Atom, etc.

Marionette and Mime follow this, clearly inspired by Charlton Comics villainous couple, Punch and Jewelee (themselves modelled on puppets Punch and Judy).

It's interesting, because in many ways this villainous coupling have actually already been inspiration to DC. After all, they are also pretty reminiscent of Joker and Harley Quinn in some ways, and the comic if anything highlights this when Mime gets a blood covered grin.

Contributor
Contributor

Joe is a comic book writer out of South Wales, writing LGBTQ+ superhero series The Pride and also co-writing Welsh horror comedy series, Stiffs. He's also a comics reporter and reviewer who works with Bleeding Cool and now WhatCulture too. So he makes comics and talks about comics, but there's more to him too. Somewhere.