DC Comics’s current President and Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns is very familiar with large crossover events. After writing Flashpoint, Infinite Crisis, Blackest Night, and Forever Evil, however, he says the DC’s Doomsday Clock is not your average crossover.
Johns explains that the typical crossover is often about large fight scenes, and that was not what they were going for with Doomsday Clock. Johns emphasizes that the whole series is character driven, saying,
“It’s all about the characters. We’re spending time with the characters, and we’re doing moments and interactions that I hope are unexpected. I think the version that Gary Frank and I weren’t interested in telling was a DC vs. Marvel-type crossover. We were not interested in anything like that. It’s not like somebody said, ‘Hey, Geoff, Gary [Frank] — do Watchmen characters meet DC characters.’ That never came from anybody. When we came up with this story, when I pitched this story to everybody, we made it clear right then what we wanted to do, and everybody was psyched for it. I think the interactions between the characters — they’re on the page, so people can see what we’ve done and what we’re doing and the tone of it.”
Doomsday Clock acts as a sequel to Watchmen, a very influential and acclaimed 1986 miniseries by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, while also serving the role of explaining a lot of mysterious changes made to the DC Universe since the start of Rebirth. Johns continues explaining what differentiates Doomsday Clock by saying,
“Most crossovers and big event stories, they get big. They go outside,” Johns said. “They get universe-spanning in such a macro way, it becomes impersonal, I think. What we want to tell is a very, very personal story, and every single facet of this series that we’re doing is a personal story. It’s not a crossover. It doesn’t have one-shot books and miniseries spinning out of it. It’s not about alternate versions of other characters. It’s not about making the universes bigger and bigger and bigger. It’s about people.”
Doomsday Clock #2 is written by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank and is on sale now.
