Doomsday Clock #5 Review

See The Light

Written By: Geoff Johns

Art By: Gary Frank

Cover Price: $4.99

Release Date: May 30, 2018

Holy cow, the Doomsday Clock has found us worthy enough to come out and grace us with its presence....... Yeah, that's a little dramatic, but for how much I was looking forward to this title, the delays have seriously gotten the wind out of my sails on this event.  That's not to say that I don't enjoy the majority of the issues that come out, it's just that I'm not looking forward to it the way I was and when it actually does come out........ it shocks the hell out of me.  In our previous issue, we saw Saturn Girl use her telepathy to get all caught up on what went down in the Watchmen Universe and used this knowledge to ascertain that the new Rorschach is someone that she can trust in completing whatever mission she still has and also helping Rorschach find Dr. Manhattan.  Who knows though, maybe their individual missions could turn out to be one and the same.  Let's jump into this issue and see what Geoff Johns has in store for us.  Let's check it out.

With this issue of Doomsday Clock our characters from the DC Universe and the Watchmen Universe converge towards their central roles in this story.  The only problem is, we're centralized on the idea of the Supermen Theory that's been in the background of this book and the hunt for Dr. Manhattan seems to be on the back burner.  Yeah, that's not exactly a problem, but when you have to wait so long in between issues, you tend to want a lot of boom for your buck.  

We've got Batman and Ozymandias teaming up, while Rorschach and Saturn Girl make their way towards an unsuspecting Johnny Thunder, who has a mission all his own......... Which while it's cool to see Johnny Thunder getting some actual page play since he's been promised to be a big deal, but we've barely seen him in the past two years, the way he get him here feels a little bit too out of nowhere and forced to get the character out and about.  It's still pretty cool though even with the forced nature though.

All in all, we get another issue that looks amazing, but as for our story and the characters involved, things feel kind of out of place right now, where even though we have characters we want to see interacting, there doesn't seem to be that much of a focus for what this series is.  Not only do we have the mystery of where Dr. Manhattan is, but it seems that the person behind who started the whole Supermen Theory controversy is the bigger mystery that will take up a lot of page space going forward and unless our two main themes come together to create a big reveal, I think that we're going to be disappointed with one or both of these aspects because there's a lot more going on in this book this book than I originally thought and we may just have a case where the creators are trying to jam two years of mystery from the beginning of Rebirth into this one twelve issue series and it may not be enough time for everything to work out perfectly.  I'm still a fan of this series though and look forward to reading what comes next, I just hope that we can really get a focus on what's important here going forward.

Bits and Pieces:

While I do continue to enjoy this series it feels like our main focus may be a bit splintered in what's actually important here.  We have a lot of characters looking for different things and while I'm interested in most of them, I just hope that our creators aren't stretching their ideas too far into these subplots.  I love the art in this issue, but these delays are killing my hype for what should be every DC readers big book.

7.8/10