Doomsday Clock #4 review: A long but necessary detour

The latest issue of Doomsday Clock spends a lot of time with one particular character, but it feels like it needed to in order for the story to have the stakes it needs.

You could be forgiven if you forgot exactly when Doomsday Clock #4 was coming out. That’s not a snarky, entitled fan comment but rather a simple statement that the high profile series went bi-monthly instead of following its intended monthly schedule, and there are now twice as many weeks between issues.

Normally, that might force an annoying re-read of the prior issue just to pick up the plot threads, but this series is so dense that it was a good idea to do just that even when it was monthly. As it turns out, it doesn’t matter that much anyway, because “Walk on Water” is almost entirely devoted to the new Rorschach, Reggie. it’s an origin story in the purest sense, taking us all the way back to Reggie’s childhood and walking along with him on the path to becoming the successor to the Watchmen world’s most unbalanced costumed crime-fighter.

If you’re guessing it would take a lot for someone to follow in Rorschach’s footsteps, you hit it right on the head. In the tradition of most excellent comic book origins, a lot of factors have to come together for it to happen, but by the time Reggie first ends up putting on the famous ink blot mask, it all makes sense.

Geoff Johns and Gary Frank also introduce an important supporting character, who, by virtue of the needs of the story, probably won’t be heard from again for the remainder of Doomsday Clock. This issue’s supplemental material also deals with this character, and while this writer has been enjoying all the Watchmen-style extras so far, there’s no doubt there’s nothing subtle about them.

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Since Rorschach is the point of view character for most of the series, an issue like this was almost required in order to understand not just how he came to be — and his motivations are tied to the events of Watchmen in the most direct manner imaginable — but why he would accompany Adrian Veidt on his insane quest to search for Doctor Manhattan in a whole other universe. It’s rewarding in its own right, for the blanks it fills in and because Frank gives us the coolest visual tease of Jon so far.

The problem is that there were a lot of plot threads left dangling at the end of issue #3 that aren’t picked up at all here because we’re spending so much time with Reggie. From that perspective, the bi-monthly schedule is doing this part of the story no favors, because it’s going to be four months from the time those story seeds were planted until we see them take root in issue #5, due out in May.

There’s also a legit question about how this Rorschach-heavy side trip will read even when Doomsday Clock is inevitably collected as one long story. It might drag the whole thing to a halt, or it could work better when it’s just 30 pages of a tale that’s hundreds of pages long. Unfortunately, unlike Doctor Manhattan, we can only trudge through time in linear fashion, and thus we’re going to have to simply enjoy the answers we’re served up here and wait until later this spring to see what’s going on with everyone else.

Oh, and it’s pretty likely that characters from the main DC universe will show up for more than a page or two at a time, too. Eventually.