The countdown to the November release date of Doomsday Clock #1 has officially started. DC Comics has announced that the event’s creative team of writer/DC Entertainment Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns and artist Gary Frank will take the main stage at this year’s New York Comic Con for a Doomsday Clock panel on Friday, Oct. 6 at 6 p.m. Eastern time.
In addition to the panel announcement, DC has also released a new promotional image for the series, featuring a rather ominous look at Batman reading Rorschach’s iconic journal. Fans of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen will recognize both the journal and the quote in the frame of the image as major components of the original story. For 12 issues, Rorschach’s obsessively kept journal entries worked as a narrative road map, connecting readers to Rorschach’s detective work as he struggled to uncover the tangled web of Ozymandias’s conspiracy.
Before his death, Rorschach sent his journal to The New Frontiersman, a newspaper publication he’d hoped would read and publish his findings. Unfortunately, it was implied that the police struggled with Rorschach’s cryptic, frantic writing and terrible handwriting, so whether or not anyone within the Watchmen universe proper actually made heads or tails of his work is up for debate.
Luckily, it looks like Rorschach’s writing might actually have a second shot at relevancy now that the journal has fallen into Batman’s hands. Of course, now there’s the troubling matter of just how Bruce came to possess it and just what Rorschach’s bleak observations about his world and Ozymandias’s plot could possibly mean for the DC Universe at large.
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Fans will have their first shot at answers for these burning questions by attending New York Comic Con’s Doomsday Clock panel, where they’ll also be able to scope out the first pages of issue #1 more than a month before release, and have a shot to bring home an unspecified, limited edition Doomsday Clock promotional item, which DC has stated will be only available at the panel.
This is the second recently released Doomsday Clock image to heavily feature the character of Rorschach. Last week, Johns revealed a gif representing the lenticular variant cover for Doomsday Clock #1, which featured Rorschach’s face shifting to the logos of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman; further underscoring the impending collision between the world of Watchmen and the DC Universe.
Doomsday Clock #1 is scheduled for release on Nov. 22.