The Cat Is Dead: Dr. Manhattan #4 Review

Editor’s Note: The spoilers… the spoilers are taking me to pieces.

The final issue of Dr. Manhattan, written by J. Michael Straczynski with art by Adam Hughes, extends what is arguably the greatest comic book story of all time, provides additional perspective on one of that classic story’s great mysteries, and it does it with bold storytelling choices, both in the writing and in the art, that play on one of Watchmen‘s original themes of symmetry.

Or, to put it in plainer terms: Dr. Manhattan #4 is fucking awful.

Straczynski uses the framework of Before Watchmen – a book that was partially sold to a seriously skeptical public as a prequel that would not attempt to modify or circumvent Alan Moore’s original Watchmen – to completely blow away one of the key ambiguities of Dr. Manhattan’s story from the original. Further, halfway through the issue, he switches point of view to that of Ozymandias to show his motivations at a key point leading into Watchmen, but not only are they motivations that really have no real bearing on how that story turns out, but they are presented using a visual gimmick that makes the story difficult to read for no reason beyond either Straczynski, or Hughes, or both, making the decision to say, “Lookit me! I’m dicking around with the established language of comic storytelling! Why? Because fuck you, that’s why!”

There are baseball analogies that could be applied to Dr. Manhattan. “Swinging for the fences” is one, although it’s not really accurate. I’m thinking more along the lines of “Running onto the field and mooning the pressbox,” because Straczynski and Hughes are playing around in areas where they shouldn’t really be in the first place, and they’re sure as hell not playing the game by any of the rules that anyone wants them to.

Plus, there’s one panel where Hughes all but rubs our faces in Doc’s dangling blue wang.

It’s really not that good, guys.

Dr. Manhattan has returned to the past and made sure that Jonathan Osterman entered the intrinsic field subtractor in order to restore the present and future into one that doesn’t include complete nuclear armageddon and the destruction of life on Earth. He returns to his present and meets with Ozymandias, telling him of what he has been through and that he still sees a future with a hazy period he cannot account for, where he kills some unknown person in the snow. Ozymandias takes this opportunity to lie to Manhattan and bring him into a scheme to provide free energy to the world, which Ozymandias uses as the impetus for his Alien Invader plan from the original Watchmen. We then see an accounting of the human cost of Ozymandias’s plan, and are brought to the final exchange between Manhattan and Ozymandias from Watchmen, where Manhattan enigmatically says, “Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends,” and disappears without another word… and then we see what happens next.

It is difficult to be objective about what is actually happening in this book, because Straczynski dares to do something that no one else has done in Before Watchmen, and which was for me personally a great fear I had about the project: it flat out shows us what Straczynski thinks happens after Manhattan’s exit from Watchmen (I say it’s what he thinks happen because I have long since decided that the entirety of Before Watchmen is naught but high-toned fanfic). Straczynski makes the decision to try to extend the original Watchmen with this revelation, and worst of all, it’s not even that imaginative. It takes some of Manhattan’s last words and simply depicts them as: yup, that’s what he does.

So the sequence really doesn’t add anything to Manhattan’s story except a few more pages, and worse, it’s written showing Manhattan in an manner inconsistent with the manner in which he is written even earlier in the issue. We spend the issue with Manhattan’s ability to see the entirety of the future (with the exception of immediately following the tachyon emission of the Alien Invasion plan), and yet suddenly, he’s just waiting around “to see what this new box reveals.” I got news for you: it doesn’t reveal anything. It takes something meant to be enigmatic from the original story, simply translates it literally, and just shows us that. It is worse than presumptuous, it is simply unnecessary.

The key conflict of the story comes out of Manhattan’s revelation to Ozymandias that he sees some kind of destruction coming and is unable to decide how to proceed, and how Ozymandias uses that indecision to trick Manhattan into working on a free energy scheme while Ozymandias secretly puts together his Alien Invasion plan. Which is fine, except the fact that Manhattan is working with Ozymandias on this plan has exactly fuckall to do with what winds up happening in Watchmen. First of all, that whole “Manhattan working with Ozymandias on free energy” thing? That isn’t in the original comic book; that plot point that was introduced in the movie. So Ozy’s internal dialogue about how Manhattan can see atoms but is susceptible to a simple lie doesn’t even mean anything, because there is no reason for the lie. Ozymandias’s plan had to do with psychic power and genetic engineering, no matter how many times you’ve watched Zack Snyder’s movie. Sure, the original Watchmen indicates that Ozymandias’s plan requires teleportation, but the only tie with Manhattan mentioned is that Manhattan proved that teleportation was possible; the book doesn’t even imply that Manhattan worked with Ozymandias on teleportation technology. So what we have here is a book where the key conflict just doesn’t matter. All Ozymandias needed was for Manhattan to stay the hell away from his island, and he could have done it with a simple, “Gee, Jon… just stay the course, big guy. Well, maybe consider some pants, but otherwise…”

And then there is the central gimmick of the issue: when Straczynski shifts the story’s point of view from Manhattan to Ozymandias, he has Hughes start drawing upside down. So for the entire stretch where we are in Ozy’s head, we have to turn the book over and read it backwards, from right to left. Which, I guess, is a reasonable physical demonstration of the “symmetry” conceit that was used repeatedly in the original Watchmen, but not only is it a huge departure from that book’s extremely simple, nine-panel layouts to something much more difficult to decode, it is a lift from a similar gimmick used in Scott Snyder’s and Greg Capullo’s Batman more than a year ago. And, unlike that issue of Batman where the change of page layout was used to further the imagery of Batman losing his grip on reality, here is just seems to exist to screech, “symmetry!”, where the theme of symmetry isn’t even apparent in the issue. So all we are left with is a sequence where we have to invert the book, figure out how to read it, and then invert it again when Straczynski and Hughes are done fucking around. It adds nothing but confusion and irritation to the issue, which is something that it can little afford.

Hughes’s art is much as it has been throughout the entire series: he draws very realistic figures and highly expressive faces, and the man seems incapable of drawing a woman who is anything but beautiful. He captures the minimalist, almost smoothly blank features of Manhattan well, doing justice to Dave Gibbons’s original depictions, and he gets minute details, like Ozymandias’s single panel eyelid twitch, down very well. There is, however, one panel on story page five, where the composition, showing Manhattan at giant size from Ozy’s point of view, puts the focus smack dab on Manhattan’s blue tubesteak and man-yams, all in far more detail than Gibbons ever considered, and that’s a little distracting. I’d address Hughes’s panel layouts, but I think once you take into account that almost half of them are upside down, it’s pretty much a moot point. In general, this is good looking stuff, but there are a few fundamental flaws – not all of them Hughes’s fault – that work against it.

Dr. Manhattan #4 is simply a bad comic book. It presumes to add to Alan Moore’s original conclusion, and yet it adds nothing really of any value beyond sucking out ambiguity and mystery. It hinges on a central conflict that has no basis in the original comic book, and not only carries no weight because of it, but makes me suspect that Straczynski didn’t even bother to re-read Watchmen before embarking on this series, relying instead on the movie. And it relies on a gimmick that is meant to be profound and referencing of one of the original’s main themes and images, but instead just makes the book hard to read and irritating. The creators are trying to create something worthy of the original Watchmen, but they just tried too damn hard and whiffed it completely. Rather than adding to Watchmen, it all but fails it. Skip this one.