‘Doomsday Clock’ Features ‘Death Of Superman’ Easter Egg

The Death of Superman was a momentous moment in the history of comic books, even if it would ultimately be undone a year later with his return – it signified that not even DC’s most iconic characters were safe from being killed off, and with it came a clear message that the Dark Age of Comic Books was in full swing. Now, the demise of Superman has been paid homage to in the form of the upcoming Doomsday Clock storyline from Geoff Johns and Gary Frank, but with a Watchmen-based twist… (Unmarked spoilers ahead!)

Superman Volume 2, Issue #75, the comic in which Superman died killing Doomsday, was released on November 22, 1992… Or November 23, 1992, if you lived in the United Kingdom. This is alluded to cleverly in the opening panel for Doomsday Clock (the first few pages of which you can read on the DC Comics website) as in the Watchmen universe, this was the day the world discovered that Ozymandias killed millions of people to artificially engineer world peace.

Perhaps in another interesting parallel to the Death of Superman – which represented the paragon of comic book superheroes being killed by a purely malicious force, signifying that dark days were ahead for comics – is that we see the Rebirth of Rorschach. Rorschach served as the template for which many Dark Age anti-heroes were built off of, as he was a sociopathic, borderline-psychotic individual with warped views on morality. It seems as though, with the doom of the Watchmen universe all but certain, the return of a nihilistic superhero is meant to serve as a harbinger for the battle to come.

Doomsday Clock starts ticking on November 22, 2017.

Source: DC Comics