DC Marketing Watchmen Sequel Doomsday Clock With Pancakes

In DC Rebirth, the first comic of the relaunch in 2016, showed Batman finding the Comedian’s button. This led to a Flash/Batman story arc involving the Flashpoint parallel earth, in which the Reverse Flash tried to destroy the Flash’s life again, only to be fried by none other than Dr Manhattan. Some fans loved the twist, but some hated it. Either way, Alan Moore probably hates DC if he didn’t already, and now they’ve gone a step further.

Having announced the Watchmen sequel Doomsday Clock, a full-blown twelve-issue crossover between the mainline DC continuity and Watchmen launching in November, DC has been slowly teasing the first issue of the story bit-by-bit. They’ve been piling small bits of marketing on top of each other, and mimicking the ads, style and covers of the original.

The newest step in the marketing campaign is probably the most confusing. Pancakes. Pancakes everywhere. They’ve sent several embargoed reviewers the first of twelve issues, along with doomsday clock pancake mix and maple syrup. They’ve also sent it to Rob Liefield, a Marvel artist known for his notoriously large Captain America, and also to Kevin Smith, comic writer and actor known most famously for his role in Jay and Silent Bob. The box had a picture of a plate with pancakes on it, the syrup on it looking ominously like Rorschach’s mask pattern and had the Doomsday clock logo looming in the background.

However, it doesn’t stop there. On November 15, exactly one week before the official release date of the first issue, DC posted a video onto their YouTube channel entitled “Pancakes”. It’s a very short video at just under forty seconds, it was probably filmed on a smartphone, and for the most part just shows a plate of pancakes, before overlaying the name, creative team and release date of the first issue in the last few seconds.

Now, this would be an absurd marketing campaign for almost any product, except for the fact that it’s highly memorable. However, DC hasn’t pulled any marketing stunt like this since 1994, before the Crisis-level event Zero Hour which rebooted the DC universe, where they had videos of the creators explaining the event interrupted by Hal Jordan/Parallax every now and then. Combine this with the fact that the World’s End story arc of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman took place parallel to Zero Hour, and the appearance Dream of the Endless, a prominent character in The Sandman, in Dark Nights: Metal, and it’s not hard for it to feel like DC is trying to do what they did back then again.

The point of Zero Hour was to clear up continuity problems and fix alternate/broken timelines, which DC currently has several of. After their last event, Convergence, there were 6 timelines co-existing to some extent: New 52, Pre-Flashpoint, Pre-Zero Hour, Pre-Tangent and Pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths. Now, the Watchmen timeline is coming into the mix, so it’s very possible that DC is going to try to integrate all of them into one timeline. It’s hard to see how they could do this with the story that seems to be planned, but if Dark Nights: Metal is any indicator, it’s that anything can happen right now in the DC continuity.