"Doomsday Clock" by Geoff Johns, Gary Frank and Brad Anderson (2017-2019)

You've read Watchmen, right?  I'm assuming everyone has.  If you haven't read Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's original series you're either very young or not that interested in comics.  I'm assuming I can skip over Watchmen for the moment.  If you haven't read it you really should, and if you're pressed for time you can always watch the movie.

After the events of Watchmen Dr. Manhattan leaves his universe behind and enters the universe populated by the DC heroes we know and (sometimes) love.  Once there he starts manipulating past events for unknown reasons.  Ozymandias, his friend and sometime nemesis, follows him to the same universe, and of course Ozymandias always has a plan, and of course this plan involves the fate of mankind.

What follows after that point is really too convoluted for me to describe, and even after Dr. Manhattan and Ozymandias explain their individual plans at the end of the series I was left scratching my head, wondering if it all made sense.  I'm still not sure if it does.  Parts of these plans seemed very arbitrary.

The real question is whether Doomsday Clock is as good as Watchman.  To this question I can only answer no, not in the slightest.  Geoff Johns is a good writer, but he can't hold a candle to Alan Moore in his prime.  Gary Frank is also a good artist, but he seems to ape what Dave Gibbons did a little too closely, distilling Gibbon's approach to art into a nine panel layout that continually reminds you of how much better Gibbons was at telling a story through images.

Is Doomsday Clock terrible?  No, I don't think so, but as DC crossover events go it's still not as good as other series such as Crisis On Infinite Earths, Infinite Crisis or even Justice League One Million.  If forced to qualify Doomsday Clock I would say that it's just OK.  Not great, not that good, just OK.

And at the end of the day did we really need the Watchmen characters in the same story as Superman and Batman?  I don't think we did.  Leaving them alone would have made them more special, while incorporating them into something like Doomsday Clock goes a long way toward diminishing their importance.

Besides that, I think a series in which the Watchmen characters come up against the Charlton characters that inspired them would have been more fun.  Let's leave Superman and Batman out of it for a moment, and have Captain Atom take on Dr. Manhattan, Peacemaker take on the Comedian, Blue Beetle take on Night Owl...

...or at least put them in a room together... with Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.. who are trying to write an outline for a comic book idea called "Watchmen..."

That would have truly been more meta for your money

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"Flashpoint" by Geoff Johns and Andy Kubert (2011)

Oh no!  Barry Allen wakes up to find he's in an alternate timeline!  And double oh no!  He's lost his powers!  And triple oh no!  Aquaman and Wonder Woman are fighting some barely-explained war against each other!  And quadruple oh no!  This timeline is... EVIL!

At least it all works out in the end, thanks to - you guessed it - a little time travel on the Flash's part.  GO FLASH!  Thanks for making our timeline great again!

The story is fairly well thought out, even if the Atlantis/Themyscira subplot isn't explained to anyone's satisfaction.  Superman acts as a kind of deus ex machina, and the story features a halfway interesting version of Captain Marvel/Captain Thunder/Shazam.

The art?  It's alright, but kind of pose-y.  Muscular dudes doing muscular things.  Hot superheroines with gigantic knockers.  You know the drill...

I realize that I'm coming at this one kind of late, but if it makes any difference I did see the animated version a lot closer to 2011.  Having now read the comic, I'd have to say that the animated version tells the same story much better.  If and when they ever manage to make that cinematic version of Flashpoint, they could do a lot worse than emulate the animated version.

"The Contest of the Century" by Geoff Dyer (2014)

"One of the jobs of a military is to plan for worst-case scenarios.  The U.S. military conducts regular war games to test how conflicts with potential adversaries such as China might play out, and in recent years these have delivered some disturbing conclusions."

In "The Contest of the Century," author Geoff Dyer discusses the fast-changing nature of U.S.-China relations.  From his vantage point as a foreign correspondent living in China, he outlines the development of crucial disparities between the two nations, and offers solutions for possible difficulties that may arise between them.  At almost 300 pages, it's far from an exhaustive treatise on the subject, but it does raise some interesting points.

The first half of the book outlines the military situation.  China finds itself in a headlong race to catch up with the U.S. navy, for a multitude of military and political reasons.  Much of this section describes China's maritime claims and sphere of influence, and also how the U.S. might both adapt itself to China's military posture and continue to be a player in Asian politics.

The third fourth of this book is an exploration into China's political situation.  China's view of history is discussed, as is its inferiority complex with regard to certain Western political achievements.  China is a country that is desperately trying to expand its influence in other parts of the world, yet its non-interventionist stance is often at odds with this attempt.  Recent conflicts in places such as Sudan, says the author, have only made this conflict of interest more obvious.

The last fourth of this book takes on the heady subject of economics.    Globalization and China's attempt to push the renminbi as a global currency are outlined, as are the origins of U.S. dominance within international finance.

"The Contest of the Century" is a well-written, thoughtful book with a couple of huge holes in it.  The first of these holes is about the size of Taiwan, while the second is about the size of Xinjiang.  I fail to understand how one can attempt to map out the complex relationship between China and the United States in the absence of these two territories.  Perhaps the author (or his editor) thought that including such material would have confused its intended audience.  Yet omitting this discussion begs a number of very important questions.

I also have the feeling that the author's Chinese isn't quite up to the task he sets himself.  On occasion his translations of common Chinese phrases is somewhat bizarre ("辛苦了!" becomes "Thanks for your suffering!"), and there are no Chinese-language works sited in the bibliography.  This might seem a minor point, but I think the author's command of Mandarin is crucial to his understanding of China.  An insufficient understanding of Chinese points to a filtering of the subject matter through Western sources, Western people, and the English language itself, and this may be the very same kind of bias which the author claims he is trying to avoid.

Overall I would recommend this book with a few reservations.  It's an easy, often insightful read, but those who've read other, recent books on the subject may want to give it a miss.