From the first pages – even from the cover – Kingdom Come made DC readers feel as
though they had entered another world, the world where their comic book heroes
are real. Alex Ross' art, which is painted rather than drawn, is as unlike the
halftone color printing of the past as reality is unlike a dream. With respect
to the visuals alone, Kingdom Come,
like Ross' Marvels before it, is
categorically transcendent, and automatically a classic.
The story itself, by Ross and Mark Waid, aspires towards
greatness. Its scope is grand, the passions run hot, the new characters are
wonderfully creative, and the world of Kingdom
Come is more complex than most of what had come before it.
This starting point for the story closely resembles the
premises of a trio of stories from the previous decade – The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen,
and the unpublished Twilight of the
Superheroes. With those stories in mind, many have observed that Kingdom Come is not entirely original,
and that is hard to deny. Nor do the creators try to deny it – a copy of the
book-within-a-book Under the Hood by Watchmen's Hollis Mason appears on Kingdom Come's eighth page, and we soon
learn that KC's Batman has become the
field general commanding an army of younger crime-fighters much as he was at
the end of DKR. Kingdom Come acknowledged those creative debts, but it makes them
its starting point, not its conclusion. It may more closely resemble TOTS, though those commonalities go only
so far.
Though it opens with minor and almost pointedly mortal
characters (Norman McCay, an old man, and Wesley Dodds, the now-dying Golden
Age Sandman), it soon comes alive with colorful – and frequently wonderfully
original – super beings. The realistic art drives home a dark theme, that the
brief era of superheroes such as we have known, eventually gave way to a kind
of super-chaos as a tiny oligarchy of super-powered beings turn the whole world
into a mere arena for their non-stop brawling. There are no longer heroes or
villains, justice or injustice – there are simply battles unleashing tremendous
forces, and the non-super-powered majority cower and can only hope to avoid
becoming collateral damage.
KC, like DKR, adopts the opening gambit of
Homer's Iliad – a great hero is
physically able, but unwilling to fight, until something goads him back into
the battle. KC's Superman has, in the
story's past, lost a non-physical showdown with a violent superhero named
Magog. In a tragic turn of events, the Joker has killed Lois Lane. Magog
executes the Joker on the street, violating the moral code the superheroes had
previously respected. But here, justice and the law became tangled, with
Superman expecting a court to convict Magog for this act of vengeance, but
neither of them feeling completely vindicated when it did not. Superman
retreated entirely from the world, and Magog became just one representative of
a new era, one in which heroes were not quite heroes anymore. A few years later,
as the story opens, things are pretty rotten, but they soon become much worse.
A handful of heroes pursue the Parasite from St. Louis westward across Kansas,
and when the villain is cornered, he panics and rips open Captain Atom. The
resulting explosion kills one million people, including Superman's adopted
hometown of Smallville. When Wonder Woman brings the news of this to Superman,
he returns from his self-imposed exile to try to set the world straight.
At this point, the major players and their positions are as
follows:
• A new breed of reckless hero – exemplified by Magog, Von
Bach, and 666 – operates outside the law. They execute supervillains
preemptively, and risk civilian lives needlessly in their battles. Their
lifestyle is not as squeaky-clean as the heroes of the past.
• Superman and his Justice League want to corral the
reckless heroes, and are willing to imprison those who don't fall in line.
• Batman and an urban league including Green Arrow, Black
Canary, and Blue Beetle keep order in Gotham, Star City and elsewhere using
their expertise and a squadron of younger enforcers.
• Luthor and several former supervillains, whose Mankind
Liberation Front conspires to turn the conflict between the erstwhile superheroes
into a battle that rids the world of superbeings for once and for all. Batman
and his allies seem to throw in with Luthor, but that is a ruse.
• The world's civilian authorities, led by a UN Secretary
General named Wyrmwood, another reference to Revelation.
Unlike the comics of the past, the sides do not merely
engage in super-powered battle, although there is plenty of that. They take
time out from the usual superhero-vs-supervillain kinetic activity to
philosophize, negotiate, argue, and deceive.
And it is on this deeper level that the script falters,
badly. Every panel and every speech balloon in Kingdom Come seems to come from a passionate and wonderfully
scripted epic, but Kingdom Come is
not wonderfully scripted. Ross and Waid's writing aspires to greatness but fails
to grasp it. A large fraction of Kingdom
Come is devoted to talk and arguments, but the arguments do not make sense,
or they are exceedingly shallow, or the characters talk past one another. On
several occasions, they argue passionately for a viewpoint, are willing to go
to battle over it, then suddenly appear to be arguing for or acting for the
other side of the argument. When these changes take place, there is never a
reason given as to why the hero changed their mind, nor do the other characters
seem to notice the discrepancies. Perhaps this because Waid and Ross didn't
notice them, either.
• Batman calls Superman's efforts "totalitarian"
while running Gotham and other cities as a police state run by fear.
• After Batman's ruse to double cross Luthor is completed,
he once again tells Superman that he is not on Superman's side. A few minutes later, he shows up thousands of miles away with his allies to fight on Superman's side.
• At the end, Batman looks on smiling when Superman finally
agrees to operate with the cooperation of civilian authorities, but Batman and
his allies have spent years running law enforcement in several cities "our
way… ourselves."
• Superman and his allies call the prison they build a
"gulag" – a perjorative term completely opposite in connotation from
the noble intentions they have for it.
• Superman and his allies say that the new, reckless breed
of heroes risk innocent lives, but Superman places his prisoners in the middle
of the country, which – he admits – is a safety risk. He says that
this was necessary so the reckless heroes could be monitored and taught, which
does not justify why someone who could effortlessly bury Brainiac's parts on Saturn would
collect the world's most dangerous superbeings in one location in the middle of
the United States.
• Wonder Woman joins Superman's crusade against superheroes
who are too aggressive, too reckless, and willing to kill, and in her efforts
to control them, she is too aggressive, too reckless, and willing to kill. Yet,
she is adamant that they must be stopped.
• In an argument before the final battle, Batman argues that
perhaps it would be for the best if all the superbeings die. Superman
vehemently disagrees. Minutes later, Superman says that perhaps he has no right
to stop the bomb from killing all the heroes, but Batman does everything he can
to stop one of the bombs. The two have exactly switched positions, and nobody
seems to notice.
• When Batman incapacitates a temporarily-powerless Billy
Batson, he does so with his foot alone and does not, for example, tranquilize
him. This mistake risked the fate of the world.
• When Superman incapacitates a temporarily-powerless Billy
Batson, he lets Billy decide whether or not to let him stop the final bomb,
even though Billy had up to that very moment been guided only by the
derangement that Luthor had induced in him. This mistake risked the fate of the
world.
• While Batman and Wonder Woman are fighting on the same
side, he insults her until she stops fighting their common enemy and turns to
fight him. With the fate of the world at stake, they disengage from the battle
to settle an argument of no apparent value.
• Superman spends the entire story trying to educate the
reckless heroes because they needlessly kill villains. After the bomb kills
many superbeings, Superman is on the verge of killing the civilians who dropped
the bomb.
• After the bomb explodes, the Spectre describes the status
as: "There were survivors. They are fewer in number, and their pain is
great… but their war is over." Batman, minutes later, says that there are
"enough [survivors] to leave us with the same problem as before. The same
impasse. The same dangers."
• The problem that the story opened with was that there was
a new breed of reckless superhero. At the end of the story, there are still enough
of them to leave "the same problem as before." How are the problems
solved? Superman tells the civilian authorities his solution, not counting the
description of what it isn't, in only these words: "We're going to solve
them with you… by living among you… We will earn your trust." An unmasked
Batman offers a cockeyed grin of approval; the emptiness of those words is one
of the strongest impressions I take away from Kingdom Come. Superman in no way articulates a solution to the
problem of the reckless heroes. He merely says that the superheroes (who failed
to solve the problem) will solve the problem with the civilian authorities (who
were unable to solve the problem). During an epilogue, Wonder Woman says that
what they went through gave the reckless heroes "plenty of incentive to
learn." Batman, who had argued that Superman's methods were totalitarian,
has the MLF working for him subdued by inhibitor collars.
Upon any but the shallowest scrutiny, Kingdom Come's script is shockingly disappointing. The entire
middle half is devoted to telling us that imposing authority on superbeings by
force is doomed to failure, then the epilogue breezily suggests that now it
will work out fine.
And yet, there are fine moments along the way. Orion, having
overthrown his father Darkseid as the ruler of Apokolips, describes the
difficulties of ruling a former dictatorship in terms that consciously parallel
the then-current situation in the former Eastern Bloc countries, commenting
cogently on instability in Russia and war in the former Yugoslavia. The
political rants of old Ollie Queen are both in-character and easy to imagine
coming from the lips of a real former radical. Snippets of dialogue in several
different languages capably give the story the feel of a real international
drama. The shallow Planet Krypton aptly portrays modern fascination with pop
culture in a world where that pop culture is about real people. And then there
are gems such as the interaction between Ibn al Xu'ffasch and his father, the
Batman:
"And they're prepared to fight tooth and nail with the
generation that sired them?"
"Aren't all young people, son?"
Despite the very serious failures in the script, Kingdom Come is nevertheless a landmark
and a must-read. It looks like an important story, usually feels like an
important story, and as a result, is an important story. A small minority of
readers (some 5%, based on Amazon reviews) focus on the script flaws and find
the work to be outright bad. Most readers consider it an unqualified success. The
truth lies between these: The art is a triumph, and Kingdom Come does enough right to keep readers paying attention from
the start through the last scene – enough right to keep many readers from even
noticing just how much goes wrong in all those speech balloons along the way.
Several works in the second half of the Eighties demonstrated
that superhero comics can potentially be a vehicle for art on the highest level.
The fact that a work so superficially pretty but deeply flawed as Kingdom Come can stand as one of the
genre's landmarks doesn't reject that proposition, but it suggests that the potential
has not been exercised that often.
