On Earth as It Is in Heaven
Kingdom Come #1 (May 1996)
Writer: Mark Waid
Artist: Alex Ross
Writer: Mark Waid
Artist: Alex Ross
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As I write these essays I keep having to remind myself that in the 1990s I was very very concerned with legitimacy. In those days when Kevin Smith was the only famous comic book fan, when comic book movies were largely terrible, and when many of the comics themselves were embarassing, things were pretty difficult for those of us trying to make an argument that comics should be considered art.
So Alex Ross was a godsend.
Ross was born in Portland, Oregon but raised in Lubbock, Texas. His father was a minister and his mother was a commercial artist who proved to be his first artistic influence. Born in 1970, Ross developed a love of superheroes thanks the Super Friends Saturday morning cartoon and Spider-Man's appearances on Electric Company, and began trying to draw them. When he got into comic books, he gravitated toward the work of John Romita, Neal Adams, and George Perez.
He decided to follow in his mother's footsteps and study painting art at the American Academy of Art in Chicago. He fell under the spell of artists such as Andrew Loomis, J.C. Leyendecker, and Norman Rockwell, and had the revelation that their hyper-realistic styles could be applied to superheroes: "I said to myself, 'I want to see that in a comic book!'" he recalled.
After finishing school, he did some work in advertising and while also seeking comic book work. In 1990 he did a Terminator miniseries at NOW Comics, and would spend the next three years doing work here and there. During this time he met writer Kurt Busiek, and the two developed a proposal for what would become the 1994 hit Marvels, which looked at the history of the Marvel universe through the eyes of an ordinary photographer. And with one miniseries, Ross became an exemplar for anyone - myself included - that comics were legitamately art.
Ross's work, done with a specialized watercolor called gouache, was gorgeous. By that time we'd seen superheroes painted by the likes of Joe Jusko and the Hildebrandts, but as accomplished as their work was it still had an veneer of fantasy. Ross's characters, in contrast, looked like they could walk of the page and sit down next to you. His use of models and lighting references made the big difference.
After Marvels, Ross turned his attention to DC, proposing with a miniseries about the future of the DC universe, one in which the classic heroes had been pushed aside in favor of a younger, more bloodthirsty generation. His idea would give him a chance to design new heroes, redesign old ones, paint some really cool set pieces, and express his feelings about the impact of Image on superhero comics: "The current state of comics seems to to me to be gangs fighting gangs...without much reason to be doing it," he commented.
He called his idea "The End of the Heroic Age," a purposeful nod to The Golden Age, a 1993 miniseries by James Robinson (LINK) and Paul Smith, and hoped to talk Robinson into writing it. But when the latter came up blank, DC editorial suggested Mark Waid to help mold Ross's ideas into a coherent story. The result of their collaboration was Kingdom Come.
The story focused on Superman, retired from heroing after the murder of Lois Lane and the rise of a generation of antiheroes as a "force" that operates outside the law to terminate crime and villainy with "extreme" prejudice. To the dismay of the old guard, this approach is applauded by the public. But when their tactics go too far - a nuclear explosion occurs in Kansas during the pursuit of a villain who has already surrendered - Superman decides to return to action, reform the Justice League, and attempt to set things right.
But it's not so easy. The anti-heroes don't want to be inspired and reformed, and the Lex-Luthor-led Mankind Liberation Front starts making plans to take out both factions completely. This involves a mind-controlled Captain Marvel / Shazam and a decrepit Batman who runs Gotham like a police state.
There's a ton to chew on thematically, and if Kingdom Come has any flaws it's that it has too many good ideas in one place. It's a story about Superman losing and regaining his sense of purpose. It's a story about the deep bonds of friendship between Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman. It's an exploration of what the DC universe could look like if the characters were allowed to truly age. It's a commentary on inter-genrational friction. It's a commentary on the failings of the prision system. It's a
meta-narrative on the proliferation of new characters and companies in the 1990s, the rise of the superhero without a moral compass in the 1980s, and the ongoing relevance of characters created in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1960s. It's not a hero-vs.-villain story but a hero vs. anti-hero story,
Often when I revisit a work after several years, I find that I react to different things. But with Kingdom Come my reaction is nearly identical to the one I had as a 19-year old: I admire it for the wrong reasons. I know I'm supposed to be taken in by the emotional heft of the story, but what I react to instead are the details. Specicially, I'm taken by the amount of visual information Ross packs in every page, and I'm fascinated by the changes made to known characters and archetypes in the DC unvierse. For ease of discussion, I've named these Easter Eggs and Evolutions.
1) Easter Eggs
Both Waid and Ross possess a deep knowledge of DC history. Waid's is in trivia and continuity (he could tell you the high school Jimmy Olsen attended). Ross's is in the visual iconography of the DC universe. So while someone new to comics could read Kingdom Come, it would be the equivalent of starting with book six of a seven-book series. You might enjoy it, but you'll be a bit lost and won't have a full appreciation or understanding of what's going on.
Ross packed Kingdom Come with visual details and Easter Eggs from across DC history, including many from his beloved Super Friends. Many characters in the backgrounds are likenesses of DC editors and personnel. His friends and family also show up, as do a few nods to his favorite musicians. A character called the Space Cowboy is the spitting image of the figure on the cover of Steve Millers The Joker album. A car has the license plate 281F, in a nod to a car pictured on the cover of the Beatles' Abbey Road. And most significantly, Ross created a character based on the XTC songs "That's Really Super, Supergirl" and "Brainiac's Daughter." XTC's Andy Partridge is a known comics fan, and invented a character who was the offspring of one of Superman's greatest foes, but mostly used the idea as an excuse for a cheeky love song. Ross brought her to life.
2) Evolutions
Speaking of Brainiac's Daughter, Kingdom Come is filled with beautifully designed updates of classic characters and brand new legacy characters. And for me that's one of the most alluring-yet-frustrating parts of the whole book. As I've written before, my favorite aspect of the DC Universe is its generational lineage. These characters evoke questions - like how did Beast Boy become Menagerie, or who is the werecat version of Wildcat - and almost every single one is completely unexplored. I'm not alone in this reaction. Harlan Ellison told Waid he didn't like the book becuase he never learned anything about all of these backgound characters.
In an interview at the time, Ross said, "it's a bonus to try to figure out their backstory and where they've been." In nearly every case I would say that a work of art should stand on its own. Sure annotations can enrich almost anything worth its salt, but you shouldn't need them to really get it. Kingdom Come is an exeption to that. If you're going to read this book you'll want to have the annotations and character guides side-by-side. It makes everything so much more satisfying.
The only real difference in my reactions then and my reaction now is a greater apprecation for the meta-commentary. Kingdom Come was created during a time when it was fully conceivable that the superhero comic book industry was in its final days. The specultor market had crashed. Comic book stores were closing left and right. Marvel was on the verge of bankruptcy. DC was fighting desperately to keep its characters relevant to new fans. That sense of dread permeates the book, at least until its more hopeful epilogue.
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Though DC released Kingdom Come under the Elseworlds banner - the name for DC's equivalent of What If... stories - Alex Ross didn't consider it to be an imaginary story. He approached it as though it were the actual future of the DCU. And while it would be sort of ridiculous to lock all of your creative and editorial teams into that fixed direction, many of DC's creators were inspired enough by Ross's ideas to incorporate them into the actual continuity.
Ross's ideas and designs were so good that they started making their way into DC continuity proper. In the 1999 Titans series, Cyborg takes on a sleek gold form nearly identical to one that Ross designed for Kingdom Come. That same year, James Robinson introduced a time-traveling Thom Kallor in the Starman costume Ross designed. In 2005, Roy Harper took on the mantle of Red Arrow, just as he did in KC. In 2006, DC introduced the third Blue Beetle, Jamie Reyes, who wore a costume similar to the Guyver-inspired version in KC. In the 2007 Countdown series, former Robin Jason Todd took on the mantle and costume of Red Robin (worn by the first Robin, Dick Grayson in KC), and later the costume would be adopted by the third robin, Tim Drake.
As if all of that weren't enough, Geoff Johns began steadily introducing Kingdom Come-inspired characters into his lengthy run on Justice Society of America. First he had Nuklon take on the Atom Smasher identity and costume. Then he intorduced Jakeem Thunder as the new keeper of the Thunderbolt. Later he brought in the were-cat Wildcat, Black Lightning's daughter Lightning, and Cyclone (who was called Red Tornado in KC). He also used Starman as a regular character.
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After Kingdom Come was so well-received, Waid and Ross made plans to turn it into an ongoing series. One assumes this would have allowed them to explore all of these new characters in depth, because Ross has said he considered Kingdom Come to be the end of the superhero careers of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. But Waid may have seen it differently, because the two had creative friction about the series, and it never came to pass. Ross excused himself and Waid instead wrote a two-issue miniseries and series of five one-shots under the collective title The Kingdom. It wasn't quite as bad as The Phantom Menace, but the unremarkable art and perfunctory stories (uncharacteristic of Waid), left that same "why did I wish for this?" feeling.
Ross got his chance to have a say in the characters in the 2007 "Thy Kingdom Come" storyline in, fittingly, Justice Society of America. This story found the Kingdom Come version of Superman transported to the current DC reality, where he has to prevent Gog from annointing Magog, something he believes will set into motion the same events that happened in his reality. As the story progresses, one realizes that this isn't so much of a sequel to Kingdom Come as it is an interlude. In "Thy Kingdom Come," KC Superman is taken out of time and reality from a moment in the original story and is returned to that same moment. The rest of the original events happen as they always did. As a result "Thy Kingdom Come" gives Ross a chance to explore his original world in a bit more depth, for example, depicting how Lois Lane died.
Interestingly, both sequels centered on Gog / Magog as the antagonist. If its been awhile since one read Kingdom Come, one might misremember Magog as more important to the story than he really was. Yes, he's at the center of two inciting events (Superman's retirement and Parasite's attack on Captain Atom), but he barely appears after the second issue, and the heroes are more much concerned about the imposing Von Bach than they are Magog. I believe the elevation of the character came because everything about him - his costume, his demeanor, his approach to heroing - is the opposite of Superman's.
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Kingdom Come is now regarded, along with Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, as one of the touchstones of the "Dark Age of Comics," a subcategory of the Modern Age that began in 1985, though Kingdom Come doesn't share those series' sense of nihlism. It takes more of its DNA from Mark Gruenwald's mideighties maxiseries Squadron Supreme; both explore what happens when superpowered individuals try to impose their will on others. Ross clearly recognzied the similarities. He included a cameo from Gruenwald, who died suddenly just a couple of months after the final issue of Kingdom Come was released, in the epilogue at Planet Krypton.
But I'll say again, that I don't regard Kingdom Come as belonging in the canon of great comic book stories, at least not for the reasons most would include it. Its legacy is not so much in its plot or themes, but in its revelation of the unlimited potential for creativity within the DC universe.
Sources:
"Alex Ross (Nelson Alexander Ross)" https://www.illustrationhistory.org/artists/alex-ross2
Brick, Scott. "Alex Ross". Wizard Xtra!. (March 2007).
Lamken, Brian Saner. Comicology Volume 1: The Kingdom Come Companion. 1998.
McLauchlin, Jim. "The 'Kingdom' that Didn't Come." Wizard #90 (February 1999)
Russo, Tom. "First Look: Kingdom Come." Wizard #52 (December 1995)
Senreich, Matthew. "Kingdom Come Monthly Title, Hardcover Reprint Slated." Wizard #65 (January 1997)
Schutt, Craig. "Thy Kingdom Comes." Wizard #57 (May 1996)
Schutt, Craig. "Judgement Day." Wizard #58 (June 1996)
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