Premise
After the reckless ways of the latest generation of "superheroes" go awry and lead to the destruction of Kansas, the previous generation returns to lay down the law.

Evaluation
Not good. In the 1980s Scott McCloud wrote an oversized comic called Destroy!! that parodied the idea of trying to out-Kirby Jack Kirby by penning the biggest, splashiest, most destructive superhero slugfest ever. Characters do things like use the Statue of Liberty to smack each other up to (and through) the moon. Waid, a decade later, attempted something similar, only seriously. He has several armies of superhumans brawling chaotically, and even with the acclaimed Alex Ross handling the painting, it's really just a big mess. In a sense, it is Paradise Lost redux: John Milton had an army of angels and an army of devils throwing mountain ranges at each other, and despite — or perhaps because of — the scale of the conflict, it was less involving than two well-drawn characters having a quarrel about whose turn it is to do the dishes.

The Paradise Lost connection is more than just one of scale. Waid draws facile parallels between his tale and the Book of Revelation. They fall flat. We are repeatedly told that the apocalypse is imminent, but there's no sense of menace; it's just "There are too many superheroes! They're gonna end the world with their fighting! So here come these 500 guys to stop the end of the world! Oh no, here are 500 other guys who will end the world! Wait, here are 500 more guys who will really stop the end of the world this time really I mean it! Hey, isn't Superman like Jesus?"

Commentary
I was given — not lent, to my astonishment, but given — this book by the professor of the apocalypse class I'm crashing after I stopped by her office hours to lend her U.S., also painted by Alex Ross, and The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln, which I'd name-checked in class. Because it was a gift, I wish I'd liked it more. But I just don't like Mark Waid's writing. He had the same problems with scale during his run on Captain America (the Cosmic Cube arc was excruciating) and what I saw of his Fantastic Four didn't seem like much of an improvement. (The one exception is Empire, which I did like.)

Kingdom Come is not on the syllabus for our class, but Prof. Palmer has taught it in at least one previous one. I've heard some of her students from that class mention it in our discussions, so evidently she was able to present it in such a way that they'd get some value out of it, despite their unfamiliarity with superhero comics... though I have a hard time imagining what that might be. So much of Kingdom Come seems to be a matter of oh so dramatically unveiling yet another future version of a DC (or DC-acquired) character. OMG, the gulag was designed by... Mister Miracle! OMG, that bad guy just got bopped by... Hourman! And the readers, who have never heard of Mister Miracle or Hourman, yawn. Even I missed half the references, I'm sure, as this isn't just a book for comics geeks, but for DC geeks in particular. Sure, there's also the Revelation angle, but I didn't find that Kingdom Come added anything interesting to that text; the Revelation quotes seemed to be there just to make the comic look more profound. Instead, they make Tom Shone look like he has a point about the dangers of lowly source material trying to get too ambitious. I can't imagine teaching Kingdom Come as a thoughtful response to Revelation; I'd have to take the angle that it's a reflection of the extent to which apocalypticism has permeated American culture from top to, in this case, bottom.

But if I were teaching Kingdom Come, it wouldn't be for the Biblical parallels at all. Those are just Kallisti-style overreaching. Kingdom Come seems to me to be primarily a commentary on the comics industry (which is why I wonder what people unfamiliar with the industry could possibly get out of it). As noted, the basic premise is that Superman has retired and his role has been taken by a new generation of badass "superheroes" who take no prisoners — one of them, for instance, makes his first public appearance blowing a hole through the Joker after the latter has been taken into custody, like Jack Ruby offing Lee Harvey Oswald. These "heroes" don't care about saving civilians from danger but instead just fight with each other. To anyone who followed comics in the 1990s, this is clearly a reference to the Grim-N-Gritty™ trend that reached full flower with the birth of Image Comics in 1992. Superman, at least initially, fought crime, and a surprisingly wide variety of crime at that: in his first adventure he saved an innocent woman from the electric chair, apprehended a wife-beater, rescued Lois Lane from kidnappers, and discovered that a senator had been corrupted by "Alex Greer, the slickest lobbyist in Washington." But late-80s/early-90s comics like Liefeld's X-Force and Youngblood were just page after page of grimacing musclemen blowing the hell out of each other just to pass the time. It is easy to see how one might respond to this ethical deterioration by pining for the return of the old heroes.

The thing is, though, Youngblood and its ilk were just flashes (no pun intended) in the pan. The fact is that every superhero anyone who isn't a comics geek has ever heard of was created in one of two periods: 1938-1941 (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Captain America, and possibly Captain Marvel, aka the Shazam guy) or 1961-1964 (Spider-Man, the Hulk, lately the X-Men, and possibly the Fantastic Four and Daredevil). Even in the comics world, the only character created outside these periods to achieve truly lasting popularity has been Wolverine, and even he was created in 1974. So while the godlike DC heroes did make way for a new generation — the feet-of-clay Marvel heroes — we should have had two new major generations of characters over the past forty years to keep the superhero concept fresh, and instead all we have is an angry 5'3" Canadian. A lot of this has to do with capitalism; Marvel and DC are far less concerned with good storytelling than they are with maintaining brands, so they continue to crank out reinventions of their existing stable of characters rather than committing to anything really new. But books like Kingdom Come, stuck on and stuck in the past, don't help matters.

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