Kingdom Come

Mark Waid & Alex Ross Kingdom Come (1996)
I'd stopped reading the caped stuff when this was first published and only found out about it a couple of weeks ago. The reason I stopped reading the caped stuff was due to the entire mainstream comics biz having taken to impersonating Rob Liefeld, or at least Todd McFarlane, and it had all begun to look like a massive pile of wank from where I was stood. Nearly three decades later I realise I wasn't the only one to feel that way, and Kingdom Come features a host of established DC superpersons who, having reached retirement age, find themselves significantly bemused at the younger generation of bloodthirsty cyborg assassins wielding shuriken swords and way too much angry crosshatching. It's a weird one because it's approximately an epic war between, on one side, the traditionally wholesome and brightly coloured comic book heroes of the fifties - hence the non-ironic cameo by Krypto the Super Dog - and all that fucking awful shite inspired by Liefeld and his buddies; so on at least one level it's pitched firmly against not so much the comic book growing up (which it sort of didn't in any case) as what it grew into, told by both means and medium far removed from the newsstands and legitimately juvenile audience whose legacy it directly represents. So it's Miller's Dark Knight flipped to more positive and progressive aspirations - or possibly where Alan Moore would have gone with 1963 had he finished the thing.

In caped terms, I didn't always get DC, generally preferring Marvel and usually rolling my eyes during streamed documentaries identifying the difference as being that DC deals in legends, man; but now having read and re-read a few of the various Crisis books - and re-reading is essential because they are otherwise often incomprehensible - I think I understand the distinction. Marvel superheroes tend to be Gods and monsters which also happen to be ourselves with all of our baggage and characteristic failings. DC superheroes are, for the most part, more remote, something to which I suppose we aspire rather than which we become. There are numerous exceptions to this generalisation, but that's what I take from Multiversity, Infinite Crisis, and now this; and it's why, I would suggest, those Marvel movies have generally been more watchable than the DC jobs, because everything looks epic if you throw enough CGI at it, so movie-epic isn't that impressive in and of itself.

Anyway, this works because although the story is probably not actually anything special, being masses of caped folks flying angrily at each other whilst shooting rays from their outstretched hands for two-hundred pages, the art is genuinely breathtaking; and so breathtaking that even the most ridiculous aspects of the genre are rendered with sublime grace and beauty as befits tales of the Gods and their kin. Accordingly Kingdom Come also demonstrates why it's mostly a waste of time trying to transfer this stuff to the big screen. The strapline about how you'll believe a man can fly never really worked for me because I could see it was just some guy in a leotard hanging from a near invisible wire, but Kingdom Come is, on the other hand, unusually persuasive.