Mark Waid and Alex Ross' Kingdom Come was the pinnacle of the post-Watchmen/Dark Knight Returns trend in superhero comics to make things all grim and gritty, to place their purely fantastical characters into a world as conflicted, violent and morally grey as our own (see Mark Millar, it's not original AT ALL). It was also the point where, thankfully, we realised that was quite enough of that, thank you very much, let's return to our escapist fantasies. Or at least stop thinking that showing Superman kill is at all interesting or challenging or anything more than something done for shock value. Kingdom Come is overrated on two levels. The book is well-remembered both for the story by veteran writer Mark Waid, who has done much better work before or since (his current run on Daredevil is a lot of fun and you should be reading it), and the painted artwork by Alex Ross, who renders the costumed protagonists in a photorealistic style. Neither of these things is actually all that impressive, at least to our eyes. The story, such as it is, is an extrapolation of the dystopian future of the Dark Knight Returns. Villains have become more vicious and violent, meaning that a new breed of superheroes has responded in kind, culminating in the murderous crime fighting of Magog and his friends. Obviously, most of the old guard - lead by Superman - aren't so hot on the whole "killing supervillains in cold blood" thing, culminating in a superhero civil war. Which might also hint at the Biblical end times, according to a ludicrously overblown and pretentious framing device where a priest quotes scripture atop scenes of an elderly Batman scrapping with Power Girl. And if that wasn't enough, there's Alex Ross' art. He certainly succeeds in making it photorealistic, but his paintings have a static and lifeless quality that's the exact opposite of comics, and representative of his working entirely from life models. Plus his approximation of the impossibly bulky physiques of most superheroes is to make them fat. So, sure, if you want a tubby Man of Steel doing Atlas poses whilst you read quotes from Revelations, you might enjoy Kingdom Come. For the rest of us, there are better things to spend our time with than this overrated graphic novel.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
