Kingdom Come - Superman's Midlife Crisis...

Venue: Kingdom Come, written by Mark Waid and illustrated by Alex Ross, published by DC, published first as a four issue miniseries in 1996 and then as a trade paperback in 1997 priced at $US 14.95, which is still its list price today. Don't buy it at that price without first checking to see if folks like Amazon sell it for a discount, which they often do. If you, like me, prefer to give your business to independent book stores, lest they vanish from the landscape entirely, then I suggest you buy this work from your local comic book shop. A good comic book shop will always give you better service and better advice on comics than anyone like Borders or Barnes & Noble. Bookstore chains just don't understand this genre, which is why your local comic book store deserves your custom.

Kingdom Come is now also available as a DC "Absolute" hardcover edition, c. 2006, for $US 75.00. If I had the money to spare, I'd own it by now in the Absolute edition as I love the art and my trade paperback version is worse for wear. There was also a novelization book version of Kingdom Come issued in 1997; I have a copy of this somewhere in the house - it was actually quite good, as far as that sort of thing goes, though it had to tweak some of the story's particulars to cover that which was taken on faith in the visuals of the graphic novel original. Try as I might, but I can not find any info on the novelization anywhere, not even amazon.com... If I find my copy, I'll post the ISBN and any other info I can find on it being in or out of print.

Setting: This is a DC comic set in the DC universe. Within the DC universe, the story takes place one or two decades from now - in Metropolis, Gotham City, Keystone City, Green Lantern's orbitting New OA, and many other places on DC's planet earth. The comic is part of what DC was calling its Elseworlds series. According to their own promotional blurb: "In Elseworlds, heroes are taken from their usual settings and put into strange times and places - some that have existed or might have existed, and others that can't, couldn't or shouldn't exist." In many ways, this is another postmodern setting for a comic book in a time and place close to our own. It is not as cynically deconstructionist as Watchmen was, but it is well within the genre of near-future nuclear-holocaust apocalyptic stories. But this is a nuclear-holocaust apocalyptic book with Superman in it, so it has to all come out right in the end, right?

Story: It's a sad sort of world one or two decades from now, with the demise of the Nobel Prizes, Major League Baseball and the Olympics. (Face it, the only thing worse than a world where the Yankees can beat the Red Sox is a world without any Red Sox at all...!) Worse yet, the old-school superheroes, now known as the first generation of metahumans, are at odds with the younger generations of metahumans which have come into being since the glory days of Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman. At the start of Kingdom Come, Wonder Woman is at odds with the rest of the Amazon nation over some of her actions in the outside world so she has been exiled from her homeland. Batman is a wreak after 40 years of physical abuse while fighting crime in Gotham City; he now hides in his underground cave where he guides a small army of sentinel robots to keep order in Gotham City for him. Hawkman has turned into an ecoterrorist in the Pacific Northwest. Superman has quit the scene and plays loner in his Antarctic fortress home in protest over humanity's preference for newer Metahuman superheroes for whom the ends justify the means.

In this world, a post-modern metahuman "protector" of Metropolis named Magog, along with his metahuman support team, has pursued a metahuman criminal from St. Louis west to the farm fields of central Kansas. This pursuit is ongoing despite the fugitive's pleas for mercy - these pleas are ignored. In Kansas, the containment suit for one of the metahuman pursuers is ripped open by the fugitive. The problem here is that this metahuman is essentially a thermonuclear reaction confined only by his special clothing. The breach of his containment suit has the same effect as a multi-megaton H-bomb. Kansas and large tracts of surrounding states are devastated.

An elderly minister (denomination unknown) by the name of Norman McKay has been having apocalyptic visions straight out of the Revelations of St. John the Divine and other related New Testament books. After the nuclear devastation of Kansas, McKay is visited by an old DC character some older folks may recognize as The Spectre, in his role as delegated angelic judge of good and evil. He comes for McKay because McKay has the visions and therefore is The Spectre's appointed partner and foil in judging the upcoming nuclear-abetted apocalypse. This apocalypse will result from the conflict between the old-school metahumans like Superman, the newer generations of metahumans like Magog, other metahumans who are trying to play the middle-ground like Batman and Lex Luther, and the normal human race which has a nuclear arsenal controlled by the UN.

In a conflict where Superman has lost his empathy for humanity, it's not Superman who ends up saving the day. Superman here is very solidly part of the problem. The two people who serially manage to "save the day," if you could call it that, are not anyone I would have guessed ahead of time - and as someone who frequently figures out the end to books half way through reading them, this left me very pleased the first time I read Kingdom Come. It's a good ending - a double ending actually - but not an ending I expected. In a way, I was a little disappointed to find that someone really did save the day in a very DC superhero manner after all. I was hoping that the plot might end with something that could be taken symbolically for the apocalypse - just like the beginning of the story explicitly proposed in the conversations between The Spectre and McKay. But this is DC where someone saving the day is part of what you pay for. Regardless, Kingdom Come is a good read, especially if you already are familiar with the DC universe and its superheroes.

The Art: The illustrator is Alex Ross, who is probably the single best American graphic novel/comic book artist alive today. He doesn't pencil, ink and color in the traditional comic book methodology. He uses mainly gouache (opaque watercolor). Got that: he paints his comic book art. The result is amazing. Anything illustrated by Alex Ross is a feast for the eyes. The story of Kingdom Come is really quite good, as good as it gets for something within the confines of the DC universe - but the art is what really makes Kingdom Come special. Ross is the same guy how did the art on the wonderful Peace on Earth Superman special where the Man of Steel realizes that not even he can solve the problem of world hunger, probably the most profound Superman story ever written. (I should probably do a review of Peace on Earth at some point...). Basically, anything that Ross does is good but in Kingdom Come, he outdoes himself in the huge scope and composition of his illustrations, which are best and grandly displayed in the battle scenes in chapter four, especially the two page splash scene of pp. 160-161 and the full-page descent of Batman's forces on p. 168. I am particularly fond of the arrival of Captain Marvel page, which is the last page in chapter three. I could make a list of all of my favorite pages but it would be too long for a blog review... Without Ross's art, Kingdom Come would be just another decently-written comic book which I probably wouldn't bother reviewing. There are bonus pages at the end of the trade paperback edition where Ross demonstrates how he did his illustration for Kingdom Come. I assume DC included the bonus pages in the Absolute edition too since these pages are offer a detailed and interesting look at a master artist's working methods.

Other Comments: Kingdom Come won three Eisners in 1997.

'Yo Folks, this is DC Superman title we're taking about here. While Kingdom Come is a more mature work than your normal drug store comic book-rack Superman issue, it's still a Superman title, even if it is in the Elseworlds series. The violence is more tasteful and less egregious than your average modern TV cop show. Other than the spit-curled perfectly-muscled guys in skin-tight long-johns (with and without capes) and the beautiful statuesque full-figured women with perfect hair in skin-tight bodysuits (all of which are still far less revealing than your average bikini), there is no scary sexual content to speak of. Bad language is not even an issue. For a story that features nuclear devastation on two occasions, there are no disturbing depictions of victims of nuclear explosions. The sort of parade of horrors you read about after Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not present, so there are no worries about your kid in fifth grade having nightmares after reading Kingdom Come, at least as far as visualization of nuclear horrors are concerned. The worst we see in this work are the bleached fleshless bones of metahumans caught in a thermonuclear blast - which is not at all realistic of what would happen in a real thermonuclear event. I guess the bare bones are to convey the deadly consequences of a nuclear exchange without showing any of the icky drippy bodily fluids and charred and burnt flesh of victims who escaped vaporization... While I can point out the unrealistic depiction of post-nuclear effects, the upside is that we get to skip looking at all that stomach-turning stuff. Kingdom Come is essentially safe to give to any kid old enough to appreciate the story, which in my estimation is middle-school aged kids and up (grade 5 and higher). They'll follow the story at least at a surface level, and there's enough action going on that most will like it. It's the older kids, the mature junior high school kids and up who will appreciate the more sophisticated setting, especially if they grew up reading a lot of DC.

It is interesting to note that anyone lacking familiarity with the Bible isn't going to have the background to fully appreciate the biblical references and nuances that run through Kingdom Come.

Ross used real people as models for the characters he illustrated. It's strange but I find that the face on the character of Donna Troy, the one-time protege of Wonder Woman and former Teen Titans member known as Wonder Girl, looks remarkably like the Fantasy author Diana Paxton - and ever since I first read Kingdom Come, I've wondered if Ross knows Paxton from somewhere. If I ever have opportunity to run into Diana again, who I met years ago in the Society for Creative Anachronism, I'll have to ask her. I find the resemblance is uncanny.

Watchmen - one of the great American Graphic Novels

Venue: The award-winning Watchmen was written by Alan Moore, drawn and lettered by Dave Gibbons, colored by John Higgins and published by DC. It is available as both a hardcover and as a trade paperback, both currently in print. There are also two hardcover collector's editions, one published in 1987 by Graphitti Designs and one labeled Absolute Watchmen put out by DC in 2005. The latter is larger than the previous editions and completely recolored by John Higgins. I don't own a copy of Absolute Watchmen but I wish I did. The recoloring is wonderful and the new edition includes previously unseen bonus material. Since I've never seen a copy of the Graphitti Designs edition, I can't say how the bonus material in the latter compares to the Absolute edition.

The Watchmen originally appeared as a miniseries of 12 comic books published monthly in 1986 to 1987 and are no longer in print. You can sometimes find the original monthly comics at stores which specialize in comic book back issues, usually priced at $10 to $20 per issue depending on condition. The book form of The Watchmen collects all 12 of the original comics and puts them under one cover. There is a Watchmen module for the DC Heroes RPG, if you're into that sort of thing. There is also a film version of Watchmen scheduled for release sometime in 2009.

Setting: It is 1985 in a world like our own. The differences are subtle but often profound. All ground vehicles are electric. Airships appear to be a popular form of travel. Hats, helmets and other headgear sport audio gizmoes that look just a bit off to our eyes. Tobacco is smoked in strange round pipes reminiscent of early-20th century cigarette holders. Richard Nixon is on his fifth term as US president. America won the Vietnam War and the Cold War is still going full blast. The threat of a nuclear conflict is greater than ever.

In the world of The Watchmen, comic books are dominated by pirate stories. There is no superhero genre in comic books. Real-life costumed crime fighters had their heyday in the 40s and 50s; but with the passage of the Keene Act in the late 70s, all costumed vigilantes were either forced to retire or work for the government. It is a world that most of us could live in comfortably. The culture is the same though the details are a bit different.

Story: The Watchmen is an action thriller, a science fiction story and a murder mystery all rolled up into one. A man called Edward Blake is murdered one night in October, 1985, thrown through the plate glass window of his apartment in New York City. Only a few people know that Blake was a former freelance vigilante before he became a paramilitary agent for the government. A former crime-fighting colleague of Blake's known as Rorschach visits the crime scene after the cops have left. He discovers that Blake was The Comedian, a crime-fighter whose career started before WWII. Though he is a wanted man, Rorschach informs his former crime-fighting associates on the chance that someone is targetting them. His suspicions are bolstered by a smear campaign aimed at the world's only true super being and confirmed the attempted murder of billionaire Adrian Veidt, formerly known as the crime-fighter Ozymandias. As the plot unfolds, Rorschach himself is framed; this leads his old partner, the Owlman, to conclude that Rorschach is right and that some sort of conspiracy is afoot. All the action is played against a background of escalating international tension between the USA and the Soviet Union, but the cataclysm at the end of the novel is not the one everyone expected.

This description of the plot doesn't it justice as it weaves through major themes, numerous subplots and ethical dilemmas. The romantic angle alone involves the love-hate relationship of the Silk Spectre I and The Comedian (Sally Jupiter and Eddie Blake) and the lovers' triangle of Dr. Manhattan, Silk Spectre II and Owlman II (Jon Osterman, Laurie Jupiter and Dan Dreiberg).

One of major themes of The Watchmen is whether the ends can ever justify the means. At the end of the novel, nuclear holocaust is adverted through a conspiracy authored by the book's main villain - but at the cost of millions of lives. At the denouement, only one of the protagonists protests this outcome, insisting that the ends can never justify the means. This is an ironic twist since this character never questions his own dubious methods. Silencing the lone protester introduces a wonderful touch of ambivalence in the last handful of pages, where the reader is left to ponder the ethics of the pact of silence agreed to by the rest of the protagonists for the sake of world peace.

Watchmen includes one independent story-within-a-story and many subplots. These include the history of the early costumed crime-fighters of the 30s and 40s and the everyday lives of people in New York City. The writing is deep, ironic and full of well-timed pathos. The depth and number of literary and artistic allusions in Watchmen has given rise to several annotated guides; some of the best are available for free on the internet. This isn't a story that you read only once. Among graphic novels written in English, only The Invisibles and the Sandman series are in the same literary league as Watchmen. Don't think of this work as a collection of 12 comic books. Think of it as visual literature. If you like high-tech action thrillers, skip buying The Watchmen for your kids and get for yourself. Download one of the many annotated guides to get the most out of your first reading.

Art: The Watchmen is drawn in the American Superhero style but with a twist. In the cheesy iconic style of traditional American comics, the superhero was always sleek and trim with sculptured muscles; the good guys were always well-dressed and clean cut; the women were always fashion-plate perfect; and the bad guys were either perfectly groomed, or ugly with bad teeth and worse posture. In Watchmen, retired superheroes get pudgy. The oldest of the retired superheroes and one retired bad guy are elderly and in one case frail. Two of the "superheroes" often need a shave and one really needs a bath, clean clothes and socks without holes in them. These aren't comic book archetypes as we've come to know them - these are superheroes and villains living in a post-modern deconstructionist world. The art makes it clear that they are all real people and not just icons.

The colors in the original comics and in the trade paperbacks are often lurid with back lighting and extreme angles of light and shadow, usually in dimly lit or nighttime settings. Personally, I am not fond of this style which I believe Frank Miller first popularized in the early 80s in comics like Daredevil and the Ronin mini-series; however, here the colors and inking appear to fit the storyline. Most of the action takes place in an alternate New York whose grit and attitude are lovingly rendered. The street scenes are exquisite, including the sidewalk shop signs, the litter and the graffiti; even the street lights are correct right down to the trapezoidal bases you see all over New York. There have been several different covers on the various editions and printings of The Watchmen, but the cover with the Chrysler Building is almost the same as the view from my late Uncle Ed's east side apartment. Dave Gibbons knows his New York.

One of the finer touches in The Watchmen are the artistic motifs that run through the story. The most obvious motif is the bloodied smiley face. The smiley face is that iconic yellow circle with two black oval eyes and a smile. It was created in 1963 by the retired general and ad executive Harvey Ball. Walmart used the smiley face for several years in their "roll'em back" advertising campaign. The smiley face is also the basis for those "emoticons" that are now ubiquitous on internet forums. At the time that The Watchmen was published, however, the smiley face had morphed from popular idea to icon to cliche. The 1986 use of the smiley face in The Watchmen came attached with some irony through its association with the Spain Brothers' line of "Have a happy day" novelty goods and its general overuse commercially. The travels of the smiley face through the pages of The Watchment is poignant at times. At the start of the story, the button is pinned to the bathrobe of the most brutal character in the story while he is murdered. The smiley face button is spattered with his blood and lands in the gutter next to the defenestrated body. It is picked up by Rorschach who gives it to the Owlman. After that, the smiley face shows up in cameos throughout the rest of the story: spattered with blood in Vietnam, splashed with wine on a tuxedo lapel at a party, stained with ketchup on a t-shirt. There are many of these cameos; a more complete list can be found on the rather extensive Wikipedia page for The Watchmen.

A similar motif of clocks also occurs throughout the story: a dead watch from Hiroshima, pieces of a dismantled watch being repaired, a copy of Dali's clock painting on the wall of Osterman's apartment, the watches of the murdered millions at the end of the book, all reading 11:25, etc. The most important of these is the clock face on the end page of each chapter, deliberately invoking the famous doomsday clock from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

There are many other little artistic touches in Watchmen that make it clear that this is a graphic novel above and beyond any of those superhero comics we read as kids, like the tear-shaped raindrop running down the face of a "weeping" mausoleum statue or the 70s style political cartoon in a rabid right wing newspaper. The biggest artistic touch is the inclusion of an entire pirate comic book which you see a few frames at a time interspersed throughout the graphic novel. This story-inside-a-story is drawn in a "golden-age" comics style. The contrast between the main story and the pirate comic stands out even more in the recolored Absolute Watchmen edition.

Age Groups: I would consider The Watchmen an adult book. It's graphically violent in unpredictable ways which is why I would let a mature high school student read it but I would have reservations over anyone younger. One of the main characters of the story is a psychotic vigilante known as Rorschach. His demeanor is calm but his techniques of interrogation and self-defense are simple, effective, and stomach-turning. He kills and maims people with the bored demeanor of someone waiting for his clothes to dry at the laundromat. For weapons and tools, he uses whatever is on hand like hair spray or his own clothing. He throws a cafeteria chafing dish full of hot food in someone's face. Another of his victims has a drinking glass crushed inside his fist. He stabs a street bully in the eye with a lit cigarette. Rorschach creatively uses a refrigerator to terrorize and interrogate an elderly man. This sort of stuff is not fodder for young children.

Rorschach is not the only disturbing character in the book: Edward Blake, also known as The Comedian, is a costumed vigilante turned government agent. He is one of the most amoral characters ever to cross a page of fiction; however, when compared to Rorschach, his behavior is the sort of thuggish brutality you'd expect from Nazi concentration camp guards. By his own admission, Blake has merrily murdered and raped his way through life, regardless of age or gender of his victims. His thoughtless murder of an inconvenient pregnant girlfriend is characteristic of his behavior throughout his 45 year career as a professional thug. I would be uncomfortable if I let an impressionable 14 year old read the pregnant girlfriend murder scene or Blake's attempted rape scene.

There's another reason to possibly restrict this work to more mature teens and older: full-frontal male nudity and some sexual scenes which are not explicit but are highly suggestive regardless. The male nudity concerns a character who is the only real "super" being among a cast of normal humans dressed up as costumed crime fighters. Jon Osterman was changed into a blue-skinned deus-ex-machina by an accidental exposure to a particle physics experiment. Imparted with god-like powers, he gradually loses touch with his humanity. One symptom of his increasing alienation is his implicit attitude toward the necessity of clothing. He no longer needs to wear any clothes so why should he? In the privacy of his own government laboratory, he doesn't bother with clothes anymore. When he makes his final break from humanity and the planet earth, he abandons clothes forever. Osterman's approach to optional clothing leads to several pages of this tall blue-skinned character in the nude, though the sparseness of detail and the unexciting presentation of his genitals is hardly the stuff that Playgirl Magazine is made of. The exposure of this character in the buff is about as exciting as the final coven scene in Roman Polanski's Macbeth with its room full of naked unkept witch women of various ages and states of sagging flesh and flab. Frankly, spying on the boys skinny-dipping at summer camp did a lot more for me than the male nudity in The Watchmen. Regardless, if this sort of thing is important to you, you need to consider it when deciding whether you want your kids reading this graphic novel.

I find the sexually suggestive scenes more disturbing than the tall blue guy in the buff. Despite the omission of exposed private parts, the art of The Watchmen is so good at suggestion that covering up is almost irrelevant. The scene of Eddie Blake fumbling with his pants in the Sally Jupiter rape scene is sufficiently evocative that I would not want any junior high school-aged daughter of mine to read it, especially if she was as impressionable as I was at her age. Another suggestive scene is where the boy Rorschach interrupts his mother the whore and her john in the act. The art is good enough that the tawdry sexual offering of Rorschach's mother in her slip is more suggestive than showing her nude would have been. While lacking the filthy feel of the scene with Rorschach's mother, the make-out scene with Jon Osterman and Laurie Jupiter suggests just enough to send even the most boring imagination south of the naval, despite the fact that all you see is Laurie from the neck up and Jon's very expressive hands.

I know that kids these days are getting exposed to sexual and violent content at younger and younger ages and that you may think I'm making mountains out of molehills. Maybe in Boston or New York there are lots of kids mature enough at younger ages to handle something like Watchmen; however, in the small Idaho town where I live, I wouldn't even think of handing this splendid piece of visual literature to any of the teenagers I know. Most of them have been raised in Mormon families with very conservative sexual and moral values compared to those common in the suburbs of California or the east coast. Many of these kids have never been to an R rated movie. What's acceptable in LA or DC is very different from what's acceptable in rural Idaho, South Dakota and inland Texas. I'm not saying that kids shouldn't learn about sex or the existence of graphic violence. I am saying that you should take the time to look at what your kids are watching on TV and reading online or in books, and evaluating whether it is appropriate for their maturity level. As someone who grew up in a small town in a conservative family and went to a church-run school, I would have been disturbed by certain scenes in The Watchmen before the age of 17 or 18. Even at 26, after living in New York City and Los Angeles, I found certain scenes in Watchmen disturbing – and by that age I was no longer an innocent. So read this book, all of it, and then evaluate if you want your teenagers reading it. And remember, once your kids reach the legal age of majority, you no longer have a say in what they read, regardless of their maturity or lack thereof. So be cautious but also try to be fair.

Other Comments: Granted mainline American comics have had their share of conflicted heroes like Spiderman and characters skirting the realm of true bete noire like the X-Men's Jane Grey in the late 70s; but the characters in The Watchmen were really the first to cross the line en masse out of two-dimensional superhero comics of the mid-20th century and into real literature. The costumed crime fighters in Watchmen are believably real in comparison to the perfection of someone like Superman; and as a group, they display interesting to frightening imperfections that make it clear we've left the comic book self-censorship of 1950s far behind. Consider Rorschach who is one of the most twisted and fascinating characters ever conceived in a work of fiction. He has an uncompromising black-and-white sense of right and wrong which eventually lands him on the wrong side of the law. He is clearly not right in his head as the unaware victim and product of his horrendous upbringing. As an unskilled garment district worker and a loner with no family, the maladapted Walter Kovacs is the kind of person that most of us would avoid if possible. Then one day at his job, he made a full-face mask using a space-age fabric that behaved like a 3D inkblot in constant motion. He considers his mask to be his real face, the face of Rorschach, the confident agent of a strict morality who is effective though brutal to his victims. This is Rorschach who once trapped a child killer and pedophile inside a house which Rorschach then set it on fire because the murderer had destroyed enough evidence that he would be acquitted if he went to trial.

When wearing his real face, Rorschach has power. He achieves respect, he gains the ear of several people who matter, and he even finds some friends – the one thing that Walter Kovacs never had. Dan Dreiberg, also known as the second Owlman, has been Rorschach's friend and occasional partner. He is also Rorschach's perfect foil. Dreiberg is one of the most decent characters you could ever run into - in fiction or real life. He's an affluent man raised in affluent circumstance. In contrast to the short, scrawny and unkept Walter Kovacs, Dreiberg is tall and good-looking; and while he is just a bit round in the stomach in his middle age, it is obvious that Dreiberg is a well-built and fit man. The contrast and interaction between these two characters gives the book a lot of its dramatic tension. Rorschach is easily the most complex and interesting character in Watchmen.

The Watchmen is the only graphic novel to win a Hugo and three Eisners and four Kirby awards. These are the top awards in comics and in science fiction. Only the Sandman series is in the same class with a World Fantasy Award and 18 Eisners. While not part of the original series, a Gaiman-penned Sandman spinoff novella, The Dream Hunters, was nominated for a Hugo. It is somewhat difficult to make comparisons between the two series since The Watchmen was a one-year 12-issue run in the mid-80s while the Sandman series put out 75 issues published over seven years. The Sandman story had longer exposure and profited by following the trail that the The Watchmen had blazed. Would Gaiman's Sandman have done as well if Watchmen had not gone before it? I am inclined to think not.

I've seen several annotated guides for Watchmen but I prefer the one online at http://www.arschkrebs.de/watchmen/annotations/ the best.