It may be DC needs to wall off Earth-22, the Kingdom Come dimension, and never let another writer or artist near it.
There’s an obvious draw, of course, in writer Mark Waid returning to his landmark Elseworlds in Batman/Superman: World’s Finest Vol. 4: Return to Kingdom Come. Almost 30 years since Kingdom Come — among other things a rebuttal of the ultra-violent, ultra-designed characters of the 1990s — one might hope that Waid has something new to say, some reflection on where superheroes are now versus where they’ve been.
Unfortunately, that really doesn’t manifest. As a rough prequel, Return barely gets into the most salient parts of Kingdom Come. The trappings are there — Alex Ross’s dynamic character designs — but I left feeling as though this could have been any alt-universe story of Superman and Batman meeting any alternate versions of themselves, not to mention how minuscule a role is played by any other Kingdom Come hero. At times, too, Waid comes close to (if not outright) contradicting Kingdom Come’s continuity, which seems an awful big gaffe for a story written by Waid himself. And it’s another in a string of Kingdom Come sequels that have never had the acuity to stand next to the original.
There’s no denying that Waid’s World’s Finest has been a tidal wave across the DC publishing line that’s reimagined the DC Universe in its wake. But with each volume I’ve felt increasingly disillusioned by the title itself — looks great, love the 1980s DCU setting, but without much forward momentum, and now the headline Kingdom Come storyline has slumped to its ending. If I cast this in comparison to DC’s “Superman/Batman” titles previous, World’s Finest looks a lot better — but I’d been hoping for more from this title than incidental Batman and Superman team-up stories.
[Review contains spoilers]
Return kicks off with our Superman and Batman pitched into Kingdom Come’s future, where they find a massive graveyard of heroes — including one for Red Robin Dick Grayson. We’re on unsure footing already, because while this seems to be the burial ground of heroes killed in Kingdom Come’s finale, when a nuclear bomb explodes over the Justice League’s gulag, Red Robin notably wasn’t one of the victims.
[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]
It’s possible that the Earth-22 featured in this story isn’t meant to be the Kingdom Come Earth proper, just one that resembles it. It’s also possible — and this is the solution that seems more sensible to me — that what Superman and Batman saw was an alternate future based on the scheme of this book's mad god Gog being successful, and that future is now cancelled out with Gog’s defeat at the end. But the book makes neither of these clear; our Superman is still yelling at the Kingdom Come Superman about the deaths after the fight with Gog, such that the audience never gets the definite message “that future won’t happen any more” (plus the alt-future’s resemblance to Kingdom Come’s canonical future).
In that way, Return to Kingdom Come feels a bit sloppy; the original text is there, it’s obviously going to be held up against this prequel, and yet the details aren’t pristine. And more: Waid uses Gog from the also-sequel Justice Society: Thy Kingdom Come, but offers no hint as to how Gog’s apparent death here relates to his presence there. Return turns on the arrival of Darkseid and his promise of future warfare, but in the minutiae of Kingdom Come, Darkseid has been overthrown and replaced by his son Orion. Waid could have expanded on or nodded to this, but instead leaves the original and prequel discordant. Characters like Wonder Woman seem to die here but are very much alive in Kingdom Come.
Our Superman and Batman arrive to Earth-22 in search of Superman’s former sidekick David Sikela, aka Boy Thunder, now taken on by Gog and fashioned to be his Magog. David is angry over his perception of Superman having abandoned him, and the Kingdom Come Superman and Batman are swiftly convinced that our heroes are villains. But a lot of that is due to Gog’s mind control, such that we don’t get much real interaction between the doppelgänger sets of heroes, making this not much of a team-up (Waid’s original sequel, The Kingdom, handled the meeting between the original and Kingdom Come Big Three better). Nor can we really assess the validity or not of David’s grievances, clouded as they are by Gog’s influence.
In the end, Magog kills Gog to save the gathered heroes, and he’s swiftly and soundly rebuked for it by our Superman and Batman, with the Kingdom Come Captain Marvel and Green Lantern piling on. DC’s prime tenet is that killing is wrong, but Waid’s depiction of Superman’s moralizing feels “holier than thou,” given that Superman was not a particularly good mentor to David in Batman/Superman: World’s Finest Vol. 2: Strange Visitor.
With shades of Jason Todd, Superman and Batman thrust David into the role of superhero seemingly solely because he had powers, never considering if he was a good psychological fit for the life, which he’s continually proven he’s not. This doesn’t seem to me a statement on Waid’s part — the sense I get from the book is that Waid intends to depict Superman as wholly right and Magog as wholly wrong — but I couldn’t help think the fault was less David’s and more the heroes who got him into this.
I might be wrong; maybe with the next volume of World’s Finest, we’ll find Superman having a big re-think about his experiences with David and what he learned in the Kingdom Come universe. But as far as Batman/Superman: World’s Finest Vol. 4: Return to Kingdom Come, it feels like neither the characters nor the audience learned anything new or were in any way changed, and that’s not where you want to be when Mark Waid writes the Kingdom Come characters for the first time in about 30 years. I’m more hesitant now about this title than I wanted to be; Lex Luthor and the Joker coming up sounds like my cup of tea, but Mr. Mxyzptlk and Bat-Mite just as easily might not be.
[Includes original and variant covers]
> Return turns on the arrival of Darkseid and his promise of future warfare, but in the minutiae of Kingdom Come, Darkseid has been overthrown and replaced by his son Orion.
ReplyDeleteThat... is a really good point. I was sufficiently engaged in the story that it didn't even occur to me, but you're absolutely right. And wasn't that Orion page a special addition for the trade? You'd think that much creative hoopla might have stuck in Waid's memory.
UNLESS: Grant Morrison had established that Darkseid and the Fourth World exist outside of the multiverse. Perhaps, in the move from hypertime to the Orrery of Worlds, Earth-22 no longer has a "future" Darkseid, just this emanation of the one true god of evil. (How's that for a Baldy?)