Kingdom Come
Winner of five Eisner and Harvey Awards, KINGDOM COME is the best-selling graphic novel from acclaimed writer Mark Waid and superstar painter Alex Ross. Set just after the dawn of the 21st Century, in a world spinning inexorably out of control, comes this grim tale of youth versus experience, a tradition versus change, while asking the timeless question: what defines a hero? KINGDOM COME is a riveting story pitting the old guard-Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and their peers-against a new, uncompromising generation of heroes in the final war against each other, to determine nothing less than the future of the planet.
Stats for nerds
1recommend
2mentions
2people
2022–2024years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- My first read was Kingdom Come (released 2006). It felt like such a great crazy tale that might have taken place in our times (even though it was absurd & fantastic); mall culture & hooliganism & factionalism. It felt like such a a snapshot of Bush II era to me. (Little did I expect what was to happen next in the world! How much we would fall!)
Drowned World was the next thing I picked up, and wow what a damned book! Nueronic time and these people slipping backwards towards it; it's such a wild psychological trip. That speaks so viscerally to the many compacted confused layers inside us, earlier forms baked deep into civilization.
- To chime in about how the article is cherry picking rather than doing deeper analysis: Dark and gritty superhero deconstruction was a product of the '80s and maybe early '90s, and then the '00s had the gritty reboot/reimagining trend for TV shows and movies in general. You also had a lot of prestige drama doing gritty realism with complex, dark antihero male protagonists starting in that era, which kicked into high gear in the '10s. Sopranos to Breaking Bad. Also shows where society was the gritty complex realistic antihero. The Wire to Game of Thrones.
I wouldn't say contemporary culture is any more unhappy than that era, it's just harder to read because there's no GOT type "event" series that everyone is watching right now. Maybe there will be a new cultural phenomenon, or maybe with this glut of streaming content, there won't be. (And if we look at blockbuster films, so many of them are shiny happy Disney-MCU fare, which are definitely not dark and gritty.) It just feels like right now we have a huge array of choices. When presented with that variety, it's really hard to say that it's generally more or less happy.
I do wonder what will replace comic books as the dominant subgenre of pop entertainment. I was hoping we'd get a reconstruction trend with comics like Astro City or Kingdom Come getting adapted, but in writing the previous section, I realized there's no need. For every dark and gritty realistic The Boys, there's multiple Disney+ shows. Batman is a character who's inherently going to have darkness. The majority of superhero comic screen media is escapist and optimistic, and this not-study is cherry-picking.
