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The Kingdom #2: Bad Comics as Opportunities Lost

Some comics reveal their true badness by contrast to the material they intend to treat (and which, subsequently, they fail to live up to so profoundly that, to the reader, it can feel like a massive betrayal).

The betrayal can take various forms, including a central one where the event itself serves to undo some previous resolution in interlinked comics. Returning Jean Grey from the dead served to betray readers of the Dark Phoenix sequence in X-Men. Day of Judgment mainly served to undo the events of the Emerald Twilight event. And our example, The Kingdom #2, served to betray a number of things, including DC's commitment to a single cohesive timestream.

Many readers - myself included - don't much fret over whether DC comics occur in a universe or a multiverse (including hairsplitting variants like those provided by the plot device of "Hypertime"). A second betrayal has less to do with the single- or multiple-continuity model and more with the completeness and resolution of Kingdom Come.

Where you have a completed story, a sequel can either build something new in a related setting, or reopen issues closed by the precedent piece. In the latter case, a greater storytelling burden rests on the writer, since he runs a risk of screwing up a carefully-balanced story ending. Where a writer has some greater height to achieve, undoing the earlier finish means an improved overall work; but where the sequel simply becomes less coherent in the endgame sequence, the later work can essentially wreck both itself and, to a lesser extent, what came before.

One Problem with Event Books

Event books sometimes end badly. A combination of factors can cause this. In one scenario, the artist can't keep up with the necessary pace through the length of time necessary to create all installments. In another scenario, the writers began with an inadequate plan and never quite figured out how to tie things up. In yet another scenario, someone gets sick of the project before it finishes and either bails out, forcing last-minute substitutions of talent, or completes it with a visible lack of enthusiasm.

This means an event piece can start robustly, proceed with vigor, then end, dead-flat. Some events that ended more weakly than they should have include the Infinity Gauntlet event, the Death and Return of Superman event, and, of course, the Kingdom event.

Where an event book follows another event book, another link exists in a storytelling chain, and therefore another point at which the chain can break. The risk, in such a scenario, increases in direct proportion to the esteem in which audiences have received the prior piece. A story that builds on Kingdom Come provides a great distance to fall, and, with the awkward and cobbled-together ending of The Kingdom #2, we see quite a failure indeed, one which, in spite of the prestigious talents dedicated to this event, earns it a place in the canon of Truly Awful Comics.

The Source Material and the Scenario

Kingdom Come dealt with the impact of superhumans on humanity, especially in the context of a great failure of will on the part of superhumans of goodwill. At a key juncture, Superman - and an entire faction he represented - did nothing, and a nihilistic superhuman culture of street fights and wanton destruction of property and live prevailed.

From this springboard, a human narrator embarked on a series of visions and encounters predicting certain events from Revelation, in which superheroes would play a central role. At first, the ending of Superman's self-imposed exile after an earlier loss of face seemed to promise a barrier against the great conflict on a metaphorical Plain of Megiddo; but quickly McCay's visions reveal that Superman's presence will serve to catalyze the coming doom, not avert it.

Superman began a mission to contain and undo the superhuman anarchy that wrecks cities and countries. His program involved providing two options to superhumans: They could join his team and crusade to contain rogue superhumans, or they could become prisoners that reeducation would ultimately return to the fold. In this second option most of the danger lay, because the execution did not come off as well as planned; once the rogue superhumans reached a certain critical mass of numbers in a prison - contemptuously referred to as the gulag, although survivors of the Soviet gulag might prefer the relatively benign surroundings depicted in this story - they became an army adequate in power to overpower their captors and break free of their prison.

Thus, the entire utopian scheme crumbled at the gulag, its weakest point, and most of the superhumans on the planet met to contain the damage of a supervillain riot. Panicking humanity, fearful of what could become of all the rogue superhumans assembled as a single horde bent on destruction, dropped the bomb on this unruly crowd, destroying most, but not all, of the superhumans on the planet.

Superman, having failed in his role as a protector and having played eyewitness to the extermination of many of his friends, thereupon began a short-lived tantrum of revenge against the United Nations general assembly, until McKay, delivered on location by the Spectre, essentially talked him off the ledge. Then the surviving superhumans resolved to forge an altogether different - and noticeably un-messianic - relationship with the people they had sworn, but failed, to protect.

This resolved, and the story completed - and capped with an optimistic sequence where Wonder Woman and Superman reveal to Batman that they will soon have a child for whom they wish him to serve as godfather - Kingdom Come ended. DC should have left well enough alone at that point.

With The Kingdom, however, DC reopened the some of the closed and resolved matters of Kingdom Come. Once having reopened them, depending on the finesse of the surgery, writers could reclose them without leaving a mark, or, having ineptly handled the surgery, could leave a massive scar. DC rightly chose Mark Waid as the most likely writer to achieve the former goal, but things didn't work as they might have, and the ending of The Kingdom stood out as a crusty and infected wound rather than a clean sealed operation.

Soft Landings and Crashes

To complete a story somewhat resembles landing an aircraft in that doing it right requires some skill, and in that a haphazard or incautious attempt can result in the vessel spiraling out of control or even crashing to the tarmac in a flaming ruin of incinerated particles of hardware and passenger flesh.

Given the story that The Kingdom began with, one might easily conclude that it did not, indeed, land anywhere near the runway. The original story - Gog's relentless lust to destroy Superman - became an irrelevancy, no more really than a footnote, by the event's ending.

Consider: The tale began with the spirits of dead Supermen in the afterlife, comparing notes about what happened, then explored the origins of Gog, the self-appointed destroyer of Superman, then proceeded to the abduction of the newborn child of the Kingdom Come Superman and Wonder Woman. With Gog's manifest power on such a ludicrous scale, the intervention of many heroes became necessary, with the younger-generation figures like Ibn al-Xuffasch, Kid Flash, Offspring, and Nightstar proceeding on a quest to retrieve various artifacts that supposedly have the power to resist Gog's campaign of destruction.

By the ending of this tale, however, at the tail end of the one last big fight scene, we find what amounts to a huge changing of subject. The story no longer really deals with Gog, no longer really with Superman, and no longer with any of the principal characters who spent the last five issues of this six-piece tale building up to this ending. Instead, the curtain parts, and a new (metaphorical) actor, "Hypertime," enters the stage and brushes the superheroes to the wings, with the exception of a badly clad and somewhat annoying narrator who provides long-winded but necessary exposition to clarify the concept of the upstart that just took over the story.

The Story as Pretext for Introducing a Plot Device for Other Stories

If one really examined what the comics that collectively constituted the "Kingdom" event, and then asked what these books intended to do, he would very likely suggest that they simply framed a tale leading up to the introduction of the Hypertime concept. Thus, none of the events that occurred from The Kingdom #1, through the various one-shots featuring alternate-future DC characters, to The Kingdom #2 meant much at all.

To some degree, this suggests that DC would have done better not to bother and used one of the subsequent Hypertime stories, such as the "Hypertension" arc in Superboy, as a better vehicle for introducing the concept. Alternately, since the birth of Hypertime served as The Kingdom's raison d'être, the work might better have dedicated itself more to this end than exploring the resentments a disposable and hopelessly ugly villain as he raged against Superman.

In this, we have the essence of the badness of The Kingdom #2. The story ran one way for five issues and then, come the end sequence, some sleight-of-hand occurred. After the bait of the original story, a switch substituted some piece about Hypertime. And all open issues closed, not organically, but through a series of unsatisfying deus ex machina actions.

"Just Imagine!"

Waid has definitely done better work. However, rather than avoiding the subject of the overall flatness of the "Kingdom" concept compared to the density of Kingdom Come, he didn't politely cough and leave the room (to save both himself and readers some embarrassment). Instead, he went on and on about the wonderfulness of the revelations at the end of the work.

The previous story having foreclosed without closure, the denouement explored the wonderfulness of it all, of the notion of a universe in which everything can - and does - happen. While the hybrid Amazon / Kryptonian with Phantom Stranger pretensions but a great need for a better tailor went on at length about the promise of a plural reality, he stopped just short of taking the characters into the offices of DC Comics and introducing the principal players to the artists, writers, and editors. His enthusiasm, however, did not have the contagious quality that Waid must have intended for it; and his declarations of promise mainly served not to endear but to annoy.

For those fans who resent the overall flatness of The Kingdom #2, "Just imagine!" sums up the balance of their objections. Looked at in the scanned panel here, it seems somewhat like an irony, a sarcasm, or even a taunt. It must seem even worse to that portion of comics fandom who resent Hypertime as a threat to a coherent shared universe or as a cheap short-cut open to the abuses of the old DC polyverse model.

In a sense, "Just imagine!" has become a sound byte of derision in the same way that President Nixon's "I am not a crook!" became the instrument of too many black-humor jokes to count. The Kingdom, at this point, failed in its objective through a shift in purpose in its last moments, and "Just imagine!" invites readers to do precisely that - to imagine the story that could have, but failed to appear, within its pages.

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Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 235. Completed 04-MAR-2001.