4.
But the "people", and specifically the "people" of American, aren't just the helpless victims of "Kingdom Come". They're actually the folks who are blame for the exile of Superman and the subsequent rise to power of Magog and his thousands and thousands of city-flattening fellows. And in a very real sense, the women and men of America are shown to be entirely responsible for the terrors which afflict their everyday lives in the present day of "Kingdom Come". It's all their fault! There's never any question in the text that this is so either, as we can see in the following conversation between Superman and Wonder Woman;
Wonder Woman; "(Magog is) out of control."
Superman; "I tried to tell them that years ago."
Wonder Woman: "And they didn't listen. I know. Stop punishing them."
There's no question of the people's guilt here. The only issue is whether Superman can forgive the people who didn't "listen" to him all those years ago. Everyone else didn't "listen", everyone else was wrong, and it's Kal-El, and only Kal-El, who has the right to forgive them. And the reader, who experiences "Kingdom Come" largely through this Superman's point of view, can only empathise with Clark's raw sense of betrayal and wonder what appalling sin every single man, woman and child in America has committed that Superman should have abandoned them to their suffering. Indeed, the sins of America's citizenry must have been biblical in nature and scale, since Superman has also turned his back upon all the children who've been born in the ten years since the schism between protector and people. It's not that Kal-El doesn't realise the degree of the suffering that the world is undergoing; he has, after all, a ten-storey high wall of news channels apparently turned on all the time in his Fortress of Solitude. Superman has, in truth, been sitting watching the world and the terrible metahuman crisis and yet he's knowingly continued his policy of abandoning everyone else to their supposedly deserved fate. (If it wasn't deserved, how could Kal-El bear to watch, though, of course, how could he bear to do so anyway?)
5.
So, "Kingdom Come" makes it absolutely clear that the people of America are to blame for the metahuman apocalypse that's been afflicting them and indeed the world beyond their shores, for longer than even the seven years of plague in Pharaoh's Egypt. And there's also no doubt about the nature of the horrendous crime that everyone committed, as Batman explains in his best bad-tempered and snotty fashion to Superman after meeting his old friend for the first time in a decade;
"Once ordinary folks decided you and I too gentle and old-fashioned to face the challenges of the 21st century. They wanted their "heroes" stronger and more ruthless."
Now that does seem a pretty convincing argument in favour of walking away from one's country and its people, and indeed from the entire world and all of those billions of people who live there. Apparently "ordinary folks" somehow amassed and expressed a decision to the effect that the likes of the former "World's Finest" team were "too gentle and old-fashioned". To a comic book fan, of course, and indeed to most of us who've been happily immersed in contemporary popular culture for all of our lives, this is heresy. The people took against Superman and Batman and decided that they were too good and decent??!! Well, no wonder Superman disappeared for a life alone except for a small menagerie of pets in the frozen north. Who could blame him, the poor thing?
But it is worth asking how these many and various "folks" came together and expressed this decision, and what sanction and force this decision carried. The answer to that can be found in the pathetic Magog's speech to Superman as the reunited Justice League continue their policy of kidnapping and imprisoning women and men not convicted in any court in any land against their will. There-in we learn that it was, in large part, public opinion as expressed through the media which drove Superman from his post as champion of truth, justice and the American way;
Magog: "Vox populi, man. Out with the old, in with the new. Brighter, faster, meaner. Next year's model, that's what the hungry crowd always wants."
That "hungry crowd" drove out their established superheroes by apparently not liking them as much as they had before, while, and this seems to be the straw that broke the Superman's back, expressing a preference for younger and more violent metahuman protectors. This sin of ingratitude can be seen to have eventually damned the ungrateful and "hungry crowd" as much as it has so diminished Superman, but it is also worth stopping and asking a few questions about what this public decision actually meant. It was, after all, a reflection of a fearful shift in the public's mood in the face of some terrifying super-villain atrocities, and as such mirrored exactly how most cultures respond to violent and unpredictable assaults. Superman would know this, of course, being a master of world if not intergalactic history, as well as the possessor of all the knowledge of the social sciences, but his public rejection in the wake of Lois Lane's death obviously unhinged him. (That he remained unhinged for ten years despite his possessing the knowledge of how badly he was needed is less easy to understand, or forgive, of course.) Similarly, the acquittal of Magog for the murder of the Joker ought to be seen in such a light; societies rarely if ever become more liberal and humane when they're scared, though Superman is again shown taking this disagreement with his apparently-divine opinion as a mortal insult.
Of course, the reader will probably know that Mr Waid and Mr Ross were actually commenting upon the comic book fan's rejection of more traditional heroes in the marketplace of the mid-Nineties in favour of the post-Dark Knight, post-Image breed of grim'n'gritty crime-fighters. But the problem with that meta-commentary is that it isn't buried in the sub-text of "Kingdom Come". Rather, Mr Waid's dialogue expresses a loathing for the mass of the comic books which dominated the market of the Nineties by placing his opinions of them into the text of his future-history of the DC Comics universe. And so, regardless of the fact that Mr Waid is using Batman to, as quoted above, express his severe disappointment at the contemporaneous taste of comic book readers in 1996/7, the sense of "Kingdom Come" relies on taking that dialogue at face value. The only explanations we have of why Superman and his generation of crime-fighters have scurried away from the limelight of their public roles lie in those comments designed to denigrate the comics Mr Waid and Mr Ross so evidently disapproved of. And these comments reveal how, as we'll discuss, the so-called "gentle and old-fashioned" Superman and Batman of "Kingdom Come" are actually quite despicable characters.
It's a considerable irony, that a book that's fuelled by a desire to explore and exalt the virtues of traditional superheroes should result in a story which paints Superman and his colleagues as self-obsessed, childish moral buffoons who walk away from a fearful America because they're not getting enough respect and love through the media. For though "Kingdom Come" eventually explains Superman's sins as being rooted in his decision to act like a "god", the type of "god" that Kal-El's behaviour mirrors is that of the Greco-Roman tradition, where the God's are juvenile and capricious and behave in their own narrow interests with little eye on the disinterested concerns of justice.
And this Superman, who we're told walked away from the DCU and left it to rot while watching its agonies from a safe distance for year upon year, isn't a young or inexperienced man. He's the Superman we've all known since childhood, the Superman who we've always had sold to us as a moral exemplar and a biblical pillar of wisdom. "Kingdom Come" doesn't present us with a Superman suffering some kind of understandable moral wobble so much as a man who stands in the middle of a society riven by anxiety, decides he's not getting enough love, and flies away in a sulk. There's no other interpretation. The going got tough and he ran away in a hissy fit. He's not the noble hero in exile waiting to be called back into action. He's the ignoble antagonist who turned his back on "ordinary folks" when they most needed him, when they needed a good example and a persevering nature to comfort and inspire them.
And how "Kingdom Come" constantly skirts round this, while ignoring the fact that even if much of public opinion had shown favour for the violence of a new breed of hero, many folks still wouldn't have. Clark would undoubtedly have heard or read the story of Abraham bargaining with God for the lives of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah when he was a boy, but he hasn't learnt from it. For even if most of America had become, accordingly to Clark's apparent judgement, disgustingly corrupt, Abraham's words to his Lord should surely have informed and tempered Kal-El's anger; "Wilt though also destroy the righteous with the wicked?"
And the unborn too, we might add.
6.
It might be wondered what attitude the Superman of "Kingdom Come" has towards democracy, given that he's always been sold as a representative of the "American Way". There's certainly every reason to suspect that Jonathan Kent would be incredibly disappointed with how his adopted son's world-view has evolved as time has passed. Because Clark's attitude in "Kingdom Come" is profoundly anti-democratic, from beginning to end. Quite contrary to the general understanding of the book, Superman does not convincingly embrace his sins and learn from them at the end of "Kingdom Come", and that's a point we'll discuss shortly. Instead, from the beginning to the end of Mr Waid and Mr Ross's epic, Superman stands outside of the society he's supposed to be part of and makes his decisions regardless of the principles that society is founded upon. This is a truth that obscured in part by the fact that Superman's final disillusionment with America and all of her people, prior to his sulking off into a self-imposed exile, is the consequence of a trial jury refusing to convict the brutal Magog for murder. The jurors are in truth glad that Magog has done away with the Joker and as a consequence acquit him. Superman's response to the audacity of folks to have a different view of things to him is to, as Magog later describes, fly "off with (his) cape between his legs". Yet, how would a true democrat respond to such a situation, as opposed to someone who turns his back upon all of those who rely so desperately upon him, as Superman does?
A democrat, we might presume, would learn from the people's opinion as expressed through the media and in the law-courts without ever mistaking such for the absolute will of the people. A democrat would be appalled but sympathetic, and would see this as a moment in which the national debate needed the weight of Superman's voice and example present within it. A democrat would understand the people's legitimate fears and work with the state to construct better systems of preventing crime, of catching criminals, and of keeping them locked up as long as it is legally appropriate too. A democrat would, in truth, do everything that Superman didn't. A democrat certainly wouldn't turn his back on the people because they dared to disagree with him. Disagreement and the ever-changing nature of the people's will is, of course, the very stuff of the American way, if not always America's practise.
This Superman is a terrible example from beginning to end, a despicably self-obsessed and obtuse figure who causes one disastrous crisis after another to befall America and the World and who yet somehow is presented as the Superman, our Superman, the best of us all and the hope of us all, as a good bloke suffering great pain and making a few serious but quite understandable and forgivable mistakes.
The various Supermen of Seigel and Moore and Morrison, among many others, wouldn't kick this Clark's arse for him in response to the terrible things he does, or, indeed, for the vitally important things he doesn't. Violence is never the way forward for a true Superman when other options are at hand, anymore than running away for a decade is. But they'd all be seriously worried for this Superman, and profoundly disappointed in him too. And I'd expect that they'd want to have a good old fireside chat with him to help this take on Clark see that if there is a single antagonist in "Kingdom Come", from the first page to the last, it's the Superman of those pages, and not Magog at all, or, indeed, the sinful and yet helpless American people.
to be continued;
If you're new here and you've been gracious and patient enough to reach this point, I wish you a splendid day and the good fortune of sticking together. And if you've been here before, I wish you a splendid day and the good fortune of sticking together too, of course. Huzzah! and take care.
Coming soon; more on Kingdom Come and then, I think, a look at Brian Michael Bendis's rather radical reinvention of Ultimate Spider-Man.
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