7.
There is a difference, of course, between a healthy touch of moral ambiguity and a state of utter ethical confusion. And "Kingdom Come" is so consistently and so thoroughly morally confused that it's actually quite ethically incoherent unless we might want to consider it as an argument against democracy and in favour of one kind of tyranny or another. Take, for example, the scene in chapter two set in an unnamed bar full of superhumans behaving at first sight, in the words of the secretly-onlooking Norman McCay, like "... monsters ... beasts!" And yet, for a rather large bar filled quite literally to the ceiling of so many of these apparent "monsters" and "beasts", it must be said that Superman's appearance in their midst affects a remarkably swift transition to silence and restraint. Even the man of steel's demand that he wants one and all present "to join the League ... willingly", and that "Those who don't ... will be dealt with." is met with a remarkable quiet. This is, after all, the Superman who once
consistently refused to use his powers in a violent fashion before disappearing from sight for ten long years ago. The degree of respect and fear that he inspires from this crowd of apparently uncontrollable metahumans is very strange indeed, and it's certainly a response incompatible with what we've been told of how this new breed of superfolk enjoy nothing so much as a grand melee. The absence of even an odd snicker or swear word during and after his grand speech seems to only say that the great mass of these metahumans aren't anything like the irredeemably world-destroying force that the reader is expected to believe in . It's not that they're smiling or welcoming or even to any degree pleased to be being lectured by him. But there's an awful lot of them and they're surely backing down. Are these folks beyond the pale or not?
It does seem as if Superman carries a very low opinion of the threat offered by this so-easily intimidated audience. He arrives alone, he expects to be listened to. His message is short and his solution simple. They're to do as they're told, and he'll tell them what to do. It's a remarkably straight-forward and uncomplicated solution to the problems which we're told have apparently drained the human race of its very "initiative" . In short, the salad days of metahumans hanging out with their fellows, getting hammered and then hammering each other as well as the good folks outside are over.
And Kal-El isn't just re-establishing a measure of peace to the land of the free and the brightly-costumed, he's also bringing some puritanical restraint to the ungodly of the metahuman nation. "This doesn't help." he says disdainfully, upon spying the horrors of alcohol on sale in the private bar, and he heat-visions it out of existence as any good prohibition-era cop might, had they happened to come from Krypton. Establishing a lasting regime of order on the streets of America and the world beyond is obviously not the limit of this Superman's ambitions. He wants all that partying amongst consenting super-powered adults on private property to stop too. He's not concerned with who's been naughty or nice. He cares not a whit if some metahumans have spent the decade drinking the days away without hurting anyone except themselves. Everyone is going to behave themselves and everyone is going to play the loyal and well-drilled superhero, or else.
That Kal-El has just himself spent ten years living for himself and ignoring the public duty that he demands from all other meta-humans seems to have escaped him. If he does recall the fact, he doesn't let it erode his belief that Superman has the moral right to demand of others that which he didn't demand of himself.
It appears to be a scene meant by Mr Ross and Mr Waid to establish Superman as a thoroughly decent private individual who's rather unfortunately stumbled into ruling the world solely through his undeniably good intentions. But on a second and third reading, it all seems rather to intensify the gathering impression that Superman is a character who rather disturbingly embodies Mencken's definition of puritanism;
"The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy."
He doesn't approve of the media, he doesn't approve of the "hungry" public, he doesn't approve of alcohol, he doesn't appreciate being talked back to by the younger generation; Kingdom Come sees a grumpy old Superman expressing in one way or another a sequence of assumptions that belong more to the early Twentieth Century than they do to one hundred years later. He has absolutely every right and reason to loathe what this America has become, of course, but all the same, he's unlike any Superman we've ever seen before. Put plainly, this is not a modest and tolerant man, and he expects to be listened to.
8.
For the sequence to work, the reader is clearly intended to be concerned and alienated by the bar's various and be-costumed patrons while impressed by the moral rectitude and bravery of the man of steel. And events are deliberately sequenced in order to stress Superman's stern magnanimity as well as the severity of his morals and the breadth of his arms. He is, after all, offering to conscript everyone, good or decidedly evil, into the hallowed ranks of the Justice League Of America. This is a tremendous privilege, it would seem, and it's a gesture which seems to utterly disguise that fact that he's pressing these folks into his private service without either their having a say or the nation they belong to getting to express an opinion on the matter either. (He's not, tellingly, demanding that folks give themselves up to the police in order to be tried according to the law.) It certainly sounds as if he's offering everyone, good or evil or just confused, a very fine deal indeed. It's as if a particularly strict but fundamentally decent teacher overseeing a school holiday were asking his regrettably drunken students to shape up and go tidy their rooms. Everything, it seems, will be forgotten and perhaps even forgiven as a result of such compliance, with all sins chalked up to a learning experience.
Superman, these panels tell us, is tough, and brave, but more than fair. He may fail in his endeavours, but he'll never deserve to loose our respect. We're certainly expected to stand more with him than against him, despite the fact that his policy isn't "do right by the law" but rather "join my gang, do as I say and you'll be forgiven anything".
And in such a way, it's fantastically simple to loose sight of exactly what this Superman's solution is to the problem of a lawless class of superhumans bringing America to her knees. He is, in essence, charging head-on into a system characterised by a series of warring and super-powered gangs and declaring that the solution to the problem is for two gangs to be created where once
there were many. On the side of good, or what he assumes to be good, will be Superman's gang. On the other will be the baddies. And the solution will be for Superman's gang to fight with the others until one side is beaten to its knees and illegally locked up.
If anything was ever designed to intensify the conflict, if any policy had ever been put together to immediately raise the intensity and scale of the disorder, then this would surely be it.
9.
For a supposed democrat with a super-mind, Superman shows an odd understanding of the circumstances under which individuals are best able to come to mature and considered decisions. If I wanted to deliver an ultimatum to a large number of apparently disaffected and often violent women and men, I surely wouldn't stride into a private bar where they're mostly engaged in the business of getting thoroughly tanked up and start demanding their service. The bar may be an environment where many of his prey are all conveniently gathered together in one place, but they're partying as well as perhaps plotting, for heavens sake. This strategy doesn't show Superman's bravery so much as illustrate at best his stupidity and at worst his arrogance. If that congregation of metahumans had rioted at Superman's presence, he himself may not have survived, and a great deal of hurt and damage would presumably have occurred whether he did or not.
Or; this isn't a old fashioned American hero striding into the lion's den and demanding that all present do the right thing. This is an idiot. There's not a policewoman or man in the world who wouldn't look at such a scene and shudder at the stupidity of it, if they could take it seriously enough to produce an emotional reaction at all. Drunken revellers on their own territory are never an appropriate audience for either a moral appeal or a fiercely delivered threat in the absence of overwhelming firepower and a willingness to use it at the drop of a shoulder or the curling of a lip.
But then, for a book which relies upon us believing that pretty much all of these metahumans are beyond control, being that they "no longer fight for the right. They fight simply to fight, their only foes each other ..", a great deal of the costumed folks at hand in the bar do seem rather harmless, if not in fact rather sweet. Indeed, they're often so benign that Superman soon doesn't seem like he's being brave at all, for he really does look like he's baiting schoolkids in fancy dress, albeit often the more difficult late adolescents from the vocational courses in the Sixth Form. Nightstar and Avia, for example, are clearly sweethearts. You'd trust them with your kittens, you really would. Superman only has to appear and demand that they surrender their entire lives to a cause he and he alone will define and they're all weak-kneed and ready to fall into line. "I feel like I was just asked to become the Thirteenth disciple!" squeals Avia, and it is hard not to feel that Superman hasn't over-estimated the threat many of these people pose. Even the clearly less starstruck and more aggressive metahumans on display here aren't showing any behaviour more disturbing than a bout of seriously disaffected scowling.
And although many of the worst of the super-powered troublemakers, such as Magog, are of course absent from the scene, it can't be said that we've been encouraged to feel any of the awe and respect that Mr Waid and Mr Ross obviously feel for Superman. Rather, he seems to be a somewhat terrifying and a deeply, deeply dangerous metahuman himself.
That bar is full of recognisable and nefarious superpeople, but it's Superman that seems to me to be the most dangerous, the most scary person there.
1o.
As Superman is positioned in the narrative of "Kingdom Come", he's a valiant conservative moral force which stands in opposition to a decadent society composed of the gutter press, feckless citizens and rude and disobedient children. His solution to the problem is indeed that of the arch reactionary everywhere, namely, a spell in the army. And like most reactionaries, Superman presumes that a dose of army discipline and the team-building qualities of a good solid punch-up under the direction of a morally-solid officer corp should sort out any problems there are. (Anyone who can't respond to that, of course, is obviously so weak-willed and confused that they belong in the Kansas Gulag.) It's a response that presumes that there are only two classes of human beings, namely those who think and behave as Superman does and expects everyone else
to, and the dangerously disruptive people who are not like us. Yet Superman is "offering" to takeconscript every metahuman into his new Justice League. Not just those super-folks who're young and have unknowingly flown through a lost-dog shelter or two, but the psychopaths, the political ideologues and the just-plain-nasty. Superman assumes that everyone he can get to join his League will respond to his example and become as he is. (Everyone else can be locked up and lectured until they're inspired by his goodness to similarly become as good as Superman.) It's no wonder that this League that he gathered with threats and menaces later turned to murderous methods. Firstly, it was composed of a vast range of individuals, some of whom were never going to reform, others of whom were simply not well suited to an existence in a para-military, and others yet who weren't going to step into line behind Kal-El for any reason other than their own advantage. Secondly, what sort of moral example was the process of threats, insults, violence and bullying that Superman used to recrut his new League anyway? How could he ever believe that such despicable behaviour could ever inspire entirely virtuous qualities?
The Superman of "Kingdom Come" clearly never knew anything of human rights, or indeed human psychology, and that's why pretty much everyone we see in the bar scene is quite dead by the end of "Kingdom Come". It's a truth that you'd never really know from the way that the book is written and drawn, but what's sold to us as both a tragedy and a learning experience for Superman in "Kingdom Come" isn't really anything of the kind. It's the story of how a ignorant and self-righteous man's hubris caused the deaths of thousands and thousands of people, and of how he was never criticised, let alone punished, for the shameful things he did.
11.
But the Children's Crusade that Superman leads, and which ends as all Children's Crusades must, is hardly just his responsibility alone. For who else in this world of "Kingdom Come" has been doing anything for this class of "thousands" and "thousands" of metahumans? We've already discussed the lack of evidence that the nations of this world have even stirred themselves to set up early-warning alarms for metahuman attacks, let alone developed the offensive capabilities to strike back. We might also point out that there seems to be no sign of any kind of social programme to try and reach these various troublesome superhumans. For though many of them are undoubtedly beyond help, many of them clearly aren't. As Nightstar and Avia alone show, a substantial number of these metahumans are no more than the superhuman equivilant of Amish kids trapped in a never-ending extension of Rumspringa.
Yet the meaning of "Kingdom Come" that we're sold is clearly that all of these metahumans - all of them , every one of them - are out of control and beyond help. Not a one has turned to the good, and not a one will either.
It reads like nothing so much as the DC Comics version of the kind of sermon fundamentalist preachers so famously gave during the heyday of Fifties rock'n'roll. Once these kids turn to the evils of those drums and that sex and violence, why, they'll never be good again. In rides Marlon Brando and the Wild Ones and each and every person under 25 in town disappears to their corruption and doom. They're all tainted and they're lost and only the likes of Preacher Kal-El can save them. As Mr Waid's words have already informed us, these new metahumans are seemingly beyond the saving; "Before Kansas, they at least had some sense of responsibility! Now, they haven't even that!"
But the reader can struggle for hours to find the slightest evidence that anyone on this superhuman-filled world has made the slightest effort to reach out to the metahumans. The value of creating social programmes to deal with the situation seems to have been entirely ignored, and ignored for longer than a decade too. Yet, even if that were so, it's impossible to believe that every single one of the thousands of metahumans on Earth would have turned to either murderous irresponsibility, flat-out villainly or apathy. There are no groups of human beings who are composed of nothing but idleness or evil. Those that would like to reduce the political process to "them" and "us", "good" and "bad", would love us to believe it's so, but it's plainly dangerous flim-flam, and it's an expression of a distasteful kind of moral reductionism which comics as much as any other fictional medium would do well to avoid.
13.
There's a moment at the end of the above-described sequence when it appears that the creators of "Kingdom Come" are ready to reveal the utter corruption through stupidity and arrogance of this Superman. It really does seem as if Mr Waid and Mr Ross are preparing to declare that Superman's not just virtuously misguided, but a quite evil if self-pitying bully. And that's not a take on the situation that it should be hard to sympathise with. If a privileged and powerful member of our society in the real world were to behave in this way, ignoring most every civil right in the book while creating and using a private army based upon threat and coercion, I've little doubt that the words "evil" and "bully" would readily be applied to their activities regardless of their motives. (This would be especially so considering, again, that pretty much everyone in the bar scene later ends up dead entirely because of Superman's vainglorious actions.) And so, when Superman races away from the bar, with a closing and deathless declaration of "Be heroes", the appearance from the shadows of Green Arrow announcing"So you heard big blue's pitch. Now for the democratic response ... " feels very much like a key moral turning point.
But if ever we needed a single example to illustrate the dysfunctional construction of "Kingdom Come" in terms of both story and ethics, it'd be this panel. For the emotional force of Oliver Queen's pronouncement seems undeniable; Superman has become a stateless vigilante, but here comes a more moustache-twirlingly-romantic and down-to-earth "democratic response" for the world's irresponsible but possibly redeemable metahumans. A "democractic response"! It's such a relief, such a good-humoured and hopeful moment, even given the fact that Mr Waid and Mr Ross have done all they can to portray Superman as having been both impressive and virtuous in what he's been shown doing. "I thought my dad was full of crap for being drafted by that guy, but now ... " says Nightstar, her dialogue designed to ram home the point that Superman is a fantastically charismatic man. No matter how badly Kal-El is actually behaving, "Kingdom Come" can't bear to show him as the brute he's behaving as. It wants us to love him and even admire his apparently minor digressions from the righteous path.
And yet, sadly, just as Kingdom Come" seems ready to present us with an antidote to the fetishistic adoration of the Superman, the promise of the opposing democratic agenda of Oliver Queen, and of Bruce Wayne too, almost immediately collapses. Oh dear. The democratic response is being delivered, you see, by profoundly anti-democratic idiot too. In fact, for a comic book that's always presenting itself as a debate between a variety of political viewpoints, the truth is that they're all fundamentally of the same hue. Violently defying the rule of law in the open; defying the rule of law in the open and being even more violent; violently defying the rule of law in secret; opting out of society and letting it go its violent way; these are the four options presented and debated in "Kingdom Come". And though none of these options come to any absolute good in the end, those who led the forces which represented those principles all survive and indeed prosper at the close of the book.
But democracy itself never raises its inconvenient head, and the conflicts in "Kingdom Come" are resolved with not a hint of the democratic process.
There are no democratic responses in "Kingdom Come".
To be continued and concluded;
Thank you for reading down to this point! As always, I wish you a splendid day, and the opportunity for sticking togetherness, as the Superman of All-Star would always recommend.
.
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