I remember when I first read this comic I recognized that it was a cut above the typical comic. I asked my english teacher to look at it and asked if it was literature. She returned it to me and wisely said she was not qualified to evaluate it.
Literature comments on writing, it influences the works that come after it and it often has interesting things to say about the world beyond. At the time the story was too new and my teacher too unfamiliar with the medium to make that assessment. But that is exactly what this is.
The story is set in the future where are familiar heroes are retired and displaced by newer more violent heroes. Its a theme familiar to centuries of our history. The old and entrenched are displaced disruptively and often violently by new ideas, but in the zeal to meet a new need, some of the good of the old is lost. We replace old problems with new ones. The old guard then reacts extremely in the other direction citing all the new problems that have been created. Eventually time and again we have come together and found new balances and compromises often returning to the core of our values and figuring out whats important today. Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis.
Thesis, supervillains always escape. The people are tired of it. They cry for new protectors who are willing to kill. Antithesis, the first who are willing to take up that call are too violent, so the old heroes return to imprison them. Both thesis and antithesis lead to catastrophe and in the end, heroes from both sides have to sit down and think about what they've done and how they're going to move forward.
This is also a commentary on the direction comics had taken. In reaction to the sugary silliness of the Silver Age, Bronze Age heroes became "topical" but it still wasn't enough for some and antiheroes were created who were dark and violent. In a short time, the comic book landscape was filled with gun-wielding chain-smokers and all kinds of grizzly darkness. So much that it was hard to care anymore. Kingdom Come brought the brightly clad heroes with their ideals into this darker world and forced them to figure out how to keep being heroes in such a place. Heroes who can be shining beacons without being dragged down by the world are that much more powerful. This is the impact that Kingdom Come had and in its wake, the medium shifted. That is literature.
One of the great literary comic books.
I remember when I first read this comic I recognized that it was a cut above the typical comic. I asked my english teacher to look at it and asked if it was literature. She returned it to me and wisely said she was not qualified to evaluate it.
Literature comments on writing, it influences the works that come after it and it often has interesting things to say about the world beyond. At the time the story was too new and my teacher too unfamiliar with the medium to make that assessment. But that is exactly what this is.
The story is set in the future where are familiar heroes are retired and displaced by newer more violent heroes. Its a theme familiar to centuries of our history. The old and entrenched are displaced disruptively and often violently by new ideas, but in the zeal to meet a new need, some of the good of the old is lost. We replace old problems with new ones. The old guard then reacts extremely in the other direction citing all the new problems that have been created. Eventually time and again we have come together and found new balances and compromises often returning to the core of our values and figuring out whats important today. Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis.
Thesis, supervillains always escape. The people are tired of it. They cry for new protectors who are willing to kill. Antithesis, the first who are willing to take up that call are too violent, so the old heroes return to imprison them. Both thesis and antithesis lead to catastrophe and in the end, heroes from both sides have to sit down and think about what they've done and how they're going to move forward.
This is also a commentary on the direction comics had taken. In reaction to the sugary silliness of the Silver Age, Bronze Age heroes became "topical" but it still wasn't enough for some and antiheroes were created who were dark and violent. In a short time, the comic book landscape was filled with gun-wielding chain-smokers and all kinds of grizzly darkness. So much that it was hard to care anymore. Kingdom Come brought the brightly clad heroes with their ideals into this darker world and forced them to figure out how to keep being heroes in such a place. Heroes who can be shining beacons without being dragged down by the world are that much more powerful. This is the impact that Kingdom Come had and in its wake, the medium shifted. That is literature.