Way back in 1996, writer Mark Waid and artist Alex Ross joined forces for Kingdom Come. Perhaps the most definitive of all the Elseworlds titles, the story explored an alternate universe where a new generation of heroes fought some of your old favorites. Big and bold and endlessly inventive, Kingdom Come stands definitively as an essential dissection of the superhero genre.
Since then, Waid’s revisited Kingdom Come rather sparingly, including 1999’s two-issue sequel/prequel The Kingdom. But more recently, the Kingdom Come “universe” has been featured in the Waid-written, Dan Mora-drawn Batman / Superman: World’s Finest. Since issue #20, the caped crusaders have had to deal with a world featuring “a jaded Superman, a broken Batman, and a war-hungry Wonder Woman” — not to mention the former Boy Thunder, who has been twisted by the heinous machinations of Gog. Not so much a sequel or a prequel, it’s been a powerful addition to the storytelling heft that is Kingdom Come.
Now, though, this new chapter comes to an end with next week’s issue #24 of Batman / Superman: World’s Finest. Here, Waid and co. will answer the question if Batman and Superman must “witness the tragic events that led to cataclysm,” or are they instead “fated to take the place of their doppelgangers?” To answer that question, and a few more, we recently caught up with Waid via Zoom. There, we talked about returning to the Kingdom Come narrative, David/Magog/Boy Thunder’s development, Superman’s emotional arc, and what comes next (hint: more interdimensional goodness), among other topics/tidbits.
Batman / Superman: World’s Finest #24 is due out February 20 from DC Comics.
Courtesy of DC Comics.
AIPT: Obviously Kingdom Come is a big deal, especially if you’re a big DC kid like myself. Were there any reasons or notions as to why you’d come back to revisit it?
Mark Waid: The only thing I really needed to do, I think, was connect the dots between the David that we knew at the end of “Strange Visitor,” the [second] arc in the book, and how we got to a Magog who would do what he did to set off the events of Kingdom Come with killing the Joker. I had to get there and at the same time make sure that our Superman didn’t fail him in any way but still wasn’t able to redeem him, which is a really fine line to walk.
AIPT: I’ve re-read Kingdom Come a few times, and it’s always changed in terms of its outlook and what it all really means. Do you have a different sense of it having done this arc?
MW: Not really. I mean, here’s the thing: I’m at the eye of the storm, right? So it’s always difficult for me to grasp what Kingdom Come means to other people and how important it seems to be to them, which I’m thrilled about. I think it’s awesome and that’s great. But from my side of the desk, I just don’t have the perspective on it that other people do. So when it came to not exactly revisiting it.. well, revisiting it, but this is not a sequel. It’s not even really an addition that we’re tacking onto the house. It’s more of looking at how would our traditional Superman and Batman react in a world where something like this is capable of happening.
Variant cover by Mahmud Asrar. Courtesy of DC Comics.
AIPT: It’s interesting that you mentioned this is not an addition. You’ve handled this really well, and it does feel like we’re walking through the same house again, but we’re a few years older and we have maybe a different understanding of why these things are their overall placement and whatnot.
MW: The reason for telling the story is not the same as Kingdom Come. The emotions behind it and the goals of Kingdom Come originally as a story are in no way really mirrored by this, which was, again, by design. I didn’t want to do a karaoke version of Kingdom Come.
AIPT: I think it was a way to sort of re-contextualize some of these ideas and concepts that feel really important, especially now, because DC’s whole thing is lineage and what kind of come next in the future. And Kingdom Come is very much a book about that.
MW: Well observed.
AIPT: Obviously, David is the centerpiece of not just this arc, but I think maybe the book in general. How has it been to develop this character and how do you feel about him coming out of this?
MW: I certainly have a more sympathetic view of him than the Mark Wade who wrote Kingdom Come 30 years ago. He is more real of a character to me and I understand the engines that drive him and the things that make him lacking as a hero. So it was a lot of fun to dig around in that and play around with that a little bit more and put that more on the table so that he becomes an even more three-dimensional character.
Courtesy of DC Comics.
AIPT: I think the idea of sympathy is really important here. I’ve talked to a few other creators about other projects and this idea of sort of caring about the characters that you’re writing, and striking that balance between wanting to be their friend but also putting them through really terrible things. Do you somehow struggle with that a little here?
MW: That’s what you have to do to be a surprising storyteller. You have to have characters make interesting, unexpected decisions, which is hard for Superman and Batman because we have 80 or 85 years just to get a sense of what kind of decisions they would make. And so that gives me David to open those doors. It gives me a tool by which I can have interesting, completely unexpected things happen in the story and people making odd choices that, in retrospect, make perfect sense, but they don’t have to be Superman and Batman who are making those decisions.
AIPT: I think the other thing that kind of surprised me about the issue was that, if anybody else wrote it, we’d get this massive battle. And that’s what we got — a chance to nerd out — but I think it’s far more of a thoughtful end. Were you trying to buck against that at all? Like, ‘If I don’t, I’m just doing Kingdom Come Part Two.’
MW: Well, it’s less even about trying to not be Kingdom Come Part Two than it is that I look for that in all my stories because I’ve read a million comic books. And if I see a giant slugfest between Superman and Darkseid again, and that doesn’t have some sort of emotional personal wrinkle to it, I’m going to die. There’s nothing less interesting to me than the fight. There’s nothing more interesting to me than how the characters react to these situations. But in terms of the toe-to-toe slugfest itself, those are hard to write because we’ve seen every permutation of those you can see.
Courtesy of DC Comics.
AIPT: I went back and read the ending [to issue #24] again. I was thinking that it feels like a very happy ending, but also infinitely more complicated than that. Do you kind of see that? That’s kind of binary but did it trend for ‘this is a good thing for David and a good thing for Batman and Superman’?
MW: It has to be, because Superman’s in this story. And you cannot have a cynical story with Superman as the protagonist. You just can’t. He’s there to fight against that sort of thing. That’s what he does as a character and he is a symbol against cynicism. So, like I’d said, it’s the tightrope that I had to walk. He couldn’t be successful in redeeming David before the events of Kingdom Come because then the Kingdom Come events don’t play out, but he still needs a chance to leave David in a better place than he was and that’s what you get with the epilogue
AIPT: That struck me as like a moment of, I don’t want to say weakness for Superman, but it’s nice to see that he’s a person who is so committed to kind of his goals and his desires and his drives. He’ll break space and time and whatever to get to where he thinks he needs to be. I think that that ultimately speaks about why he’s so powerful and why he’s so important and why it’s nice to see the David story filter through him in a way without taking away from David.
MW: Right, and he’s very connected to David. I mean, remember halfway through this issue, when they’re given a chance to go home, Superman just says point blank, ‘I’m not going anywhere until I know what happened.’
AIPT: We only have a few minutes left. I think there’s a few directions David could go after this. Do you think about revisiting the character at all?
MW: I’m of two minds. On the one hand, I think there’s more to be done with David, and I like that character a lot. On the other hand, if I ever revisit that character, it’s more likely to feel like a sequel to Kingdom Come because it will happen after the events of Kingdom Come, and that is a giant red flag to me. You know, Alex [Ross] and I both have the same feeling about this: the story stands alone as it is. We really don’t need an actual sequel to it. So the final fate of David at the end of this whole thing is probably as close to a sequel as you’re going to get.
Courtesy of DC Comics.
AIPT: Yeah. And, to go back to an idea we’d mentioned just a few minutes ago, it feels like a sequel, but it’s not a sequel. It felt like to me this idea of, ‘Well, if you want this character sort of to have a grander arc, this is how it’s going to have to be.’ You just have to engage with it as it is, which I think works really well to satisfy people who continually want more and more of a character, but know that it’s not always that easy.
MW: Right, it’s really hard to write an arc for a character whose final fate was determined 30 years ago.
AIPT: But I think that you honor that in a way by saying like there’s only so many places I can go. Maybe there’s just things that are left unsaid, which is weird in the realm of comics but still feels nice.
MW: Right, I hope so.
AIPT: After this arc, I’m curious if there’s anything you can sort of tease us in terms of what might come next?
MW: The fun of issue #25 is the first meeting of the [Lex] Luthor-Joker team, which Steve Pugh has drawn and has done an amazing job with. And then in the back of that issue, to make sure that Dan [Mora] still has a foothold in World’s Finest, there’s a little prequel story that comes out of the World’s Finest that carries through with the back of #25.
And then the next arc is Dan Mora’s dream come true, which was a Bat-Mite story. The tricky needle to thread there is you can’t make Bat-Mite and [Mister] Mxyzptlk and serious because that’s not what they are. So you have to retain the fun of those characters. But at the same time, we don’t publish comics from 1965 anymore, and you can’t make Superman and Batman look like complete goofballs. I don’t think that World’s Finest could be a comedy for three or four issues in a row. One issue here or there, yes. We’d never get away with an entire story arc that’s nothing but Tex Avery and Chuck Jones.
Courtesy of DC Comics.
AIPT: I’d buy that arc for sure.
The last question I have is that you’re very clearly someone who understands DC’s sometimes weird, sometimes tenuous history of trying to balance kind of that intensity with that playfulness. And this book, especially, has done an amazing job of that.
MW: Thank you.
AIPT: Is there a secret to that balancing act for you?
MW: There’s not really in terms of how I approach the overall content of the book. If I could write 25 pages of Superman and Batman just having a conversation, that would be fine with me. I figure out how I want these characters to react and then build a story around it so that we can see a side of these characters that we’ve never seen before. That was the whole point of the David arc, the original David arc…to see a side of Superman as a mentor and raising a side that we’ve never seen before.
And that to me is the most interesting way of approaching these characters in this book. Even if it’s guest stars like Flash or the Metal Man or Metamorpho or whoever. I really want you to come away saying to yourself, ‘I’ve never thought about that before.’
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