By coincidence, yesterday I reacted to someone else's comments about Kingdom Come on another forum. His basic argument appeared to be that Kingdom Come was long-winded and pretentious because Alex Ross was bound and determined to show us, at great length, that "classic" superhero concepts were much better than 1990s Image-style "superheroes."
That was his attitude. Mine was a bit different. Here's what I said:
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Of course, the ironic thing here was that, from where I stood when I bought the miniseries as it came out, the plot of Kingdom Come seemed to "prove" that Alex Ross saw "classic" old-fashioned superhero Superman as "Mister Crybaby, the Clueless Quitter."
How did the backstory go? Magog killed the Joker. Magog stood trial for this. A jury of his peers ruled that it was a justifiable act of violence, all things considered. Superman was so heartbroken at hearing that one single court decision had made what he judged to be a mistake that he threw a childish super-tantrum and flew off into oblivion for the next several years, rather than lift a finger to help anyone the next time any Global Catastrophe was threatening to wipe out zillions of people.
Sometimes I hear about cases in the criminal justice system that were not resolved the way I think they should have been resolved, but I don't dump all my responsibilities and run off to be a hermit in a cave because of it. (Does this prove I'm a better person than Superman?)
Eventually Superman gets the word that Kansas has just been nuked. "Gosh!" he says. "Even though I had single-handedly prevented such things from happening a thousand times before, it never occurred to me that when I quit being Superman for awhile, this might happen due to my absence!"
So we've established that he's a Crybaby, a Quitter, and Utterly Clueless about the probable consequences of his own absence from the scene for an extended period.
Eventually Superman decides to resume an active role in the world, and clean up the huge mess that the younger generations of heroes and villains have made of things, as he sees it. (Of course, if he had stuck around to provide an example to the younger heroes, and share the benefit of his greater experience with them, there might not be such a huge mess needing to be cleaned up in the first place.)
And Alex Ross's "epic" was supposed to persuade me that Superman was inherently better than those courageous young whippersnappers who, during Kal-El's nice long sulk -- "Go away! Somebody hurt my feelings and I refuse to come out of my room!" -- had actually been risking their necks on a daily basis as they tried to maintain some degree of law and order to keep the lid on the supervillain population? If that was Ross's intention, then he did a fantastic job of shooting himself in the foot!