Kingdom Come!

In my universe comic books exist BAR and AAR, that is Before Alex Ross and After Alex Ross. Ross with his paintings made the Marvel Universe look new and fresh again, even when he was rendering it oldest components. The only artist who had the same impact to my mind was Neal Adams who a generation or more before had brought to the page his bold illustrative stylings. Ross upped the ante on realism but to my falls short in the area of dynamics. Don't get me wrong, by and large I love the work of Alex Ross and followed Astro City through all its publishers and incarnations in no small part due to the paintings Ross did for each and every cover. But when I read a Ross story (and not just stare lovingly at one of his covers) my eye sometimes lost and clarity of detail which I know must be there gets washed out by the complexity of an image. 

Nonetheless Ross is the perfect candidate to work with Mark Waid on Kingdom Come, a rather grim look at a possible DCU future in which Superman has been swept aside for someone more hip and sadly much more dangerous. He and the other heroes have fallen away as a new more brutal and less empathetic generation of characters take to the streets to fight crime and each other with a wild abandon that often caused as much harm as good. The morality of doing good seemed to have become radicalized and made for dangerous super types of all sorts. In this story a good man becomes gifted with the ability to see the future, a gift he inherited from Wesley Dodds the Sandman, and this man a preacher by trade is led by the Spectre to scene after scene of Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman and others attempting to deal with crisis brought on by a "hero" named Mangog who caused nuclear devastation in the center of the United States bread basket, effectively irradiating the state of Kansas and regions beyond. In the face of this calamity the veteran heroes return to the playing field and attempt to bring order. And that's just the beginning as efforts to bring justice and peace prove much more difficult. 

Here are the original covers. 

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