This all leads to a final showdown with the prisoners of the Gulag who have escaped and Superman’s old school Justice League, as well as the MLF led by a brainwashed Billy Batson. Batman allies himself with the MLF, and eventually double-crosses them. All the while, Batman is working in the background with a group of Outsiders. Humanity has had enough of being at the whim of the metahumans, and factions of the United Nations, as well as Lex Luthor’s Mankind Liberation Front (MLF), all attempt to quell the metahumans following Superman’s reemergence. Superman thus is coaxed out of retirement and begins to go about suppressing the young heroes, putting those that won’t fall in line into “The Gulag” (oh boy) and trying to restore utopia to Earth. After this disaster, Norman is visited by The Spectre, and is tasked to judge and punish who needs to be punished in the coming conflict. Magog and his team, in the opening pages of the story, cause a nuclear disaster in Kansas which kills millions and destroys a multitude of America’s food production. This is a world in which Superman is retired, ousted by the “hero” Magog as he turned the public against Superman. We meet Norman McKay, a pastor struggling with the morality of the world he lives in, a world post-Justice League, where all the Leaguers kids and other amoral, violent heroes fight for the hell of it without a second thought. The series opens with visions of the Apocalypse and verses from the book of Revelation in the Bible. All of those sequels, in my opinion, fail to live up the beauty of the original (much like we expect “Doomsday Clock” to) and follow a laundry list of DC exploiting some of its most successful and creative titles. ![]() ![]() ![]() The entire four-issue prestige format series ran from May to August of 1996 under DC’s “Elseworlds” banner and spawned multiple spinoffs and sequels like “The Kingdom” (which helped further the Grant Morrison/Mark Waid concept of Hypertime) and “Thy Kingdom Come” (an arc of Geoff Johns’s pre-New 52 “Justice Society of America”). Ross pitched the series first to DC and to James Robinson to write, but DC ultimately paired him with Mark Waid who they felt had a wider knowledge of the history of the DC Universe. “Kingdom Come” started as a pitch Alex Ross had to DC after completing the similar opus “Marvels” with Kurt Busiek in 1994.
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