#9: Kingdom Come #1-4 (1996) by Mark Waid and Alex Ross



Story Overview: When young “heroes” of the nineties run amuck with superviolence, it’s up to the Justice League to come out of retirement and bust some heads.

My Two Cents: Another series about which much digital ink has been spilled in both analysis and praise. The theme is great, a rebuke to a notoriously bad decade in comic book history. Waid covers some similar territory to Astro City, but with non-canonical (mostly) access to DC’s most beloved heroes, showing the conflicts that erupt in the process between idealistic Superman, warlike Wonder Woman, and Machiavellian Batman. Alex Ross works in a lifetime’s worth of Easter Eggs into his famously photorealistic painted art, including a new generation of supers whose parentage you can infer from their powers and costumes.
Ross would show his love for the Silver Age further in his collaborations with Kurt Busiek such as Marvels (feting Marvel’s 1960s roster) and Astro City (using new characters to pay tribute to well-established comic book archetypes).