James Gunn has recently uploaded his Hive Social’s background image to an excerpt from DC’s Kingdom Come comic arc. This has amounted to a hurricane of speculation on social media as to the meaning behind the sudden upload and whether it could be indicative of what’s to come with respect to DCU’s new slate of projects under James Gunn and Peter Safran’s joint custody.
If the Kingdom Come arc is actually set to be adopted by the new co-heads, it will not only be the most ambitious stance on the franchise’s part but also manage to parallel the impact that was left by Zack Snyder and his immortal legacy.
James Gunn’s Hive Activity Hints a Kingdom Come Storyline
The four-issue Kingdom Come miniseries is an Elseworlds arc created by Mark Waid and Alex Ross which ran from May to August 1996. Arming the usual banner of the DC trio, Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, along with Shazam, Norman McCay, and the Spectre, the comic takes the narrative and its heroes to a dystopian future that puts to shame even Darkseid’s invasion and the Knightmare timeline. Most of the components and the superheroes (as well as villains) that exist in the Kingdom Come series are active within the new DC cinematic universe and as such, the franchise’s present timeline will prove to be an exceptional battlefield for hosting the comic adaptation in its vast, brash, and unbridled brutality.
The DCU, now more than ever, has a revolutionary canon of characters and is equipped with James Gunn at the top who is known for his vast creative imagination. Pairing the scraps of DC’s multiple open-ended threads with the current management’s attempts at creating a new universe, it looks like a limited story series like Kingdom Come might serve as a perfect stepping point for DC to show their mettle and ambition for this new phase of their creative development.
What a Kingdom Come Adaptation Could Mean For DCU
With the Justice League disbanded, Superman leaving the Earth to fend for itself nearly a decade ago, a world-weary Batman barely maintaining an image of his past self, Wonder Woman advocating military ideologies, and a new age of superheroes who have a broken moral compass and an unquenchable thirst for bloodshed and retribution, the Kingdom Come series truly defies all that is cathartic and even Superman’s beaming symbol of hope and righteousness dims in the chaos that scars the world of the Waid-Ross limited narrative.
The open-ended post-credits of Justice League indicated the formation of a sinister team of supervillains with Lex Luthor at the helm, which could well be redirected toward an MLF (Mankind Liberation Front) arc. This can then set the precedent for Superman’s return, the reassembling of the Justice League, and the older Batman played by Michael Keaton to emerge as part of the dystopian arc to try and stop the eradication of the Western world and regain control of the world from Luthor’s clutches. And it looks like the fandom is on board with this tangent.
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Moreover, considering The Flash is set to eradicate SnyderVerse and rearrange the timeline using the Flashpoint paradox, the story can easily oscillate between Henry Cavill‘s mainstream timeline and an Elseworlds narrative occupied by Brandon Routh‘s older Superman, without disrupting the direction that David Zaslav seems intent on following.
In the meantime, James Gunn’s quiet planning behind the scenes and his affinity toward experimenting with ambiguous and morally compromised characters gives the directionless DCU fandom hopes of a future that can be brazenly explosive and step beyond the current will-they-won’t-they development phase. However, all of this simply remains speculative at the moment.
Source: James Gunn
