Groonk's Newsmine 2.0

Yeah. That's a character that Mark Waid invented that was really just put to me like come up with the most God awful, Rob Liefeld sort of design that you can. What I was stealing from was - really only two key designs of Rob's - the design of Cable. I hated it. I felt like it looked like they just threw up everything on the character - the scars, the thing going on with his eye, the arm, and what's with all the guns? But the thing is, when I put those elements together with the helmet of Shatterstar -- I think that was his name -- well, the ram horns and the gold, suddenly it held together as one of the designs that I felt happiest with in the entire series.

Really?

Yeah. I don't think it ended up looking like a buffoonish character. In a way, that gold rams head affect took it to a new level of almost biblical metaphor that had a nice little touch to it. It's the kind of thing I should have been striving, but it was much more accidental.

It's interesting you used the words "biblical metaphor," as "Kingdom Come" is rife with Christian symbolism. Then of course today, 10 years later, Christian religions have a louder, more pronounced and influential voice than it had 10 years ago. Once again, the book proves prophetic.

Today, there's a lot more direct discussion of things regarding images and beliefs and faith and all that kind of stuff, whereas back then it really wasn't a hot topic of conversation. It was just a part of every day culture. Now we can find these types of images and debate all over our country today.

[...]

Allright, keeping all that in mind and the fact that "Kingdom Come" has helped inspire a new generation of comics creators, how would you do the book differently today? Or would you do it any differently?

Well, it's weird, because right now I could argue that the book is being done today, not so much in what I see DC doing, but with what I see Marvel doing in "Civil War." Really, "Kingdom Come" was meant to be a civil war between two different armies of super humans, particularly super heroes. You know, one team was mostly Batman, the other team mostly Superman. The story evolved in a very different way from that original intention of mine, but when I see what they're doing with Captain America and Iron Man and "which side" and the whole idea that there's this one, nuclear, devastating moment that sets off this whirl wind of change where the heroes have to put their own house in order, that's basically the set-up of "Kingdom Come."

It's actually fun for me to watch it being done again in this way because they're going to be able to give it a lot more time to expand, whereas the kind of work that Mark Waid and I did together was very compressed. There was only so much depth we could give any one of those particular concepts because it's a four-issue series that's only about 200 pages. That may sound like a lot, but for actual content there are so many more stories that could be spun out of there.