We spoke with Sal Abbinanti and Remsy Atassi about their new documentary dissecting Alex Ross's most iconic work.
Welcome to Creator Corner, our recurring interview series in which we chat with the coolest and most thought-provoking creators in the industry. In this entry, we're conversing with Sal Abbinanti and Remsy Atassi about The Legend of Kingdom Come. Listen to the unedited audio HERE.
Some comics create shockwaves. The first issue of Kingdom Come arrived in May of 1996. The comic written by Mark Waid and illustrated by Alex Ross roared from the stands as an undeniable work, and it has remained inside the collective imagination of comic fans ever since. At a moment when the 90s comic boom had burst, here was a story that showed the cultural significance of Superman and his DC Comics cohorts. It seems only fitting that a documentary like The Legend of Kingdom Come has finally landed to explain its impact for the seasoned, the curious, and the uninitiated.
Produced by Alex Ross's longtime friend and business manager, Sal Abbinanti, and directed by Remsy Atassi, The Legend of Kingdom Come reunites Alex Ross and Mark Waid as they reflect on their comic's legacy. In addition, the film has assembled a massive array of creators, historians, and fans to provide a better context for the world in which Kingdom Come was born. Why does this comic persist when so many of its sibling titles have faded away into obscurity?
The Legend of Kingdom Come is currently seeking funding through Kickstarter. Abbinanti and Atassi are putting their life's blood into this project, creating a film that lives up to its subject. Via Zoom, we spoke to them about Kingdom Come, what separates it from other books, even those by Alex Ross, and what they hope audiences will take away from the doc.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
The Legend of Kingdom Come...28 Years Later
Brad: Kingdom Come obviously has this massive footprint within comics. It shadows so many stories. A documentary about it certainly makes sense to me, but what was the process of making it happen?
Sal Abbinanti: Remsy and I have been working together for a while now, creating content and video content for Alex Ross and Bill Sienkiewicz and our social media platforms. From the beginning, we talked about doing something a little more ambitious and bounced around some different ideas. And then I discovered just through trial and error, people were just rabid for Kingdom Come. You do a post of whatever, and then you do Kingdom Come, and there was a 70% jump.
When you do a signing with Alex, you look at the line, and two-thirds of the line is holding Kingdom Come. So we just felt there's this tremendous fanbase there that really, really loves this work. And I was in on the ground floor, so to speak, of working with Alex while he created Kingdom Come and then worked with Mark to develop it while we were at the bar. I always had a lot of great stories and knew the background. So, when Remsy and I sat down, we thought this might be something where we had an audience for.
Remsy Atassi: Sal and I have been working together for about eight years, and as you said, we started kind of doing some content for Alex. I'm a filmmaker, so I had a narrative feature that I've done before and lots of other shorts and documentaries and different kinds of projects. I immediately knew after meeting Alex that It would be an amazing subject for a documentary because he's a fascinating guy. His work is amazing, and he has such an amazing fanbase and following. But also, when I first met him, I was maybe more of a comics outsider, and so I wasn't as familiar with his work. In a lot of ways, Alex and Sal became my comics mentors because I learned so much about this through them.
So, we had been working with Alex, and we would be filming stuff for his channels. I'd say, "Okay, let's take a day, and we'll work on the documentary." When I read Kingdom Come, I knew it was amazing. I didn't know exactly what we would do with Alex, but we knew we wanted to do something. We were just putting stuff aside. And then as we kind of continued moving through, it became obvious that Alex was so passionate about this project and had a lot of stuff that he wanted to say. Also, there's such a cool story behind it, and Sal was so intimately involved that it coalesced around this idea. Alex was less keen on doing a documentary about him, but I think he got excited about a project we could work on together telling this story.
It's The Legend of Kingdom Come, Not Marvels
Brad: What is it about Kingdom Come that makes that the book fans crave the most? Why is it not Marvels? Why is it not Uncle Sam?
Sal Abbinanti: It was Alex's first big project. I mean, after Burning Earth, and really he cut his teeth in the big business, so to speak. I mean, he was still really young. I think he was in his early 20s when he did Marvels and he was working at Leo Burnett. And it just was, those were his guys. I mean, Superman, Captain Marvel, those were his characters. Those were his favorite characters growing up. So when he got a chance to really get in there - and Alex speaks to it a little bit in the doc - The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen set the table for Kingdom Come. The mood of where comics were headed then and what was happening to comics in the '90s.
So I think Kingdom Come spoke to that. It spoke to a fan base at Warner Bros. that needed that type of book and needed to have this research. It's to say, "No, you can make Superman cool." I think that's what happened. Superman got this bad rap of being corny or cornball or too much of a vanilla character, and Alex said, "No, no, this is the guy." This is Superman. So that's kind of the way I felt about it, where Alex could show you no, what's old is new again.
Remsy Atassi: Yeah, I 100% agree. It's not just his depiction of Superman, or I should say the way that he illustrates it, but it is how he embeds the character's history into it. When they think of superheroes, Superman is the one they think of first, definitely at the time of that book. Alex breathed new life into a character, and now it lives on.
Brad: And what was the process of getting Mark Waid on board?
Sal Abbinanti: Remsy met with Mark. Mark was really cool about it from the jump, and one of the first things Alex said was, "Hey, you got to get Mark. You got to reach out to Mark." And we said, "Okay." We didn't ever assume everyone was going to be on board.
Remsy Atassi: I talked to him. I mean, right after we kind of had Alex on board, we knew that we had to have Mark's blessing as well. And so I reached out to him and talked to him about it and he was really game. I mean Mark, he is an amazing writer and he's got a great perspective. I think him and Alex had a really good collaboration and this is a really important piece for both of them. So he was excited, and he's been there for us throughout the process. We've been finishing it, and he joined us when we were in San Diego. We did a panel out there about it. He joined us for that. We're really grateful to have his support for the project.
The Legend of Kingdom Come and The 90s Boom/Bust
Brad: What do the other interviews beyond them bring to the story of the documentary and the story of Kingdom Come?
Sal Abbinanti: Remsy could speak more to this, but as a filmmaker, we knew we needed a narrative about Kingdom Come. I wanted different people's opinions or people we knew in the comic industry and also from different perspectives of the comic industry, what their reaction was to it versus people that were working with it firsthand versus people that were models in it. So we wanted to get lots of different positioning, lots of different interesting takes on Kingdom Come. Because you remember in the '90s the comic business was a really unique situation. It was exploding for better or for worse in a lot of different ways.
Remsy Atassi: The point of Kingdom Come in the movie, I would say, in the documentary - obviously it's about it, but it's also very much about the history of comics, about Alex's career, about that particular time in the '80s and '90s. Giving it all that backstory about what led up to it and the history of these characters. For maybe somebody who doesn't know them super intimately, I think this is definitely for the fans. Fans are going to see stuff that's really cool. We've brought some of the scenes to life with animation and have gone through these thousands of images, which we've enhanced and treated and put in the film in 3D and done a lot of really cool animation and design around it.
But also for the uninitiated or maybe someone who's a more casual person in comics who's somewhat familiar with Alex. I mean, if you're a comics fan, you know Alex's work, but outside of comics, I think there's still an audience that could discover him. And he's very accessible because his work is photorealistic. You can see it and you immediately understand why it's really meaningful and important. It doesn't look like other comics.
As of this writing, there are still 23 days left to go in The Legend of Kingdom Come's Kickstarter campaign. Check it out, asap.
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