Tom King Talks Getting Out of the Way of the Art, Going Sexy with Dick, and the Best Intentions of Heroes

Tom King, the current writer on DC’s Batman, is an ex-CIA agent who volunteered after 9/11. His experiences serving in Afghanistan and Iraq informed much of his work in comics, which also includes Grayson, Omega Men and Sheriff of Babylon for DC and Vertigo, and Vision for Marvel. We talked with him at New York Comic Con about what drives him as a writer.
King had always been a comic reader. He interned at DC and Marvel Comics but eventually went to law school. “My mother said I needed a career that paid,” he said. He took a job in the Justice Department. After 9/11, he volunteered to serve. When he came back, he wanted to tell a particular kind of story, one in which the leads not only have to choose between right and wrong, but come to the conclusion that there might be no right answer in some situations, that those who want to help may well be in over their heads.
“I consider Omega Men, Vision and Sheriff of Babylon to be my ‘best intentions’ trilogy,” King said.
The three books reference each other in quiet ways (“Don’t tell Marvel,” King joked): Vision faces Marvel’s Omega Man; the number 37 appears again and again; and in other small touches that attentive readers will notice.

“When I came back to comics, I realized I can’t write better than Alan Moore or Jack Kirby or Stan Lee, but the one thing I do have is who I am. I’m a guy who tried to do something in Afghanistan and Iraq and it turned out to be more complicated than I thought,” he said.
In Omega Men, which I praised last year for its brilliance, the White Lantern Kyle Rayner is captured, stripped of his abilities, and immersed inside a terrorist opposition to a vast galactic empire.
If this sounds familiar, the real-world analogy is intentional.
In Vision, the artificially created Avenger creates his own family: a wife, a teenage daughter and a teenage son, and drops them in suburbia so they can learn to be normal. A good intention that utterly fails to take into account the inherent prejudice against those who are different and the realities of teenage life in high school. It all goes wrong, so very wrong. This is a comic where the Grim Reaper, Vision’s greatest foe, is basically an afterthought. It’s the actions of people toward his family, and his family’s response, that becomes the crisis.

In Sheriff of Babylon, an idealistic veteran hopes to make a difference in rebuilding Iraq from his office in the Green Zone but soon he’s plunged into a murder investigation where allies become enemies, and vice versa, and other Americans, particularly civilian contractors, only make the situation worse. Can anyone make a good choice here? The answer seems to be no.
Even in King’s run on Grayson, which he cowrote with Tim Seeley, there are echoes of this theme. Dick Grayson has become a super-secret spy to infiltrate an evil terrorist organization. Everyone but Batman believes he’s dead. His choices leave him with few good options and many evil ones. If the comic sounds grim, it’s not, mostly because Dick is a sunny presence even while making hard choices, and because the creators—especially artist Mikel Janin—make the most of the fact that Dick Grayson is the sexiest man in comics.
“We decided to go sexy [with Dick],” King said. “It’s a fact, so we went with it.”
That led to a discussion about Dick’s sexuality, a topic of much discussion among comic fans. King said he views Dick as straight but, “completely comfortable with the idea that anyone finds him attractive. He’s confident in himself and who he is.”

After Grayson, King landed the highest profile job at DC Comics: writing Batman. He had a hard act to follow after Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s definitive run on the Dark Knight.
I noted that the story of Gotham and Gotham Girl in King’s first arc echoed the “best intentions go awry” theme, and King admitted that was his “way into Batman.”
When I suggested King’s military background was unusual in comics, he brushed the idea aside.
“Jack Kirby fought Nazis. Jim Starlin was in Vietnam,” he noted.
Other than main them of his comics so far, King’s books are impressive for their visuals. He often leaves the art to tell the story without allowing words to get in the way, a talent that doesn’t come easily to all comic writers.
“I was raised on this medium. When I write, I see the pages in my head, not the words. It’s a visual medium. My job is to get out of the way of those images. Always, always, it’s a collaborative art.”
In King’s first issue, Batman literally rides a passenger jet falling from the sky to prevent its destruction. In all my years of comic reading, that’s was a first for me, and it made for a terrific start to his run. It was a promising start, featuring a Batman who takes time to be kind as well as stern.
Batman, I suspect, is not a guy in over his head in any situation.
King’s Batman, Vol. 1: I Am Gotham will be published in January 2017.