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Creator / Tom King

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It's not impossible. It's just very controversial.
"In the CIA, the sort of thing you do is you pretend to be other people so you can get across borders, get into places they don't want you to know that you're CIA. And most of my colleagues (bless them) wore suits like this and very much like James Bond-ian kind of, cross as nice businessmen. And I would always cross as the supernerd comic book writer. I would go on an airplane, I would spill on myself, I would read comic books, I had graphic novels with me. I'd basically be me and they'd be like, 'That guy could never be CIA.'"
—Tom King during his interview with Seth Meyers.

Tom King (born July 15, 1978) is an American comic book writer. He's currently well-known for his run on Batman. He's also a former CIA operative.

After quitting the CIA and writing his debut novel, A Once Crowded Sky (about superheroes, of course), King teamed up with Tim Seeley to co-write Grayson, drawing from his experience in espionage to add to the authenticity (which he ironically defied so Grayson is a Bond pastiche with hints of Jim Steranko's Nick Fury added for good measure). King was later responsible for rebooting the Omega Men, as well as another personal project called Sheriff of Babylon, published through Vertigo Comics. While Grayson gave him marginal success, King's solo career was launched into stardom with the twelve-issue The Vision (2015), about the titular Avenger trying to start his own family while continuing work as a superhero. It's creepy.

The Vision receiving critical acclaim and his "Trilogy of Best Intentions" complete, King signed on to work exclusively for DC Comics and took on the role of Scott Snyder's replacement on Batman. What began from there was what King planned to be a one-hundred issue bimonthly epic that asked, "Can Batman be happy?" It got creepy. That 100-issue plan was scrapped in mid 2019 due to a variety of factors, but he would receive an opportunity to conclude his story in a maxi-series for DC Black Label, Batman/Catwoman.

Simultaneously, King worked on The Vision's Spiritual Successor Mister Miracle (2017), which is basically Jack Kirby's New Gods meets Jacob's Ladder. It's very creepy.

Spinning off from his Batman run WAS also the Crisis Crossover Heroes in Crisis, said to be a thematic sequel to the infamous Identity Crisis. It's...divisive, to say the least. Since its release, he has mostly gone back to writing limited series centered around less prominent characters, like Strange Adventures and The Human Target (2021).

King was also set to co-write the screenplay for a movie about The New Gods together with its intended director, Ava DuVernay, as part of the DC Extended Universe, but the project was announced to have been cancelled in April of 2021. However, King would become re-involved with the new "DC Universe" initiative spearheaded by James Gunn and Peter Safran in 2023, where among the initial projects listed by DC Studios is a cinematic adaptation of King's Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow miniseries.

King's work is notable for tackling the psyches of his characters, darker leanings that hearken back to the 2000s, somewhat topical undertones, slow-paced rhythmic dialogue, Dissonant Serenity-brimmed stories and for implementing many of stylistic trappings of his own favourite authors — most notably Alan Moore and Frank Miller.

Suffice to say, he's living the dream.

Works:

Tropes about him and his work:

  • The Ageless: King appears to be in the camp of portraying Kryptonians as immortal under a yellow sun, as he's written stories where both Superman and Supergirl have survived hundreds if not millions of years into the future and have barely aged a day.
  • Arc Words: King seems to love this considering individual issues of his work has some. For examples:
    • The Omega Men: "We will not hurt you. We are friends."
    • The Vision: Behold!
    • Mister Miracle: "Darkseid is." Also someone says to MM himself, "Scott Free. Stand." to which he replies "Yeah, I know. Standing."
    • Batman: "It's not impossible. It's Batman."
    • The Cowboy: "Love is everlasting."
  • Author Appeal:
    • Out of all the Batman Mythology Gags, King seems to really like referencing Batman: Year One. He's gone as far as to take it as canon over the supposedly canon "Zero Year".
    • He really enjoys writing characters dealing with mental illness brought on by trauma (depression, PTSD, survivor's guilt, ect.), as well as heroes who have dark secrets hidden in their pasts.
    • King has a fondness for deconstructing the fantastical exploits of certain characters, from showing the consequences of Adam Strange's desperate actions during a cosmic war in Strange Adventures to delving into how being raised by an abusive tyrant on a nightmarish Death World like Apokolips could do a serious number on one's psyche in Mister Miracle.
  • The Bus Came Back: Taking a few pages from Grant Morrison and Geoff Johns's books, King also brings back silly and oft obscure characters to tell darker stories with them. For example, Kite Man (hell yeah).
  • Broken Bird: They flock his books. Heroes in Crisis in particular deals with the consequences of having superpowered beings with untreated trauma.
  • Casual Danger Dialogue: Almost every story he's written is entirely comprised of these, edging dangerously close to Dissonant Serenity. Especially in Mister Miracle.
  • Cerebus Callback: Standard modus operandi of a Tom King story: everything established in the canon of the characters is true, including the deaths, rebirths, loss of loved ones, ambiguous rapes, multiversal wars and backstory change; and then it gets worse.
  • Continuity Porn: He seems to be trying to one-up Grant Morrison in that regard considering the slew of references to Batman's comic history (among other things) during his run.
  • Creator Thumbprint:
    • King has a habit of utilizing the nine-panel grid in his work, inspired by Watchmen and how it creates a fixed, appealing tempo to approach stories in. Ironically enough, he consciously avoided it with Rorschach (2020) because it collided with Alan Moore's own creator thumbprints that he was inspired by.
    • A much more mundane Running Gag: giving his characters coffee mugs featuring funny text. In Mister Miracle, his run of Batman, and Strange Adventures, various characters have a mug with "I am God." written on them, and similarly silly mugs also appear in works like Human Target and Danger Street.
  • Creator's Favorite: King has gone on record claiming that Booster Gold is his favorite character in comics, and he particularly enjoys writing him for his goofy earnestness, which makes a nice change of pace from the tragic and sad stories he usually writes. While King has never done a dedicated series for the character, Booster has appeared in Batman (Tom King), Mister Miracle (2017), Heroes in Crisis, and The Human Target (2021).
  • Darker and Edgier: Most of the books he works he turns into this, as most of his stories focus on the mostly unseen side of superheroes: the trauma that comes from their grittier exploits. Whenever he writes The Vision, Batman, and Mister Miracle, expect him to depict them as emotionally-compromised, mentally-scarred badasses with issues so deep it'd make Zuko say, "That's rough, buddy".
  • Deconstruction: A particular hallmark of his work is deconstructing some of the more fantastical characters in comic history to reveal the darkness and trauma lying beneath the larger than life adventures. Mister Miracle and Strange Adventures in particular give harsh reality checks to both the titular character and Adam Strange. Love Everlasting is a brutal Genre Deconstruction of classic romance comics.
  • Does This Remind You of Anything?: In any of his books, there are brave people considered heroes by many who have gone through traumatic situations that no normal person should ever have to go through and their lives are changed forever. They're unable to fully acclimate back to normalcy and their built up issues lead to even more disasters, most of them personal.
  • Friendly War: With Tom Taylor, mostly due to the two being frequently mistaken for each other. They're both somewhat notorious for taking friendly potshots at each other on social media.
    Tom Taylor: Also, if I AM being accused of something, just remember my name is Tom King.
  • Lighter and Softer: In contrast to his dark, trauma-laden stories and deconstructions of larger than life heroes, Superman: Up in the Sky stands out for being a lighthearted, All-Star Superman-esque reconstruction of Superman that explores and essentially celebrates what makes the Man of Steel such an iconic superhero.
  • Meta Fiction: King has explored this in much of his miniseries starting in the 2020's, deconstructing not just the characters he writes about, but the nature of the works and overall genres that they occupy and how people out-of-universe write and consume them. Strange Adventures (2020) reflects on the sanitization and biases built into the Planetary Romance stylings of Adam Strange's lore, Rorschach (2020) reconstructs the character of Rorschach by exploring his real-world influences and what his legacy reflects on in the modern day, Batman/Catwoman dissects the potential of Batman and Catwoman's relationship by directly baking the multitude of potential stories others write about them into the actual narratives through Alternate Timelines, and Love Everlasting is a vicious deconstruction of the conservatism in romance comics by playing the genre's approaches to traditional "love" and maintenance of the status quo for Psychological Horror.
  • Mundane Horror: Mister Miracle and The Visions place heavy emphasis on the more creepy, disturbing and destructive aspects of the superhero lifestyle in juxtaposition to the eerie calm of domestic family life.
  • Repeated for Emphasis: Many of his characters will repeat what they say, from single sentences to long poems. Repeatedly. Repeating them. Repeatedly.
  • Self-Parody: He was picked up to do a one-shot Batman/Elmer Fudd Special (yes, seriously), and used it as a means to poke fun at his own trademark introspective, melodramatic neo-noir style. Like most of his works, he approached Elmer Fudd of all characters with heartbreak and moody grit. Also like most of his works, he chose to preserve and embrace some of the goofiest parts of the character, turning Fudd into a genuine badass who's "hunting wabbits" (in this case, a morose, yet strangely witty human lowlife named "Bugs the Bunny") and gives completely serious noir detective monologues in his trademark voice.
  • Shout-Out: King confirmed in a tweet in memory of Stan Lee that he insisted on having the titles of his stories be preceded by the phrase "DC Comics Presents" as a reference to "Stan Lee Presents." When he told this to him, Stan just snarked that King should write for Marvel.
  • Surreal Horror: Mister Miracle, The Vision, and Strange Adventures all have traces of it. Love Everlasting runs on it.
  • Symbol Swearing: King admits that even when given the go-ahead and freedom to curse in his books, he will always stick to this because he feels it's so ingrained into the comic medium that doing anything else feels wrong and unnatural to him.
  • Thematic Series: Tom King considers his comic book career to have been split into a few of these, roughly the size of trilogies, and each informed by his state of mind and philosophy while working on them:
  • What Could Have Been:invoked After Mister Miracle wrapped, King joined Ava DuVernay's New Gods film as a co-writer. Unfortunately, the film was eventually scrapped.
  • Write What You Know: King has gone on record to say that a lot of his superhero works draw influence from his time in the CIA. What results is a noticeable amount of comparisons between superheroes and military veterans and the trauma both have to deal with on the field. The mental health consequences of this trauma is also often explored as a result of King's own personal issues after coming home from Iraq.
    • Subverted with Grayson where King went out of his way to avoid the gritty realism of actual spy work in favor of sci-fi fun in the vein of Nick Fury and James Bond — This is despite him being brought on specifically to lend authenticity to the work.
    • Averted with Love Everlasting, which is a Deconstruction of romance comics. King studied various comics from the forties to the seventies for inspiration and research.

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