The Philadelphia Inquirer interviewed the overrated DC Comics writer Tom King, who was attending a local specialty store on Election Day, and everyone’s leftists leanings are made known:
Acclaimed comic book writer Tom King has never shied away from the political moment. Telling tender, mind-bending tales about immortal gods, amazon princesses and masked vigilantes, King has powerfully explored the anxiety, paranoia, misogyny, and absurdity that has defined America in the time of Trumpism.
King, known for hit comics like “The Vision”, “Mister Miracle”, “Rorschach,” and “Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow,” knows the stakes more than most.
Before shooting to comic book stardom writing “Batman” in 2016, King spent seven years in the CIA as a counterterrorism operations officer, including serving in Baghdad in 2004. The experience served as inspiration for his masterful and murky 2015 wartime crime thriller, “The Sheriff of Babylon.”
So only Trump’s to blame, and leftists have no accountability on any of these subjects? It’s just like them to airbrush it all out of the picture, as usual. Describing his stories as “tender” is insulting to the intellect, as is to say he’s acclaimed, which is only by the leftist crowd, who never convincingly panned his horrific miniseries Heroes in Crisis, which still stands out as one of the worst exploitations of established characters to serve his pointless agendas. The only “stakes” he knows are taking apart those holding up the tables on which the classic creations he’s torn down are sitting on.
While the Eisner Award winning author has never been shy about sharing his political concerns, including in 2019 when he tweeted his suspicions that Trump could be a foreign asset, his must-read comics are far from political diatribes. Like all classic comics, they glimpse the truths of our time through the struggles of the superheroes we like to think we could be.
Your opinion as an ex CIA is worthless. Go back to writing Identity Crisis 2: Heroes in Crisis.
— Otto Gruenwald (@CapeworldComics) November 5, 2018
King, 46, who lives in Washington D.C. with his wife and three children, will be appearing at Brave New Worlds comics in Old City on Election Day for a get out the vote celebration. The author will be signing books and handing free copies of his books for customers who show an “I Voted” sticker. We talked with King recently from Hollywood, where he’s currently co-writing and executive producing the upcoming HBO series, “Lanterns.” The author talked about the inherent hopefulness of comics and how Philly has the power to change the world.
Oh this is pathetic to lecture us that his comics aren’t diatribes. If anything, they certainly are revolting “explorations” of trauma, and for Heroes in Crisis, the application was very forced and contrived. And that he’d attack Trump – quite possibly over the exaggerated claim of being a Russian agent – only says all we need to know why King’s bad for the job. Not to mention that his Adam Strange miniseries was quite a political metaphor. As for “inherent hopefulness”, that’s only if you write a story that way, which Heroes in Crisis wasn’t. And how can Philly change the world when officials in charge have done nothing to clean up the mess in neighborhoods like Kensington?
You’re making Philly an Election Day tradition!
King: Yeah, I did a similar event at Fat Jack’s four years ago where I just celebrated Philly’s voice in the election. You just do everything you can — and one of the few things I can do is to say thank you to voters by giving them the thing that I can give out: my time and signage. Pennsylvania is where the rubber meets the road.
No doubt, he was celebrating the beginning of 4 disastrous years for the USA under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Though based mainly on his mainstream comics writing, that’s why I have no interest in his signature. And then he says:
You had just broken through to the top of the comic book industry when Trump came to power.
King: I spent my 20s in the CIA doing counterterrorism work overseas so I’m not uninvolved in government and how it works. And I live blocks from the U.S. Capitol. The Supreme Court are literally my neighbors. I remember walking my dog right before the [2017] inauguration, and this is one of these little absurd details that got lost in history, but they had a bunch of porta-potties and the porta-potties company was called “Don’s Johns.” And I guess the president-elect took offense to that so he had people go use a sharpie marker and cross out ‘Don’s Johns’ from all these porta-potties. Literally, the guy had censored porta-potties in my neighborhood. I remember walking past, and thinking, “Oh, this is going to be bad.”
This sounds like yet another petty rant, blaming a conservative for everything bad that allegedly happens, but never a liberal. I guess that means he’s not disappointed with Biden’s conduct, nor with Harris’ conduct. King wrote these absurd rants of his a number of years before, so this is nothing new.
Your books are incredibly successful but you have gotten a little blowback from readers over the political bent of some stories. Like when Wonder Woman fights against a ban against all Amazons passed by a secret king of America.
King: The atmosphere right now is so bifurcated and personal that you can’t sort of help to step on that rail. Even Shakespeare, man. Look at “Macbeth.” He’s talking about the fact that they just got a Scottish king. You’ve got to write for your moment. That’s what it means to be a writer and to be alive. So to just try to ignore that to appeal to a larger base in order to make more money seems wrong to me.
Now isn’t it contradictory to talk about a political bent, when here, the writer first lectured everyone that his tales aren’t diatribes? Oh wait, is that because they’re leftist? Now we can understand – if these were rightist stories, they would be considered diatribes. Apparently, not if they’re left-wing, however. And he makes the error of indicating he doesn’t care about pleasing a larger audience, since his petty leftist politics is apparently worth that much more.
What’s the balance between politics and a good superhero story?
King: You never want your comics to be your twitter feed. You never want to be lecturing somebody and being like, “This is bad, this is good, the world is black and white.” That just doesn’t make for good stories. It’s not about a lecture. It’s just about writing truth.
Writing superhero stories in the era of Trump almost seems like a political act in of itself.
King: In a superhero context, it doesn’t work. Lex Luthor is evil but he’s also super intelligent. That’s not Trump. No offense to the guy, but he’s not Lex. He’s not Doctor Doom. He doesn’t resemble anything like a superhero villain. His appeal is something else, something new, something shocking.
What he’s saying here is that in his biased mindset, Trump’s not intelligent enough to be compared to classic villains like Luthor and Doom. Or, in other words, King considers Trump nothing but stupid, despite all his studies in businesses that he worked in decades ago. Well how come he doesn’t consider say, the Iranian ayatollahs not intelligent enough to be comparable to said supervillains? And why does he say we shouldn’t turn our scripts into our X pages when he’s been doing just that for some time?
Comics feel so resonant right now. They have always been such a powerful artform for political thought.
King: It’s aspirational. Like I don’t think of Wonder Woman as being very political. Someone is being terrible to women therefore Wonder Woman should fight back. That doesn’t seem like a political stance to me. That doesn’t seem left or right to me. That just seems American.
Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman aren’t inherently political. They’re inherently hopeful. All three of those characters were created in the shadow of the Nazi Party, two of them specifically by Jewish creators (Batman and Superman). So their origins are Anti-Fascist. The earliest Superman comic before we entered World War II had Superman going overseas and capturing Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo. That’s baked into the pie. But it’s not political to be Anti-Nazi. We all used to agree on those ideals.
Notice how he doesn’t speak of Islamic jihadists as an adversary, past or present. Should concerns about Islamofascism be a political stance? If Germany’s National Socialism is a non-partisan issue, then by the same token of logic, even the dangers of the Religion of Peace shouldn’t be a partisan issue either. Sure is strange somebody who wrote a WW story as a metaphor for anti-Trump viewpoints and to support illegal immigration doesn’t want to take issue with Islamic regimes who oppress women and turn them into 2nd class citizens. King apparently also doesn’t want to address the issue of illegal immigrants who attack women either. That he sticks with a tunnel-visioned viewpoint of western conservatives as “evil” only makes clear he’s not a serious writer.
The comic book audience has grown much more diverse in recent years, everyone from indie readers to the most hardcore “Punisher” fan. It’s a big tent.
King: If I had to say the random comic book reader, there’s something about the world that alienates them. There’s something that they feel a little bit disconnected about — a little bit rebellious. They feel a little bit of otherness. That crosses all political lines. That’s what I love about comics. It speaks to kids and grown ups who do feel a little disconnected from the mainstream.
What about conservatives? Don’t they feel practically ostracized and blacklisted from the mainstream? What alienates them is woke writers like King.
What’s at stake?
King: Everything’s at stake, man.
But honestly, you read Superman because you want to be like Superman. You read Batman because you want to be like Batman. Because they’re special. They’re important. They don’t accept the world the way it is. They try to change it. And I feel like voters in Pennsylvania right now have the opportunity to be like Batman, to be like Superman, like they don’t every other day of their life. If Batman and Superman were alive today they couldn’t do s— to stop what’s coming. But a voter in Pennsylvania can, and that’s pretty cool.
And if you vote for Trump, and want to come get a comic, you’re welcome to it. It’s a celebration of democracy and the fact that Philly gets a chance to change the world.
If he’s trying to pretend he’s not anti-conservative, forget it, I’m not convinced. And you read Superman/Batman/whatever else because you want to be entertained and find some escapism. Which King’s comics make impossible to find. Nor does his writing provide anything genuine to think about. Except that in his mindset, right-wingers in the west are the sole cause of all that’s evil. That’s why King’s hopeless as a writer. Maybe he should consider getting into a politics instead?
Originally published here.
English (US) · 