The shocking controversy behind Mister Miracle writer Tom King

Warner Bros. has announced new animated series Mister Miracle, with comic book writer Tom King at the helm. However, he’s a controversial figure for some, stemming back to his life before DC and Marvel.

If you haven’t heard of the DC superhero, don’t feel too bad. While there’s three iterations of him in the original comics, we’re going to be following Scott Free in the new TV show. As the logline says, “No trap can contain him. He is Scott Free, the worldwide celebrity sensation known as Mister Miracle, and he is the greatest escape artist who ever lived. But can he pull off the ultimate trick – and escape death itself?”

This comes after the release of James Gunn’s Creature Commandos, with original writer Tom King returning as the animation’s showrunner. While King is spinning a lot of plates at the moment – he’s currently in production for HBO’s Lanterns series – the news isn’t exactly music to everyone’s ears.

With the announcement comes criticism, focusing on both King’s work and his background prior to his time with Marvel and DC. But why is Tom King a controversial figure?

Tom King is an ex-CIA officer

In a nutshell, King spent seven years as a counterterrorism operations officer for the CIA before quitting to write his debut novel.

King was inspired to make the career change following 9/11, telling Business Insider, “That just got under my skin. So I did like a million other people did. And I just tried to find some way to get into the fight.”

After a year of psychological testing, he became a counterterrorism officer in 2002. His postings included Iraq (more on that later), Pakistan, and Afghanistan in the mid 2000s, before bowing out around 2009 after the birth of his first son.

When the CIA gave him a cover story to get through border security during a trip, King instead told them he was a comic book writer. “I thought it was such bullsh*t. ‘Tom, you’re a pretend chemistry businessman.’ I was like, ‘I don’t know sh*t about the chemistry business!’ So I threw that away and I’d be like, ‘Oh, I’m a comic writer.’

“If I ever got interrogated, they’d be like, ‘Let me talk to you about comics.’ I’d be like, ‘Let’s go!’”

In 2019, fans called into question King’s background, alleging he wasn’t actually in the CIA after circulated correspondence failed to confirm his involvement. Taking to X/Twitter, he responded, “There’s a post going around questioning whether I served in the CIA. Which is odd, cause I did, and there’s a way for employers (like DC) to check.

“Anyway, here’s a picture of me in Iraq in ‘04 and an email from when I was getting Sheriff reviewed by the agency.”

In the second image is an email chain between King and PRB (the Prepublication Classification Review Board, part of the CIA), in which King cites his prior experience. Sheriff refers to King’s 2015 12-part comic series The Sheriff of Babylon, which follows a military consultant trying to solve the murder of an Iraqi police recruit.

A follow-up tweet added, “My wife has, for the first time, requested that she be quoted directly on this feed. As such, my wife, Colleen: ‘Tell those a**holes to call me and ask me what it was like worrying every day that you’d get shot. You served your country. F**k those f**kers.’”

He was “in charge” of the Iraq invasion

In a 2022 YouTube interview with Word Balloon, King alleges he was “in charge” of the Iraq invasion aged 22, which has since come under fire online.

“Before I even went to the farm, I worked on the Iraq war, when they were planning the invasion,” King can be heard saying. “I didn’t sleep well, so I worked the night shift in the CIA, and it was really like a skeleton crew. There were two of us and another older person.

“If the older person didn’t show up – and he was not the most reliable person – it would just be me. I was 22 at the time, in charge of the f**cking Iraq invasion.”

He followed up on this in a podcast episode on Ideas Don’t Bleed, where he was asked what he’d be doing if he wasn’t writing comic books.

“Oh I really enjoyed the CIA, I’d go back,” he says. “That was a job I loved. I would do it.”

During the 75 years of Batman panel at NYC Comic Con 2017, King is also seen talking about torture techniques in conversation with Frank Miller.

“My line is it helps writing about being shot if you’ve been shot at… like Batman’s famous thing when he’s interrogating someone is to dangle them off a building and then open his hands up and like ‘Ahh!’ and then just start confessing. That doesn’t actually work [laughs].”

King’s involvement with the Iraq invasion has drawn criticism from fans online, which has become more noticeable again with the announcement of Mister Miracle.

As Connor Lālea Hampton at the Poly Post puts it, “King is just one example of a pattern we’ve become far too comfortable with. Those responsible for atrocities in war don’t face the consequences of them because Western society has normalized their behavior. King can fulfill his childhood dream of becoming a comic writer, whereas child victims of war crimes are forced to be martyrs in a war they never asked for.”

King’s work has also been criticized by fans

With Mister Miracle now King’s latest project in the pipeline, it only takes a quick Google to see some fans have a problem with his work – completely unrelated to his prior experience.

“It’s mainly due to some of the controversial creative decisions in both his Batman run and Heroes in Crisis,” one fan posted on Reddit, with a second musing, “I find all his endings underwhelming.”

“He’s a good comic book writer, but he’s not good at writing superheroes. He’s great at diving into the psychology of characters but not good at doing much interesting with them. King breaks characters down without building them back up. His stories feature too much deconstruction of characters without any building of them,” a third sums up.

We’ve not even got a release date for Mister Miracle yet, but fans are already concerned that it’s not going to live up to expectations.

“Even ignoring the fact that he’s ex-CIA and a hack, Tom King seems like a strange pick to be the DCU’s token comic book writer. He doesn’t exactly write crowd-pleasers, and his takes on established characters are always divisive. Not exactly a safe pair of hands,” one fan responded to the announcement.

A second weighed in, “I have to admit, back when I was an active fan of Tom King’s work my attitude towards him was heavily influenced by this idea in my head that while he was ex-CIA I thought a lot of his work was influenced by regret about it. That obviously no longer holds water, so.”

Check out our list of the best superhero movies of all time and keep tabs on the year’s releases with our 2025 movie calendar.




Source link

Exit mobile version