'Batman' writer (and former CIA operative) Tom King on DC's USO tour of Kuwait
Gotham City may be Batman’s homebase, but the Dark Knight has been a global phenomenon for eight decades and counting. So for his 80th birthday, DC Entertainment dispatched select members of the Caped Crusader’s creative team across the world as part of a USO-organized event for U.S. military personnel on the ground in Kuwait. Bat-artist and DC Chief Creative Officer Jim Lee headed up the unit, which also included current Batman writer Tom King and a trio of stars from The CW’s line of superhero shows: Black Lightning’s Nafessa Williams as well as The Flash’s Candice Patton and Danielle Panabaker. For King, at least, the decision to travel to a combat zone was an easy one: “DC reached out to me a few months ago, and I don’t think they got to the end of their sentence before I said, ‘Yes.’”
To be fair, it wasn’t King’s first experience embedded overseas. Before concocting adventures for Batman, he went on his own missions as a counterterrorism operations officer in the CIA. From 2002 to 2009, he made regular trips to Iraq, as well as the region around the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. “I went around the world trying to get terrorists to spy on other terrorists and for people to stop blowing crap up,” he says now. “It was one of the joys of my life — incredibly rewarding and incredibly challenging.” King’s CIA years also informed his approach to Batman when he took over writing duties from Scott Snyder in 2016. “What you’re seeing in my book is Batman dealing with a kind of pain and trauma that he can’t solve through violence and trying to find another way. That comes from my CIA days and seeing that the answer isn’t always the biggest bomb you can find.” (Watch a video recap of DC’s trip to Kuwait below.)
DC’s USO tour took King and his traveling companions to five military bases located around Kuwait where he found himself talking to soldiers who are currently the age he was when he first ventured overseas. “I was there in my 20s, and now I’m in my 40s entertaining people in their 20s! It’s surreal. This is such a long war — Bob Hope didn’t fight in Vietnam and then come back to tell jokes about it. The biggest difference now, and I don’t think this is a secret, is that everyone over there is worried about Iran, not Iraq. When I was there we were looking in one direction, and now we’ve got our heads turned the other way. Everyone I talked to, their North Star was their faith in our government and their faith in their command structure.”
According to King, those same soldiers also considered Batman their comic book North Star. “Whenever I asked them who their favorite character was, they always said Batman, because he has no powers, but he still kicks ass. The point of Batman is that he’s the best of us: He has that dark side, but he’s also someone who takes pain and turns it into hope — this his superpower. I think the military, at its best, can be that, too.”
King also had to field questions from military fans who were disappointed that he’s leaving Batman at the end of 2019, well before completing his planned 100-issue run. But at least he’s leaving for a good cause: writing a big-screen version of Jack Kirby’s classic DC series New Gods, to be directed by Ava DuVernay. “We want it to be a love letter to Jack Kirby,” King says of what he and the When They See Us auteur have planned for the film. “It’s like his White Album, where he had no one to stop him so he lets his true id out. The great scenes that he wanted in that book — scenes of war and love and loss — will be in the movie.”
King says he’ll carry a specific memory from his USO experience into New Gods and the rest of his work going forward, one that complements a time when comic book and comic book movies continue to see the benefits in cultivating a diverse group of heroes. “There was a woman who was talking to Nafessa Williams, and the first thing she said was, ‘You play a black lesbian on television, I’m a black lesbian out here. I wanted to tell you how important that was to me.’ And then she just burst into tears, and everyone else was crying at the same time. [I realized] the image of the U.S. soldier that I had as a kid — G.I. Joe, blond hair, blue-eyed — that’s not who U.S. soldiers are now. They represent every single corner of this country, and that’s the strength of our army. Her saying that just reinforced the responsibility of us people writing superheroes have to realize that’s the strength of our books, too.”
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