When A Good Man Goes To War: Thesis on Tom King

Commissioned by Mitchell Gosser

I'd love an essay on Tom King's shift between The Omega Men and Mister Miracle, on the consequences of these 12 issue miniseries. While Omega Men was billed that the ending would set up a huge conflict for the DCU, and The Vision teased the end of the world but shrunk in scope but increased in intimacy for the family, Mister Miracle feels like Tom finding absolution in not needing the narrative to affect the larger DC Universe. I felt Oberon's talk with Scott is the most telling about the shift of the plotting intimacy of King's books with time.

I kinda didn’t want to write about Tom King for a while. It’s not that I’ve soured on him, he’s still one of the best comics writers working today. It’s just that… look, when you write a book that’s about 125,000 words long, you really want to not write about that for some time. And it’s not like I’m never going to talk about Tom King at length ever again. I’m sure something will come out of Strange Adventures (no doubt a podcast series where I make David Mann suffer) and I’ll probably talk about him in length in an upcoming podcast on Doomsday Clock: The Official Sequel to DC Comic’s Watchmen, a DC Comics Production.

But I was requested to talk about a through line between these three works. To be fair, while I talk about all three in the book, I don’t really talk about them in context. There is, to be sure, a connective tissue between the works beyond Tom King’s presence. The Vision and Mister Miracle, for example, are about the cross section between the mundane and the weird, but the latter lacks the former’s interest in the ways in which attempting to be normal (white and straight) ultimately leads to disastrous and toxic results. Mister Miracle and The Omega Men, meanwhile, explore the ways in which war corrupts a society, but The Omega Men looks at it from the perspective of those on the front lines while Mister Miracle is focused on those who order men to their deaths (and also serve on the front lines). The Omega Men and The Vision both have an interest in the apocalyptic implications of superheroes gone horribly wrong, but the theme is very muted in the latter (until it suddenly isn’t) and the former is more interested in the subject of Sci-Fi war stories and the ways their implied utopias don’t always pan out.

But perhaps the theme connecting these three comics the most is that of masculinity. Masculinity is somewhat of a minor theme within the comics in the sense that it’s not, say, Steven Moffat writing the Doctor as unsure what makes a good man with contrasts ranging from the ideal man in the form of Rory Williams to more flawed, but still ultimately good men like Santa Claus. On the surface, the theme is nonexistent within The Omega Men, considering that’s a story of flawed, broken people working to make the universe a better place. However, one can find the theme within the character of Kyle Rayner. Kyle, in many ways, is a Good Man who’s gone to war. When he arrives in the Vega system, he rejects the worldview of the Viceroy that there is a distinction between us and them. That, ultimately, all life is valid and worth existing. The terms “savage” and “civilized” are used by those in the former to demonize the latter. (Insert clip from Pocahontas here.) Kyle’s goodness comes from his rejection of such binaries in favor of a better world.

The Vision, by contrast, is a bad man. He’s a bad man precisely because of what he thinks it takes to be a good man. Good men, The Vision’s been sold, are violent men. They fight against all odds to protect their families from those who would do them harm. They are breadwinners who rarely, if ever, actually have time to spend with their families, but will give pat answers to their issues that don’t really help them in the long run. And, if our families are hurt, men like The Vision ought to Avenge them. No matter how many bodies he will leave in his wake. All to be a good man.

Mister Miracle, ultimately (among other things discussed in my book which will come out by Christmas or I will eat a shoe), is about a man who broke and tried to build himself back together. And when that didn’t work, he realized that the best way forward was not by keeping his feelings bottled up in masculinity (like his brother, Orion, did), but by being open and honest about it even as it hurt those closest to him. Tom King understands this quite well. Though, from my knowledge, he has not experienced the childhood trauma of being thrown into a volcano, he has been traumatized by his experiences in war. These experiences are things he can’t fully express publicly, but they still linger in his mind.

And so, he writes stories that rhyme with his experiences. Stories about those who broke and lashed out at the people closest to them. Those who broke by breaking themselves. Those who tried to make the world a better place and came out the other side scarred. The secret at the heart of all of Tom King’s stories is empathy.

That is, after all, the moral heart of the flawed Heroes in Crisis: The Flash had a pervious breakdown that accidentally caused the deaths of those closest to him (sometimes metaphorically). He concluded from this that he was a monster for being unable to remain normal and sane like all his friends, to keep it together and not have a nervous break. So he tried to kill himself. Because he believed that was the right thing to do, the heroic thing. But the system that made him believe such rubbish was flawed. Broken even. Ultimately, the way forward presented was to have empathy for such people as Wally West, as The Vision and Kyle Rayner and Scott Free.

Not because they did horrible things and should get a pass for being white men. (For starters, Kyle’s Latinix.) But rather because one doesn’t fix a problem simply by acting as if it’s an outside problem, one that can be repelled, as opposed to a systemic one. Masculinity, especially in Batman where King presents the titular character in the midst of a nervous break due to his inability to accept rejection, is broken. It aligns with toxic ideals and is rewarded frequently for embracing them. There is, however, something within the male archetype worth salvaging. All it has to do is be open when it’s failing.