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.

A Rough Excerpt of "My Own Utopia: An Examination of Space Utopianism in Wartime"

What follows is a rough idea of the themes and ideas I’m planning on exploring in one of the chapters of One Must Imagine Scott Free Happy on the series The Omega Men by Tom King and Barnaby Bagenda as well as the approach it will take. It was commissioned by Aleph Null through Patreon.

…But what makes it all the more galling is that one of Trek’s major influences explored this territory so much better. That influence being the Dirty Pair. For those unaware, Dirty Pair is a series of light novels, anime, and comics about a pair of trouble consultants who work of the World Welfare Works Association (3WA) named Kei and Yuri, who are hired for various jobs from investigating the disappearance of a child in a city owned by a corporation who does weird experiments involving the remains of a long dead race of aliens to infiltrating the mob to chasing a cat around the city as The Lovely Angels. It should be noted that their escapades typically end in high body counts as a consequence of completing their missions, giving them the derogatory nickname “The Dirty Pair.”

The society depicted in Dirty Pair is typically read as a utopian one, albeit in the Omelas sense as opposed to the typical Trek sense. That is to say that while socially, humanity has improved immensely over the years, there are still some of the lingering economic concerns of the era be it the ability of the uber-rich to do whatever they want, regardless of the ethical implications or the political corruption that allows patently evil people to remain in power. [FOOTNOTE: This is perhaps best exemplified in the episode Love is Everything! Risk Your Life to Elope!!] People still die horribly and the guilty don’t always get caught in the end. Indeed, the Lovely Angels work on a paycheck to paycheck basis, sometimes even for exposure. As I have said before, capitalism is a utopia. It just depends on where you look at it from.

But in terms of the themes of this chapter, it’s perhaps best to look at the episode Red Eyes are the Sign of Hell Chase After the Killing Squad! There are many similarities between the episode and The Omega Men. Both involve members of a, for lack of a better term, space police entering a relatively internal matter focusing on a group of rebels going up against a government for a better life. Both involve the complex nature of child solders as a background theme and the ways in which those in power will try to destabilize a situation for their own benefit.

Where they differ is in the scope. Omega Men deals with an entire federation of planets having a civil war over the cruelties of the system done largely for financial gain whereas Red Eyes is invested in a singular backwater planet being manipulated by forces outside the conflict for financial gain. And yet, Omega Men, for all its scope, is a more personal story. One focused on the experiences of those within the conflict from the guilt-ridden murder bots to the disillusioned pacifists to those who use rebellion for their own gain. Whereas Red Eyes takes a more overview look at the situation at its current stage, not even glancing at the causes and motivation of the war. [FOOTNOTE: This is most likely due to the length each story is provided. The Omega Men is a twelve issue series whereas Red Eyes are the Sign of Hell Chase After the Killing Squad! is a single half hour standalone episode of a 10 episode series.]

And yet, from both there’s a sense of disillusionment at the very nature of war within them. Both stories view the war as a pointless slaughter that only helps the cruel and breaks those who want a better world. There is no Mekon to be slain, no barbarians hounding at the walls of this world we call Utopia, no Spiders throwing bombs from a far off land. Not even a Section 37 keeping the peace from the shadows. Merely people in a bind forced to make deals with the worst kinds of people who see war as a means to an end. Everyone else just gets consumed and the survivors are left wondering why.

Nowhere is this clearer than in both stories endings. In The Omega Men, after Kyle tries desperately to convince everyone that there is a better way to deal with this than just killing the bad guy and succeeding with almost everyone, the Princess cuts off the villain’s head, “winning” the war. Disillusioned, Kyle returns to Earth and is debriefed by some member of the government about what’s happened since he left Vega. To keep it short, everything’s gotten bad, if not worse than before. Some have fallen because of the power they wield while others are on the run because of what they did for the greater good.

Indeed, the general tries to frame the war as a battle with a literal evil empire as part of his pitch to Kyle to be on his side in the next war. While this statement is true in that the Viceroy was involved in massive genocide as well as general fascist tendencies, the statement that he led an evil empire is to simplify the war Kyle just fought in order to make joining the next one much simpler. It ignores the people who fought on both sides being anything more than slabs of meat to be thrown at one another, as if being a star war makes the war any less horrific. That the people holding a gun at your face aren’t as afraid to shoot at you as you are at them. [FOOTNOTE: For more on “The Enemy,” see The World Haters.]

It is perhaps fitting that Kyle’s response is to reject the notion of the enemy and the ally, of Us and Them, of, to use his words, the savage and the civilized. In effect, he keeps the same perspective he had at the start of the story: the world is more complicated than just goodies and baddies. People are people in the end and he is one of them. But the invocation here, in this final moment, on the eve of yet another sodding war, sparks an edge of rebellion.

But Red Eyes are the Sign of Hell Chase After the Killing Squad! offers a bonfire. When the dust settles and everyone’s dead, it’s revealed that the person behind the titular Killing Squad was an arms merchant who has been prolonging the war by kidnapping veterans and brainwashing them into being emotionless killers who will not stop. They do not feel pain, do not want for food, lack any mercy or empathy. They are the perfect soldier, the terminator of worlds. [FOOTNOTE: As an aside, there’s an interest in the series with the Terminator. In the second episode of the OVA series, No Thanks! No Need For a Halloween Party, taking the piss out of the famous robot by having it bum around the City it’s in while still being demonstrating its status as a threat. Affair of Nolandia, the first Dirty Pair film, has its Terminator analogue as a massive threat and a physical representation of the cruelty the corporation at the heart of the story does to gain power. And What?! The Boy in the Mansion is a Terminator, the penultimate episode of the original series, used its Terminator analogue as a metaphor for how loss can bring good people to do bad things.] One who will follow orders no matter what, even if it means killing a child.

In truth though, there’s not much difference between these kidnapped men and a typical soldier. As Morrison notes, most people didn’t volunteer to fight in WWII. “People,” Morrison said, “are afraid when a guy says to you “Mr. Morrison, we’ve got a war here, and you’re a person we want to fight for us – will you please come and fight for us?  If you don’t come, you’ll get a fine, or you’ll be put in prison.  You’ll maybe get ten years.  We might even shoot you.”   I think it’s easier without the Emergency Powers, like they had during the war, to protest, but in this country, despite all the talk, we don’t protest easy.  We allow a £10 fine to deter us.  But with a ten years prison sentence, or a prison sentence that’s indefinite, like some of the COs got – a year in prison, ready to come out, give them another year – that kind of thing, and pile it on, I would suggest that’s more of a deterrent than the fear of possibly dying.  It was the threat that they knew, rather than the one they didn’t.  Take it from me, if Churchill instead of his Blood, Sweat and Tears thing had said “Any man or woman in the forces who would like to give it all up and go home, can” – he wouldnae have got the microphone out his mouth before he’d been trampled to death in the rush.  That’s a fact.” (Grafton, Looking Back) Really, the only significant difference is that these men were kidnapped and brainwashed with machines rather than coerced and indoctrinated.

But this difference is enough to enrage the Lovely Angels and, as their name implies, they bring their wrath upon the war profiteer. And so, they kill him. Given the ambiguous nature of the ending and the nature of the series as a bunch of standalone episodes that don’t necessarily follow one from the other, it is plausible to say that the Lovely Angels died at the end. But they died taking down one arms merchant. One. There are other arms merchants like him out there. The idea of using other people like machines to kill other people for the sake of making a buck is not a new one. Indeed it’s the very foundation of war. None of these stories offer a means to escape from this cycle.

Is this the best we can hope for? To bend the knee to powers we know are monstrous and cruel because they wear the aesthetics of Utopia? That there needs to be cruelty in this universe because without it, we would be seen as weak and be consumed by the barbarians at the gates? That the only way to keep a Utopia afloat is for us to dance with the devil in the pale moonlight while the frozen mask just smiles? That the only acts of useful rebellion that are possible… merely a reference only we’ll get and the ability to take them down with us? Are we trapped forevermore in this binary cage we call Endless Wartime?

Well…