How an Ex-CIA Officer Became the World’s Hottest Comic Book Writer

SAVING THE WORLD

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast

With Marvel’s “The Vision” and DC Comics’ “Mister Miracle,” Tom King has risen to the top of the comic-book world. And his own origin story resembles one of his hero’s.

Melissa Leon

  Sep. 04, 2019 

At first glance, a former CIA counterintelligence officer’s post-war trajectory from spy games in the Middle East to a star-making run as a Marvel and DC Comics writer might seem, at the least, sort of random.

But Tom King, the multiple Eisner award-winning writer of two of the decade’s best comics—Marvel’s The Vision miniseries and DC Comics’ Mister Miracle—indeed served abroad in Iraq and Pakistan on behalf of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center in the years after 9/11. And once back in civilian life, he indeed became one of the comics industry’s most sought-after storytellers, known for expressing the low-level unease of being alive with emotional resonance, efficiency, and frequent doses of gut-punch wisdom.