This famous D.C. creator is revitalizing DC Comics

There are only a handful of well-known creators who make a living writing for Marvel and DC — the big two comic companies based in New York and California, respectively. To find a comic writer or artist living in Washington, D.C. is like coming upon a shard of Kryptonite.

Yet somehow, Tom King, who’s spent the last 25 years in the District — living multiple lives as a CIA counterterrorism agent, stay-at-home dad, and comic book megastar — snuck his way in. 

One of today's hottest comic writers, King has won multiple awards for his limited series “Mister Miracle,” about an escape God trying to escape his life, and his over three-year run on the main Batman title. His story “Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow” is being adapted into a feature film by DC Studios. 

Like many of his works, his 2015 breakout “Vision,” — which served as the inspiration for the Disney+ show WandaVision — was  “a very Washington D.C. comic,” King tells The 51st.  It portrayed the android Avenger attempting to settle into family life in the suburbs of Arlington. 

“It's about that Washington experience of you coming to Washington with all the ideals in the world as a young person,” he says. “And then having kids, and then making the compromises it takes to get your kids through their life, which makes you compromise your career, which makes you compromise your values, which I've seen and maybe experienced.”

This is a theme in King’s work: writing characters that grown folks can identify with. His heroes may be ace crime fighters during the day but at night they fret about whether to sleep-train their kids. They faced gargantuan supervillains, yet their worst enemies are anxiety and despair. They need saving. 

Living on Capitol Hill, in what King calls “the beating heart of the country” allows him to plug into the national discourse. “I don't write politically, but I try to express the emotions that are in the air,” he says. This humanity is what allows his work to transcend traditional superhero comics and appeal to a broad audience, Julian Lytle, a Washington, D.C.-based comic creator, podcaster, and film critic, tells The 51st. “All that stuff is in the books. Batman loves Catwoman because Tom loves his wife.”

Seeing King succeed shows “it's possible to live in this area and do something” that isn't working in government, writing for a newspaper, or working in the military, Lytle says. Unlike people who visit once or twice and only know Congress, King portrays an accurate version of the city “because he lives here,” Lytle continues. “He has no problem asking people questions to figure out more about whatever he needs to know.” 

Born in 1978, King grew up in Southern California and was raised by his Jewish single mother, who worked as a studio executive at Warner Brothers. He fell in love with comics after reading Avengers #300 in 1989, but his mother discouraged him from pursuing a career as unstable as writing. While studying philosophy and history at Columbia — partly inspired by Marvel-lawyer/masked-vigilante Daredevil’s alma mater — he interned at DC’s Vertigo line, working under top editors, and later at Marvel with legendary X-Men writer Chris Claremont. He even sold his first script for $500, though the comic was never released.

After graduating in 2000, he listened to his mom, decided to become a lawyer, and moved to D.C. “That's a very Washington track,” he says. “You work at the Justice Department for two years. You become a lawyer, you clerk for some Washington judge, and suddenly you're on the inside track.”

That’s where he met his wife Colleen, who — along with his children — would serve as the inspiration for many of his comic characters. They were colleagues in the same Justice Department program helping radiation-exposed cancer victims get healthcare. 

“We all became best friends,” he says of the five young folks who began the program around the same time. “If you watch ‘Friends,’ it's very much like that, where two of the friends in a group started dating each other, and then we dated in secret, and eventually had to come out to everyone else. And now we have three kids and a dog.”

The first time he kissed his wife, who became a practicing lawyer, was on the mall of the Lincoln Memorial, sipping rum from Coke bottles. “I got way too wasted,” he says. “And ended up hooking up right on the lawn.” 

King planned to continue to follow his wife into law, taking the LSAT and getting into law school at the University of Virginia, but 9/11 changed his plans. He hopped onto the CIA website, seeking to help. 

He enrolled and served as a counter-terrorism officer, eventually posting in Iraq and Afghanistan. His time in the agency inspired his acclaimed 2015 comic “The Sheriff of Babylon,” which offered a nuanced, empathetic portrayal of military life in Iraq and its impact on civilians amid widespread judgment of those who served.

Weeks before leaving the U.S., he popped the question to Colleen on a waterfront bench near the Jefferson Memorial. “It was the middle of the winter,” he says. “It was cold. I think she just said yes to get back in the car.” 

Years later, she became pregnant with their first child. The birth scene in “Mister Miracle,” which won the 2019 Eisner Award for Best Limited Series, is — beat for beat — the birth of his first son at George Washington University Hospital. King just replaced his in-laws with the female Furies, New Gods who serve Darkseid — the murderous dictator of the planet Apokolips. You don’t have to understand all those words to realize how great the story is.

“When my wife read the issue, she's like, ‘Why does the check come in your name?’” he recalls. “‘I did all of the work. You literally just recorded what I did.’”

After his wife’s maternity leave ended, the couple found themselves without childcare. So King left the CIA — where he worked for seven years. He entered the stay-at-home parenting world, swinging his kids at Turtle and Garfield parks. “It would just be 20 nannies and me,” he says. They took frequent trips to the monuments, and King says the kids honed their early reading skills “by looking at the walls of the Lincoln Memorial.”

At the same time, he began dreaming of a career in comics again. While D.C. only had a small industry presence with few local creators, it's centrally located to numerous comic conventions, which made it a great place to leap into the industry. King devised his plan after listening to an episode of the Word Balloon podcast, in which New York Times bestselling author Brad Meltzer shared his journey of launching a DC Comics career after achieving traditional literary success. 

“I was like, ‘All right, I’m just gonna do exactly what Brad Meltzer did,” King says. The plan worked — kinda, sorta. 

Having been trained on sleep deprivation in the CIA, he spent nights writing his first novel, the critically acclaimed “A Once Crowded Sky,” which portrayed a world of newly powerless superheroes struggling with everyday life — falling into depression and alcoholism. The book bombed sales-wise, but King used it to hit up every local convention, tabling and introducing himself to anyone he could.

Discouraged after writing two more books that never got published (even though his agent loved them), he contemplated returning to the CIA. Then the email came.

DC Comics editor Karen Berger — a Vertigo imprint trailblazer he’d met during his college internship — wanted to meet. She introduced him to another Vertigo editor, who gave him a shot in 2013: an eight-page time-travel short story about what would happen to Hitler’s sister if someone went back in time and murdered the guy before he became a genocidal dictator in an issue of Time Warp, an anthology one shot of time travel stories. This led to longer works, including “The Sheriff of Babylon” and “Grayson,” a spy tale about Batman’s first Robin for the main DC universe. 

In 2023, King took the writing reins of the main “Wonder Woman” comic book, which he’s still writing today. True to form, it takes place in D.C. and is inspired by his life experiences. 

“When my kids were little, I would tell them these stories that there was a huge giant that was buried underneath the Washington Mall, and his foot was in the Lincoln Memorial and his nose was where the Washington Monument was, his hand is where the White House is,” he says. “They loved this story, and so when I wrote this huge Wonder Woman battle where she had to fight a giant, I buried the giant under the mall.”