It’s been a wild few years for Tom King, and an even wilder few days. A former CIA officer, his first published comics work only came in 2013, but he swiftly penned some of the most acclaimed — and lucrative — mainstream comics of the past decade. There have been critical smashes like the political-science course/sci-fi epic The Omega Men, the Iraq War saga The Sheriff of Babylon, the brutal character study Vision, and the brilliant psychological dissection Mister Miracle. Most notably, he’s been writing DC Comics flagship Batman since 2016 and earning awe from fans (as well as the occasional bit of disgruntlement, as with the twist at the end of the issue where Batman and Catwoman were supposed to get married). Just this past Friday, he won an Eisner Award (the comic-book Oscar) for best writer. And now, he’s peering over the horizon into the realm of television.
Today saw the announcement that King is working with First Look Media sub-brand Topic and production company Playground to write a dystopian saga called States of America. Details are still scant, but according to a release, the show is “set in a deeply divided U.S. that with an unprovoked act of war has been forced to suffer foreign occupation for the sake of a tentative peace.” It apparently “explores a world where the old, small differences that divide this country have become the war cries of new nations.” This is all still in very early stages, with no pilot or network in the official mix just yet. Expect to see more announcements like this in the future as the boom for adaptations of comic books continues to give way to a realization that you can just hire the people who write the source material. For example, rather than handing his baby off to strangers, writer Brian K. Vaughan is intimately involved in the FX adaptation of Y: The Last Man. Comics writers are not half bad at scripts, it turns out!
