Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Mike Redmond | News | July 20, 2026
I’m just going to come right out and say it: The internet is a fartbox of dumb. I’ve said it since the very beginning of my career, and I’m saying it with all of my chest now. The advent of social media has been a sea of gasoline poured on a raging dumpster fire, and the situation has only gotten progressively worse ever since.
One of the things that drive me nuts are insane narratives that instantly take hold on the far left just as quickly the maniac rantings of the right. In both cases, it’s to prove the ideological bonafides of the spouter, and sadly, any attempt to bring truth to the matter gets you shouted down for minimizing evil or whatever. To me, the real evil is media platforms that amplify anxiety and depression for engagement, but have fun telling Bluesky that one.
Anyway, what’s this have to do with Lanterns? Well, the show is co-created by comics scribe Tom King, whose critically acclaimed work James Gunn has been using as a blueprint for his DCU to varied results. Mister Terrific in Superman was inspired by King’s Strange Adventures and absolutely crushed it. While Supergirl was based on King’s Woman of Tomorrow, and uh, yeah…
What people might not know is that King worked for the CIA, so you can only guess how normal our side of the aisle has been about that, especially since King’s tenure started shortly after 9/11. He had just broken into comics as a college student, working for Vertigo as a copy boy and an assistant for legendary X-Men writer Chris Claremont. If you know anything about comics, the early 2000s were bleak. King was given some blunt advice that the industry was going bankrupt, so he went to work for the Justice Department before applying to the CIA.
As I mentioned earlier, the internet is stupid, so this factoid was readily distilled into “Tom King started the Iraq War,” when in reality he was barely out of college and working the night shift. Did he do time in Iraq? Like a lot of young men of my generation, yes, and he was immediately disillusioned by the experience.
Via Variety:
“I’ve seen rumors that I started the Iraq War. I didn’t start the Iraq War. I was 23 years old,” he says. “I was against al-Qaida and the Taliban. We were trying to stop them from doing horrible things. I was against the Iraq War. I thought it was the stupidest f*cking thing. I watched people lie about stuff on TV, but I still had to go. It was my duty. I worked on some cases where people were going to blow up a base, and we stopped them. Should I have let them blow them up? Let those kids die because I didn’t agree with the war?”
According to King, he got a care package from his mom that was full of comics by Brian Michael Bendis, Mark Millar (I know, I know) and Ed Brubaker that showcased how comics did not go bankrupt, but instead thrived thanks to new creative visions. That’s when he got out.
“It was the generation who had reconstructed comics,” King told Variety. “They turned them from books with pictures into movies with words. It blew my mind.”
Look, if you want to deny yourself the creative works of a guy because he used to work for an organization that’s only been surpassed by AIPAC as a mindless social media bogeyman, it’s your life. But can we stop with hyperbolic statements like he started the Iraq War? It accomplishes absolutely nothing except proving that our side’s eyes can glaze over just as readily as every right winger spouting lies about migrants eating cats. If you can’t make a point without lying, then you never had one to begin with.
