Sheriff of Babylon #3 Discussion

[the illustrious mr. kenway]

Honestly its so great and I'm hoping they do a spiritual sequel or something.

[RBerman]

There have been rumbles of doing a "second season" since the story clearly has more to unfold, but King and Gerads are so much in demand right now that making time for a less commercial project is probably unrealistic.

I don't pay much attention to modern comics but took a recommendation to check out The Vision and was glad I did. Now I've read Sheriff of Babylon and Mister Miracle as well and am halfway through Omega Men. Like Grant Morrison, King has some pet themes and stylistic "tells" that pop up repeatedly in his work, but I don't mind; it's like looking at the same object from different sides, seeing different things each time:

Sheriff is the most literal telling of the American military experience in Iraq. We have massive force to bring to bear, but the complex web of local politics is hard to decipher, and we can't make a move without causing collateral damage.

The Vision tells a similar story of America (represented by The Vision family) moving into Baghdad (represented by Arlington, VA) and causing all sorts of collateral damage due to their high power level coupled with a limited understanding of how to behave in that environment. Everybody has the best intentions, but tragedy is inevitable when people of wildly disparate power levels try to coexist with little trust or mutual understanding.

Mister Miracle is about PTSD. It leads to suicide attempts and alienation from spouses who try to understand, but whose sympathy takes its own toll on them. There's also some Orion-related material in the first few issues about having bad bosses who are more about building their own kingdom than fulfilling their mission in a compassionate way. And some material about how some conflicts never end; you just get shunted repetitively from one victorious mission to another without seeing any evidence of overall strategic progress.

I'm only halfway through Omega Men, but it's clearly about the intra-Iraqi conflicts between Shia and Sunni (the "Alpha" and "Alpha and Omega" Vegan factions) and secular totalitarians (the Brahmins). There's even some recycled dialogue between Omega Men and Sheriff of Babylon about how God/Alpha is the Uncaused Cause, which is probably a topic from Tom King's days as a philosophy major at Columbia. Into this mess of unending ethnic hostilities gets dropped an American (Kyle Rayner) who becomes a pawn and a prize to be manipulated, because he has great power and little understanding of the landscape.

That's all I've read from Tom King, but I can tell that "Heroes in Crisis" is another murder mystery (like Sheriff) dealing with PTSD (like Mister Miracle). "Grayson" deals with spy stuff I guess -- fog of war in the Middle East perhaps? I've heard of Batman getting drawn into the "War of Jokes and Riddles" which just from the name sounds a lot like more Iraqi Sunni/Shiite allegory.

So basically, the King work that I've read to date seems very personal and of a piece with each other. Where Grant Morrison writes about taking drugs and feeling like he's ascended to alternate planes of existence, Tom King writes about powerful people blundering into other people's business and wounding everybody, themselves included, in the process.