It’s off to post-war Iraq for ex-CIA officer Tom King’s new one, ass-kicking superhero Patsy Walker returns, and supernatural black ops are on the menu in Cry Havoc
Comics used to be printed with just four colours, which suited their bright, simple morality. Now they increasingly deal in shades of grey. Tom King joined the CIA after 9/11 and worked for seven years as a counter-terrorism officer, including a stint operating out of Baghdad’s Green Zone after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. More than a decade later, he has retired from espionage but is revisiting his Iraq experience in The Sheriff Of Babylon, a new series from Vertigo with gritty art by Mitch Gerads. The discovery of a body under Baghdad’s iconic Victory Arch entangles three very different characters: a distracted US contractor training Iraq’s new police force, a burnt-out Shia detective who previously worked under Saddam, and a driven Sunni tribal chief tightening her grip on the city’s criminal underworld. King’s terse writing captures the volatility and cynical realpolitik of post-invasion Baghdad, and the fact that his script required CIA vetting to ensure it wasn’t revealing any sensitive operational detail gives The Sheriff Of Babylon an added real-world frisson. Issue two of the eight-part series is published next week, and will appeal to fans of Homeland and The Honourable Woman.
King has already proved he’s not just a spy guy; he’s staged his own mini-invasion of the Marvel universe with his ongoing series The Vision. Featuring the dashing red synthezoid played by Paul Bettany in Avengers: Age Of Ultron, it follows the artificially created superhero attempting to live an ordinary suburban life and was one of the best-reviewed debuts of 2015.
Continue reading...
0 comments:
Post a Comment