{"id":27846,"date":"2021-07-30T08:54:43","date_gmt":"2021-07-30T12:54:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/?p=27846"},"modified":"2021-07-30T08:56:51","modified_gmt":"2021-07-30T12:56:51","slug":"tom-king","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/2021\/07\/30\/tom-king\/","title":{"rendered":"Binge on the Balkans with Eisner Award-winning comics writer Tom King in Episode 150 of Eating the Fantastic"},"content":{"rendered":"

The chat on which you\u2019re going to eavesdrop this time around is unique for multiple reasons, but the one most important to listeners is that this is the first time in the history of this podcast I broke bread with a comic book guest who did not come from my personal generation of creators. Those you\u2019ve heard me talk to before from that particular branch of the fantastic — such as Marv Wolfman<\/a>, Gerry Conway<\/a>, Paul Levitz<\/a>, Don McGregor<\/a>, and others — were all people I worked either with or beside during the mid-\u201970s and into the early \u201880s. But this episode\u2019s guest, writer Tom King<\/a>, is different. There\u2019s no overlap to our comics careers, because his didn\u2019t begin until long after mine had ended.<\/p>\n

Tom started out in comics by interning for both DC and Marvel, where he was an assistant to X-Men<\/em> writer Chris Claremont. After his comics-inspired debut novel A Once Crowded Sky<\/em> was published in 2013, and after a stint in the CIA, he went on to write Batman<\/em> and Mister Miracle<\/em> for DC, The Vision<\/em> for Marvel, and many other projects, which won him an Eisner Award in 2018 for Best Writer. Plus \u2014 and I only realized this while taking note of comic artist Joe Giella\u2019s recent 93rd birthday \u2014 we’ve both written Supergirl<\/em> stories \u2014 43 years apart! But that\u2019s not the only commonality to our comics careers, as you\u2019ll soon hear.<\/p>\n

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We discussed the two questions no one in comics can answer, his attempt at age 11 to get a job at Archie Comics, how he goes back to the beginning when writing a classic character such as Supergirl, whether Alan Moore would have had the impetus to create Watchmen in today’s environment, our dealings with comic book censorship, the weird way Monica Lewinsky caused him not to get hired by MAD magazine, the differences we discovered early on between Marvel and DC, what he learned as an intern to the legendary Chris Claremont, the Black Knight pitch he got paid for which was never published, the way comic book people are like circus folk, why the current state of Krypto proves I could never go back to writing comics, and much more.<\/p>\n

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Here\u2019s how you can take a seat at the table with us — <\/p>\n

1) Subscribe at Apple Podcasts<\/a> — where I hope you’ll be tempted to sample some of the other 149 previous episodes.<\/p>\n

2) Use the RSS feed of http:\/\/eatingthefantastic.libsyn.com\/rss<\/a> on the device of your choice.<\/p>\n

3) Or listen using the embed below.<\/p>\n