Mark Millar’s latest venture King of Spies holds almost nothing back as its hero assassinates producers, presidents, and popes.
WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for King of Spies #3, available now.
The typical super villain is a well understood cliché in the spy genre. Cackling mad scientists with doomsday devices may be typical fodder for James Bond, but the super spy Roland King sets his sights in King of Spies on far more realistic targets. From movie producers with rampant allegations of sexual assault to ex-presidents responsible for endless wars, the villains of the comic are not only closer to the real world but closely aligned with actual historic figures.
The thinly-veiled parallels make their sources of inspiration clear, and as King of Spies continues its hero racks up an increasingly controversial body count. Nothing could prove that more than the latest issue, where one of Roland’s targets is a former pope.
At the start of the series, protagonist Roland King holds a parallel to himself that is familiar to any fan of spy fiction: James Bond. Roland’s work as an elite agent of espionage saw him fulfill an entire career of action-packed missions with high-tech gadgets much like Bond himself, but the main departure occurs when Roland discovers a terminal medical condition that leaves him with 9 months left to live. The condition provokes a crisis of conscience where Roland decides to go rogue from the world’s governments. Rather than protecting the worst and most powerful people in the world, he turns those very same people into his targets.
And the targets are not cartoonish supervillains or garish psychopaths. Though Roland’s hit list includes brief one-panel executions with vague descriptions like a drug kingpin in the House of Lords or a pedophile popstar, many of his targets prove eerily similar to actual real world figures. When Roland appears on an airplane and identifies his target as a former president who was “the one whose strings were pulled like a marionette and who gave us a war that would never end, blood spilled for oil for two entire decades,” the description and appearance of the character in question are transparently George W. Bush. Mere moments later, Roland shoots the ex-president in the head.
The same treatment continues in the following issue where Roland kills a movie producer with clear parallels to Harvey Weinstein and even kidnaps a former pope who bears a striking resemblance to Pope Benedict XVI. For the former the crimes meriting Roland’s attention are his sexual assaults, and for the latter it was his role in covering up the crimes of high-ranking priests in the Catholic Church. But while Weinstein was infamously convicted in a portion of the crimes brought against him, pinning such charges on figures like President Bush or Pope Benedict stand out as far more controversial moves inherently divisive in the realms of politics and religion which they concern.
The comic leaves no holds barred when it comes to the figures it targets, embracing in full force the reality of its conceit of what would happen if such an outlandishly deadly figure such as Roland truly did try to assassinate his way through one man’s conception of what the world’s most powerful evil people would be. But the nature of reality is that not everybody agrees on what it constitutes, meaning that there are no conveniently objectively evil figures like Doctor Doom or the Joker that Roland takes down. With its sights set on presidents on popes alike, there is seemingly no real-world figure beyond the irreverent boldness of the comic’s concept.
There is no doubt that King of Spies‘ choice of targets is controversial, and it seems to lean into that controversial nature deliberately. Individual readers may see those real-world parallels as alternately brave spotlights on figures whose misdeeds too seldom receive attention or else tone-deaf insults to important people whose reputations do not deserve such aspersions.
Regardless of the individual reader, however, the boldness and directness of the comic is nevertheless strikingly different from the usual fare of such adventure stories. There is something refreshing in the novelty of its realism, and for those who can sit back and enjoy the comic purely as a work of fiction there seems to be no end to the surprises it has to offer.
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