#mark millar

On a lark I picked up Mark Millar's King of Spies from the library, best synopsized as " Mid-sixties James Bond learns he has an inoperable brain tumor and begins systematically assassinating everyone on the Epstein list in an attempt to clear his conscience." The comic is very visibly the result of Millar laundering his frustrations with all of the unpunished political monstrosities of the 21st century, and the fact that he'd write a comic like this shouldn't actually be surprising to anyone familiar with the political bent of his writing on The Authority, or hell, even his work on Kingsman. But for the kind of self-indulgent romp that it is, I did think it did a remarkably effective job of maintaining that the spy genre as as embodied by James Bond in particular is simultaneously incredibly cool but also basically unsalvageably morally bankrupt; you'd expect those two lines of thinking to fight each other more than they do, as they sometimes do when he tries to do something similar with superhero comics. I think part of why they don't fight each other has to do with his characteristic lack of subtlety; it's not a particularly artful decision to cap off four issues of popcorn revenge-thriller violence with a deadpan recitation of your actual political stance on the entire affair, but I can respect the impulse, at least, to want to make the audience Eat Their Fucking Vegetables.