Lanterns creator Tom King denies starting the Iraq War

On Jul 16, 2026

DC and Marvel Comics veteran and Eisner Award winner Tom King is known for many things. His Supergirl comic Woman Of Tomorrow was the basis for the character’s recent film adaptation, and later this year, he’s heading up Lanterns, HBO’s reboot of the Green Lantern mythos. Like many artists and writers, he wants to receive credit for his work, unless, of course, it’s the 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent eight-year war that claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and destabilized the entire Middle East.

Following the September 11 attacks, King, like many patriotic 22-year-olds springing to action in the face of war, enlisted in the CIA’s counterterrorism division to do his part. According to King on a 2021 episode of the Word Balloon podcast, he was in the “Iraq planning group,” working under CIA Director George Tenet, who was running the agency during the failed attempt to find weapons of mass destruction and the authorization of torture techniques on detainees. Arriving for his night shift on the eve of the war, King found Tenet sitting in his chair chomping on a cigar. “It was very weird to be there at that moment when history was starting and to have, literally, the guy who was starting the invasion sitting in my chair, and being like, ‘Okay, can I use my computer now?’” King recalled in a different 2022 episode.

However, just because he was in the room doesn’t mean he started the War. Speaking to Variety about Lanterns, King makes his case pretty clear: “I’ve seen rumors that I started the Iraq War. I didn’t start the Iraq War. I was 23 years old,” he says. “I was against al-Qaida and the Taliban. We were trying to stop them from doing horrible things. I was against the Iraq War. I thought it was the stupidest fucking thing. I watched people lie about stuff on TV, but I still had to go. It was my duty. I worked on some cases where people were going to blow up a base, and we stopped them. Should I have let them blow them up? Let those kids die because I didn’t agree with the war?”

King spent seven years working for the CIA before returning to writing and comics, having been an intern at Marvel and DC before Iraq. But his time planning the Iraq War did eventually work its way into his writing, including his Woman Of Tomorrow. Earlier this summer, social media film and culture critic Reel Takes argued the end of Woman Of Tomorrow could be read as an admission of guilt for the conflict, which, King insists, he did not start.

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