Tom King was a recent college grad intent on a writing career, when airliners struck the World Trade Center and completely changed his life. At least temporarily.

Incensed by the attack, he applied to the CIA, which lead to a seven-year career as an undercover operations officer disrupting terrorist networks in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Tom King

“I was one of those post 9-11 people who just wanted to do something and joined up,” says King. “I started in 2002, because it took a year to get security clearance. I thought they’d make me an analyst, because I went to Columbia University as a philosophy major, but they made me an operations officer. I was one of the younger officers there.”

Today, he’s applying that background to a writing career about superheroes. At last weekend’s WonderCon in Los Angeles, DC Comics announced King will write Batman when it relaunches in June as part of the company’s line-wide DC Universe: Rebirth publishing initiative, which continues the expansion of the character mythology begun with the 2011 “New 52” revamp.

“Batman gets close to the insanity of Gotham, to the craziness, to what drives that city mad, and not be driven mad himself—or at least most of the time he isn’t,” says King. “That’s most like the mission of the CIA. We get into the heads of our enemies without becoming our enemy. I’ll use that experience to tackle this character.”

Tom King with Sheriff of Babylon artist Mitch Gerads at a WonderCon signing. Photo: Susan Karlin

King, who had interned at DC Comics and its sister company, Vertigo, in college, reignited his writer dreams after leaving the agency in 2009 to focus on his growing family. While his wife worked as an attorney, King took care of their children by day and wrote at night. His first novel, A Once Crowded Sky, about superheroes stripped of their powers battling evil forces, landed at Simon & Schuster.

“When you tell your wife you want to be a writer, most sane wives are like, ‘That’s a horrible decision!’ because you should earn a living,” laughs King. “But when I said, ‘I want to be a writer and not get shot at,’ she was like, ‘Yeah, that’s it!'”