Posted in: Comics | Tagged: dc, heroes in crisis, Tom King

Tom King Reports Death Threat Following Heroes in Crisis Reveal

Superstar writer and former C.I.A. agent Tom King has reported receiving at least one death threat on Twitter following Wednesday's release of Heroes in Crisis #8.

The issue featured big revelations about the killer at Sanctuary, a superhero PTSD treatment center, which you can read all about here. Of course, Tom King would prefer you actually buy the comic, but to each their own (see how easy that is?).

Even so, King spent the day engaging with fans about the issue's events, but as often happens in comics, things soon took a turn for the worse, with King tweeting:

This isn't the first time King has dealt with death threats. At last year's San Diego Comic-Con, King tweeted that he was traveling with a bodyguard after receiving threats in response to Batman #50, which advertised a wedding between Batman and Catwoman but delivered Catwoman leaving Batman instead.

After Bleeding Cool's Rich Johnston pointed out:

But he's not a bodyguard. He's Dave, who helps run Fan Expo Toronto. Described by those who know him as "a big teddy bear of a man". He's as much a bodyguard as Batman is Catwoman's husband…

King spoke to geometry-themed video game website Polygon to clarify the situation, once again blaming online spoilers for heightening tensions:

I was assigned a bodyguard by my con agent. Anyone who read the issue and felt that pain would get a little salve with it, and you'd see that there's that twist at the end that sort of says this isn't over. For five days [fans] didn't get the salve, and they didn't get the twist. They just got the pain. And so for those five days, understandably people were very upset […] and I can't blame them. And it used to be when you're very upset you yelled in the shower, now when you're very upset sometimes yell on your phone. And some of those people, you know, they said some things that were, you know, just like, 'Go kill yourself' or 'I'm going to come after you' or 'You're fucked.'

What I got was a mere percentage of with some people get. There used to be a bounty on my head from the fucking Taliban — I can deal with a few Twitter followers.

Of course, it goes without saying that even if you didn't like the events that occurred in a comic book, threatening to kill one of the book's creators — no matter the degree of seriousness behind the threat — is totally unacceptable. Unfortunately, it also seems to be a fact of life of the modern social media landscape.

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