Reading Comics 174 "Omega Men, revisited"

I've been reading the complete sneak peaks DC put out for the Divergence launch in June, and it occurred to me that what I was talking about last time concerning Frank Miller and Holy Terror!, and what it means to think about comic books, terrorism, and the aftermath of the Paris attacks specifically has another dimension worth bringing up.

It's funny, too, because the Omega Men preview was one of the few I'd caught originally, and I even talked about then how audacious it was in showing what amounted to a comic book version of the beheading films terrorists have been uploading for the horrified public.

Reading it again, especially in light of the Paris attacks and the renewed sense of urgency they've provoked, I can't help but think of Omega Men as more significant than it seemed even then.

The writer is Tom King, one half of the duo responsible for the intermittently brilliant Grayson.  I guess I shouldn't be surprised.  King very deliberately sets the preview up as a dialogue, a thought piece, which none of the other sneak peaks did.  That's reason enough for it to stick out.  The fact that it seems to feature the death of Kyle Rayner, a character comic book fans of twenty years ago have particular nostalgia for, at the time of my original reading appeared to be the most important aspect of the whole piece.

But it really wasn't. 

My friends over at Weird Science track monthly sales, so I get to find out which titles are selling miserably (although, apparently, lately it's just about all of them), which includes Omega Men, which at its current rate would target it for cancellation.  And in fact that's exactly what DC did.  Except it went back and reversed that decision.

I'm thinking DC realized what it had, even if readers at the moment don't.  What I'm suggesting is that Omega Men might be one of those seminal comics that needs to be discovered.  I'm hardly its greatest possible ambassador, having read only the preview (twice).  But if King has managed to keep it compelling, relevant, on-point (and DC's faith in it certainly seems to suggest that), this might be exactly the comic book to explain, or at least attempt to make sense of, a perspective that seems downright baffling to the rest of it.

This is not to say that I think Omega Men or Tom King are endorsing terrorists, but that this is the rare experience that dares to go where no one else has gone, and it deserves some recognition for it. 

There are plenty of people who think Frank Miller's Holy Terror! after all did have the right approach, and there are others, notably President Obama, who think it's wrong to have a knee-jerk reaction to the Paris attacks.  And maybe Omega Men can help explain why.

Hey, it's worth a look.