Warning: contains spoilers for King of Spies #3!
The new Image Comics series from writer Mark Miller, King of Spies, has been called a pastiche of James Bond, as it is seemingly an unofficial continuation of Pierce Brosnan’s role as 007. The main character, Roland King, is a retired super-spy who finds out he has cancer and doesn’t have much time left to live. King – who bears a striking resemblance to Brosnan – decides that he will use what time he has left to track down and assassinate high-profile targets who, in his mind, deserve to die. However, during one of his missions, King uses a gadget so gross, it would be cleared to appear in a Bond movie.
In King of Spies #3, written by Mark Miller and drawn by Matteo Scalera, Roland continues to hunt down political and business figures whose misdeeds warped the world (with his now regretful help.) Having taken down prime ministers and even a former pope, Roland moves on to a “Hollywood producer,” utilizing an arsenal he seized after taking down one of the planet’s greatest assassins.
After the mission with the former Pope, the two men keeping track of Roland King’s current body count discuss another one of his assassinations during which the James Bond-like super-spy uses a truly disgusting gadget acquired in the second issue. King decides to kill off a Hollywood big-wig, confronting him in the bathroom of a restaurant and citing “how you treat women and the multiple rape allegations you weaseled your way out of.” Prior to this, he utilizes a ‘Smart P*ss’ device. To use it, the assassin needs to swallow a capsule containing the gadget, then stand next to their target at a urinal, at which point the microscopic device leaves the assassin’s urine stream, moves through the system, and targets the bladder of the person the assassin wishes to kill. The device then swims up the stream of the assigned target and embeds itself in their body until the assassin utilizes the detonator, triggering a sizable explosion.
The device is intensely gross, and more immediately fitting for Millar’s other spy homage Kingsman: The Secret Service, but it’s not totally out of place in a Bond-esque arsenal. In the James Bond film You Only Live Twice, Bond uses a ‘Deadly Cigarette’ to kill one of his targets. The gadget contains a mini-rocket hidden within the cigarette, which James Bond uses to discreetly kill someone from across the room. This microscopic urine probe is definitely grosser, but the concept is the same, and could have come from Q on a particularly strange day.
While the idea that Roland King is an aging James Bond may all be done through winking association and implication, the iconic aspects of 007’s adventures – cool gadgets, exotic locales, and near-unstoppable villains – persist in Mark Millar‘s King of Spies, allowing fans to imagine the secret agent getting a little more extreme (and a lot grosser) as he realizes his lifelong mission benefited all the wrong people.
