Hallucination, Art, and Memory: On “The Department of Truth: The End of the World”
Welcome. After a couple of false starts and a move from Substack to Buttowndown, this newsletter is finally up and running. What's it about? Comics. What kind of comics? All kinds. Some old, some new. I've missed writing about comics at length; I'm happy to be doing it again. And thus, this whole adventure begins with an anecdote involving Batman, middle school, and the comics store where the singer from Monster Magnet used to work.
I can distinctly remember reading comics on a very specific Friday night in the house where I grew up. Specifically, I was reading a graphic novel: Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. I was 12 or 13 at the time, putting this squarely in the late 1980s; I think, though I’m not sure, that it was before a middle school dance. I’m not sure why I remember this better than several years in my 30s; memory is a strange thing. (Strangely, this digression is relevant to the topic at hand.)
I was hooked, and not long afterwards I decided that if I liked one high-profile graphic novel featuring Batman, I’d probably like another. Cue the younger version of me reading Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s Arkham Asylum. Cue me being very, very unnerved. I understood Batman, or so I thought. I’m not sure I understood the blend of body horror, philosophical debates, and self-mutilation I immersed myself in. But it left me as a longtime admirer of both writer and artist, and subsequent readings of the book have helped illustrate just how crucial McKean’s free-flowing, hallucinatory images are to the narrative at hand.
Now it’s thirty-odd years later and I’m reading The End of the World, the first volume of James Tynion IV and Martin Simmonds’s The Department of Truth, and I’m getting some of the same unsettled vibes. Some of that comes from Simmonds, whose style evokes both McKean and Bill Sienkiewicz — another formative influence on my comics reading at that age, as I returned over and over to Red Bank’s long-since-shuttered Fantasy Zone to buy back issues from the Claremont/Sienkiewicz New Mutants run. Sienkiewicz, though, never left me quite as unnerved as McKean; I’d cite both as formally inventive surrealists, to be sure, but there’s a (literally) visceral quality to much of McKean’s painted work that gets under my skin in a very particular way.
The way that the first volume of The Department of Truth left me unsettled has to do in part with how the writer and artist gel, and in part with how that links up with the story they’re telling. And, to get the obligatory disclaimer out of the way: I realize that by writing about the first volume of a much longer series, just how much of the full story is being told here is up for debate. And there have been plenty of series — The Wicked + The Divine and Locke & Key among them — where the full scope of the book wasn’t apparent until after the first collection.
This first volume is suitably intriguing to have me wanting to come back for more, though. The quick summary, though there will be spoilers, is as follows: FBI instructor Cole Turner sees something he wasn’t supposed to and is effectively drafted into the ranks of the super-secret Department of Truth. As his soon-to-be boss tells him in the first issue, “The more people believe in something, the more true that thing becomes. The more reality tips in the favor of that belief.”
That is made dramatically apparent to Cole when he attends a flat-earther convention and is spirited away by a pair of sinister billionaires, who take him to a place where it appears that the world is, in fact, utterly flat. There’s also the matter of Cole’s boss, who we encounter in the issue’s first pages in an even earlier flashback. He’s Lee Harvey Oswald, you see — which, for a story told at the nexus of American history and conspiracy theories, seems to be an inspired choice.
The End of the World alternates between standalone cases featuring Cole and fellow Department of Truth agent Ruby and more mythology-centric issues. I don’t think it’s projecting too much to say that Tynion and his collaborators are riffing on The X-Files somewhat here; then again, if a structure works, why not? The unique wrinkle in this is that the series mythology has two distinctive strands, one having to do with the nature of the Department of Truth itself and one relating to Cole’s own history, which involves a Satanic Panic-esque incident in his childhood, which in turn gives rise to a star-faced demonic figure who manages the enviable task of being the most unsettlingly-designed character in a series full of them.
Earlier, I wrote about how Simmonds’s work evokes the art both McKean and Sienkiewicz, but there’s also something of J.H. Williams III in there — a sense of experimenting with page layouts that works strikingly well in this context. Much of that has to do with the nature of the story being told. This is, after all, a book about reality being rewritten; that the panel layout used from page to page can sometimes evoke panels pasted over a more sinister underlying image works perfectly in this context.
Simmonds’s range as an artist allows him free rein to render certain figures in decidedly different styles, including the aforementioned star-faced monster, who shows up as both a child’s drawing and an eldritch terror. The original characters here abound with striking visuals; another recurring figure is a woman wearing a red dress with giant Xs over her eyes. (It’s worth mentioning here that Tynion has a penchant for visually striking characters in both his creator-owned and company-owned work.) But that filters down into the book’s more mundane cast as well, who tap into a well of American archetypes.
Oswald is, obviously, the primary example of this, but he’s not alone. Cole’s husband has a thing for Western shirts, giving him something of a timeless, cowboy-esque demeanor. And Cole himself has a mop of light blonde hair — sometimes colored white — and massive eyeglasses. All of which, in certain panels, makes him a dead ringer for Andy Warhol, something I can’t imagine is coincidental. If you’re telling a story about mass communications, about reimagining and repurposing the mundane, and you’re chronicling decades of pop culture, it’s an unexpected but spot-on choice.
Elements of The Department of Truth feel timeless, but others seem all too connected to our conspiracy-minded present moment. That a book about the inexactitude of memory is illustrated in a style impossible to neatly describe is a perfect touch — and a reminder of why the way a story is told can be as important as the story you’re telling.
As always, I'm Tobias Carroll, and this has been Postcards From Komiksoj.
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