The world might be flat if you believe it hard enough
cover artist: Martin Simmonds
Imagine a world in which believing something made it true. Not simply magical thinking about winning the lottery, but the kind where gods can be made, the devil can be summoned in a high school, and the world can be made flat.
What if, when enough people believe it, Lee Harvey Oswald escaped death, Kennedy was killed by the government and every other conspiracy you can think of might just be true.
Except in this world only a very few know this power is true—and so people schooled in stability and predictability can be controlled.
The Department of Truth (TDOT) is up into the mid-thirties now and there are six collected editions following a new member, Cole Turner, brought into the eponymous department as he gets to grip with what his new job in this secret organisation entails. The thing is, he’s not alone, and nor is the department. Author James Tynion proposes that this power of belief is well understood by those who’ve been in charge of the world going back millennia, and that when empires collapse, it’s as much because their enemies controlled the narrative as it is because of force of arms.
As a result, every major power in the world has its own equivalent of the Department of Truth whose main mission is to ensure that their truths prevail. With the legacy of the Cold War hanging over their heads, both Russia and the US are stuck with ideas and beliefs that seemed powerful weapons just yesterday but now hang around their necks like lead tires threatening to drag them to disaster.
What starts out as a mission to control conspiracy theories before they become dangerous turns out to be a mission to control all truth, not just conspiracies. Tynion suggests that once you start to question the nature of truth, everything is up for grabs.
Most worrying for all concerned is a third party and rival to TDOT called Black Hat, which wants truth to be decidable by whoever comes along with the most sway and influence. This third party revolves around a “Woman in Red”—a grotesque who appears around disasters and seems to feed on these conspiracies.
The threat from a breakdown in the sense of what truth is and what it can be is the central theme of this series—tied in with how the powerful manipulate media, ideas and social structures to maintain the world that benefits them most. TDOT is a dark and deeply challenging story about how easily fooled we are, how easily we become willing members of mobs and how easy it is to hack and twist human beliefs.
Tynion’s writing is dry, sardonic and, most of all, bleak. The story, which is well into its run, is very dark and shows no signs of really revealing what’s going on under the surface. After spending time telling the reader that there’s a deeper layer yet beneath the idea of a fully malleable truth via the belief of crowds and even that there is a being who might just be the apotheosis of that state of affairs, Tynion has steered away from revelation, but that deliberate refusal to provide clear answers is very much a part of the overall style of not only the story but what Tynion’s saying with this comic.
With Tynion’s focus on truth as a construct and the perils of letting ourselves lose sight of what is true and what is deception comes Martin Simmonds’s art style, which is one part collage, one part impressionistic, and several parts scratchy painting that is reminiscent of Munch’s The Scream. It brings to Tynion’s writing a sense of saturated scenes that could reach out of the page and eat you whole. It’s a tremendous achievement that I’ve shared with my daughter (an animator) that deserves to by studied for how it lands the vibe of what Tynion’s writing about while elevating the story in the process.
This lack of respect for boundaries in the visual presentation, the overwhelming richness of the colours and the frequent ghost-like quality of how the cast appear calls into question everything you’re seeing, reminding you that this is a story that wants us to fear a world in which truth is radically unstable.
Spies, murder, psyops, propaganda and conspiracies that are true—demons and mothmen, flat earths and assassinated presidents. These are the tools in The Department of Truth, the levers the characters use, but they’re also the subject of its metanarrative that asks us to remember that we are all too susceptible to falling for scams and cons and believing liars when they lie.
We humans aren’t built for distrust—we’re built for community, and part of what makes The Department of Truth bleakly compelling is how it dives into these ideas and pulls them apart and in so doing pulls us apart too. It might be speculative fiction, but the truth (see what I did there?) is that we’re easily fooled, and most of the conspiracies appearing in this series have serious advocates who have built their lives around them in the real world of the reader.
The Department of Truth is a lengthy exploration of the very idea of consensus with the most stunning artwork. I really love it.
Highlights:- Stunning art
- Proper weird SF
- Truth as malleable set in a world of sleazy spies
Nerd coefficient: 7/10, A great comic about truth with great art and with a long running story line you can really dig into.
Reference: Tynion, James IV (writer), Simmonds, Martin (illustrator). The Department of Truth [Image Comics, ongoing at time of writing].
STEWART HOTSTON is an author of all kinds of science fiction and fantasy. He's also a keen Larper (he owns the UK Fest system, Curious Pastimes). He's a sometime physicist and currently a banker in the City of London. A Subjective Chaos, BSFA and BFA finalist he's also Chair of the British Science Fiction Association and Treasurer for the British Fantasy Society. He is on bluesky at: @stewarthotston.com.
