Department of Truth #10 // Review
Cole Turner has been taken to Oregon by a guy in a US flag baseball cap. His name is Hawk. Cole doesn’t know it when he gets there, but he’s horribly mis-dressed for the assignment that rests ahead of him in the Oregonian wilderness in Department of Truth #10. Writer James Tynion IV tells a fun, little story of cryptids, belief, and pursuit that is brought to the page by Martin Simmonds and letterer Aditya Bidikar. Tynion’s story is fun, but it doesn’t exactly engage the art in a way that makes the art feel all that integral to the story.
Once again, there is coffee at a diner. This time it’s between Cole and Hawk. Cole should have known to expect the loafers-suit-and-tie look would have been inadequate when he found out they were going to Oregon. The FBI look is nice and professional, but Hawk is taking Cole into the woods to hunt Bigfoot. It’s official government business. In the world of the DOT, hunting a fictional creature is a lot more weird and dangerous than it’s likely to be in the world on this side of the comics page. Cole is about to get a lesson in the strangely existential ecology of cryptids.
Tynion is playing with a lot of intriguing elements in the script for this issue. Paranormal sci-fi and non-fictional accounts of those encountering unexplained phenomena have explored the nature of perception and belief countless times. In dialogue and the handwritten text of a character, Tynion crystallizes belief, perception, and the reality of the paranormal in a way that sometimes feels a bit crude and simplistic but occasionally delves into a thematic synthesis between truth and fiction that comes really close to its own kind of genius. That being said, Tynion isn’t really giving the artist a whole lot to work with.
The story is ALL dialogue...and WAY too much of it to provide a whole lot of room for the kind of moodily surreal nightmare landscapes that Simmonds so deftly puts to the page. To his credit, Simmonds delivers some profoundly atmospheric moments. There IS a cleverly sharp fusion between text and image on a single page as Simmonds lays out some of Tynion’s best writing between the antlers of a jackalope that’s gazing intently at the reader the whole time. For the most part, though, it’s just a few people wandering through a forest at night accompanied by big, cumbersome balloons of dialogue that totally wash out the moody primeval mystery of a forest in the Pacific Northwest.
The world that Tynion is building is fascinating. It would really need to dive in to embrace the art a bit more to be totally satisfying in comic book format, but it’s solidly entertaining as is. Simmonds’ art really SHOULD be engaged by the script much more than Tynion is allowing for, though. Issue number ten seems to be merely scratching the surface of a strange and mysterious world of existential horror. Given the right fusion, the series could be brilliant.
