Department of Truth #12 // Review
Cole Turner had an awful experience as a kid in Milwaukee back in 1987. The worst thing about it wasn’t the horror of the experience. The worst thing about it was finding out that adults lie. Shoot ahead nearly four decades, and Cole is working for a secret organization that’s trying to harness the power of misinformation in a world where reality is nightmarishly fluid in Department of Truth #12. Writer James Tynion IV’s hit-or-miss series slinks back into compelling darkness in an issue cleverly brought to the page by Martin Simmonds. The backstory of Cole mixes a bit more with depth, smoke, and mirrors as Hawk reveals more about his personal work history.
Cole Turner is a kid watching TV in the living room in residential Milwaukee as his mom (formerly employed on staff with the Milwaukee Sentinel) is having a casual conversation with a shadowy figure. That figure is allowing her to tell the story of little Cole’s brush with Satanism. Shoot ahead to the present, and Cole is trying to figure out whether or not he can trust Hawk...who may be working for the Department of Truth just like he is. Or maybe he’s going rogue. Either way, it’s hard to tell with one of the most totally secretive organizations in history.
Tynion’s exploration of the formation of truth gets a little more interesting in the twelfth issue. With the nightmarish faith-creates-truth world firmly established, Tynion starts to reveal how some of those in the DOT may or may not be using it to twist themselves into greater positions of power. A lot of this falls dangerously into big, uninteresting blocks of text, but there ARE moments where Tynion has decided to show and not tell what’s going on in the story. Of particular note is the ominous moment when Hawk takes Cole into a black helicopter that may or may not have been created out of the fears of people who believe they exist. What’s worse: they’re going to Milwaukee.
Like many of the best entries in the series, the issue mixes the nightmare collage imagery with strangely compelling drama told in sequential panels. Simmonds’ collages are as appealing as they’ve ever been. Even at they’re least compelling, any one of those collages would look outstanding as a poster or a t-shirt or an album cover, but they don’t exactly make for dynamic storytelling. The opening of the issue DOES make for a stylish bit of comic book drama as Cole’s cell-animated-looking mother talks with a mysterious figure in a Simpsons-like residential American house as little Cole is a child in the next room with the head of a Warhol-esque adult man.
So Cole and Hawk are going to Milwaukee in Black Helicopters that only sort of exist. This can safely be mentioned at the end of the review as the revelations in the issue don’t really have anything to do with the direction of the series, which ends up being a bit of a problem for it. The central action of the series isn’t centrally squared on the main conflicts. The stories that are being told in the text ARE interesting, but they’re not what’s going on in the accompanying art, which makes for a bit of a disconnect between text and graphics.
