Department of Truth #13 // Review
When Cole Turner was a kid growing up in Milwaukee, he was confronted by a monster. Cole is being taken back to Milwaukee. He may or may not be in the right frame of mind to handle the situation as he comes face to face with his past in The Department of Truth #13. Writer James Tynion IV continues to delve into the strange world of the DOT with dizzying convolutions that don't exactly interface with the potential of beautiful horror that might be achieved by artist Martin Simmonds. It's a good story...hell...it might even be great. But it's not terribly good as a comic book. The format doesn't serve the story very well.
Cole has been taken to Milwaukee by Hawk. He asks Hawk if he plans on killing him. The fact that Hawk doesn't exactly tell him that he isn't, which might be a little encouraging. The fact that Hawk quickly rifles off a few ways he could have already done so isn't exactly reassuring. Cole's going to pull a gun on Hawk, but it's not going to be that easy. Hawk's taking Cole back to the school in Milwaukee he went to when he was a kid...a school where he met a demon that only existed because he thought it was there.
Tynion IV is really pulling together a fun and dizzying plot that stems from a world in which belief creates truth on a fundamental level. Every conspiracy theory is true if enough people believe it. It's a fun concept, but Tynion isn't exactly engaging the art. Again there are huge, dense clusterings of dialogue that could be impressive on stage, screen, or in a podcast, but simply aren't that interesting on a page that doesn't interface with the art all that much. It's too bad. The story really IS turning into something interesting as of this issue. Too bad it doesn't work terribly well as a comic book.
Simmonds' art is pulled back just a bit in this issue. There's a cursory analysis of the nature of Satan and Christianity in the world of DOT this issue. Cole and Hawk descend into a basement beneath a Milwaukee grade school, which would be a really cool place for weird, horrific tableaux in the style of Hieronymus Bosch, but Simmonds doesn't really deliver on it, which may be a conscious choice. The text really needs to live at the center of the issue, and too much horrific distraction would pull the reader away from a far more insidious horror in the story Hawk is delivering to Cole.
There would be a million ways to draw the story closer to the art. Tynion is constructing a really impressive plot, but it's largely just an outline. There are only a couple of moments in the issue that aren't stories delivered entirely in text. It's a real disappointment as the plot IS interesting. It's just too bad, so much of it is cluttering-up dialogue balloons.
