Cole Turner knows that the people he works for are messing with him. It’s nothing new. EVERYONE knows this. For him, things are a bit worse, though. He doesn’t work for a normal employer. He is forced to confront just a bit more about his employer in Department of Truth #8. Artist Martin Simmonds returns to the series he helped develop with writer James Tynion IV in another satisfying dive into the murky shadows of conspiracy and government secrets in a world in which faith creates truth. After faltering for the past several issues, DOT returns to the creepy mystery that has made it so captivating.

In Washington D.C. in 1987, Lee Harvey Oswald met with a guy wearing a baseball cap with an inverted US flag on it. Both Oswald and the guy were there to talk shop. There was a situation brewing in Milwaukee. There was a kid they could use as leverage. That kid’s name was Cole Turner. Shoot ahead decades later and Turner is working for Oswald along with the rest of the DOT. He’d had nightmares of a demon when he was a child. Now he works for people who wer involved in the birth of that demon. 

Tynion finally dives back into the heart of the story with Cole Turner, advancing the central exploration of the nature of truth in a place where mass belief can drastically change the way the world is objectively. A lot of what Tynion is exploring in the affairs of the Department of Truth could be seen as reflections and refractions of what the CIA had been doing on this side of the comics page. It’s fascinating stuff. Intentions might have been pure, but the more one tangles with the darkness, the more one tends to become a shadow, which is a theme that’s ricocheting dizzyingly through this issue. 

Simmonds’ return to the series is a welcome one. The rather crucial, little details of the serial that are moving the narrative forward seem to have been waiting for him to get back to business. There’s a hell of a lot of murky plot exposition going on in this issue that would be really, really cool in a dramatic format with actors, but Simmonds lays the shadowy drama out on the page in a way that make it feel like a natural habitat for weird conspiracy horror. From the use of shredded document imagery in the gutters between the panels to the cleverly selective extreme close-ups and the weirdly ghostlike world of Simmonds’ heavy shadows, Department of Truth has found its pulse again. 

It’s worth mentioning that this is an improvement over earlier attempts at this sort of serial. TV’s The X-Files wasted little time in losing a hell of a lot of coherence in the government conspiracy end of the show. The usual pitfalls of this sort of ongoing serial seem to be solidly avoided in Department of Truth. Tynion’s challenge is to dive into the mystery in a way that reveals just enough without weaving hopeless convolutions into the story. Tynion seems to have carefully constructed the backstory of Cole, Oswold and the DOT. It’s satisfying following a series knowing that the creative team has the mystery well under control.

Grade: A