The Department of Truth #22 // Review
Cole and Lee are talking. There’s a hell of a mess going on. Black helicopters that don’t exist are crashing. Popular belief is creating evidence of fraud in the last election. Similar evidence seems to have popped up at the CDC that the last pandemic was instigated by the government. Things are really unraveling, and time is running out in The Department of Truth #22. Writer James Tynion IV continues his nightmare funhouse descent into hell with artist Martin Simmonds. The drama of the series crawls across the page with wit and grace as it makes its way towards a promising climax.
Cole is returning from work to greet his husband. It’s not casual, but they’re both kind of trying to act like it’s casual. Cole’s husband has been told what Cole does for a living. Cole’s husband doesn’t know that he knows, but he seems to have a strong suspicion about it. After casual greetings, Cole tells his husband that his boss at work wants him dead. Cole’s boss told him to kill his own husband. A little later on, his boss shows up and casually mentions that he’s Lee Harvey Oswald. Things are about to get extremely complicated for everyone involved.
Tynion balances interpersonal drama against the grander scale of paranoia in a story that works well on a couple of different levels. The huge swaths of expository dialogue that dominated previous issues have been swept aside in some very, very tight drama that draws Lee Harvey Oswald, Ruby, and Cole Turner into a complicated power dynamic with Cole’s husband. The fate of the world hangs in the balance as Cole tries to level with his husband. It’s impressively orchestrated stuff on an intimate dramatic level. A thoughtful intricacy balances out the stresses and conflicts of the drama.
Shadowy faces regard each other in shadowy rooms as the drama drifts around the page listlessly. It shouldn’t be nearly as visually interesting as it is. Simmonds does a hell of a job delivering the weightiness of the drama simply by keeping a tight framing on the faces of everyone involved. The temptation to over-emphasize the drama must be positively overwhelming, but Simmonds keeps it simple, dark, and shadowy throughout, managing only the occasional departure to explore more sinister and fantastic elements in nightmares of childhood. It’s a cleverly subdued visual world that allows the weight of the drama to peel off the page on its own time under its own energy.
The Department of Truth ends its current story arc on a cliffhanger. The final pages announce that “The Department of Truth will return.” Time will tell where the story is heading, but Tynion and Simmonds definitely seem to be going in a direction that could change the way that the world of the series operates. The “world outside our window” element of the series will fade away as things shift for the series, which could make it a bit more of a dark fantasy than something altogether more horrifying, but time will tell.
