The Department of Truth #27 // Review
Huck had been haying monsters in the woods. Shot an angel once. Saw the light go out on the halo and everything. Now it’s different. Now he’s got to deal with an entirely different kind of fiction that’s walking around in souther California. Hollywood. She’s not where she should be and there’s something fundamentally wrong about that in The Department of Truth #27. Writer James Tynion IV continues a journey into a strangely tilted existential kind of Hollywood with artist Alison Sampson and colorist Jordie Bellaire. The legend of one of Hollywood’s most legendary starlets hits the page with the full force of clever horror in its second part.
Norma Jean had become Marilyn. She was caught somewhere between chance and circumstance. Maybe she was too smart and a kettle too dumb to play dumb. Not smart enough to know what she shouldn’t have known and so things got complicated and she attracted the wrong attention. She attracted the attention of the Department of Truth. They don’t like fictions walking around. It’s dangerous. Things could always get dangerous around the popularly fictitious. So something’s going to have to happen to Marilyn. And Huck is going to find himself mixed-up in it.
Tynion twists a fiction around one of the most legendary deaths of the 20th century. Fusing the story of Marylin Monroe around the emerging mythology of Tynion’s Department of Truth could have been a hell of a lot more elegant than what the author develops for this particular two-issue story. Given the level of complexity that could have developed in and around Hollywood in the early 1960s, it might have simply been better to let the story make it to the page in the simple allegory that Tynion is rendering. It’s a good decision, but that doesn’t make it feel any more satisfying an execution of that which could have been fairly breathtaking.
Sampson and Bellaire move the visuals of the story solidly away from the screen beauty that could have been presented on the page. Bellaire seems to be taking a cue from Warhol’s study of Marilyn with all of the simple colors. Sampson chooses to peel Marilyn Monroe away from the iconic glamor that defined her onscreen as well. The garish surrealism of the world at the end of Marilyn’s life is pleasant enough, but it feels more like a faded nightmare than what it might have been with a bit stronger and stranger vision.
The Department of Truth. Marilyn Monroe. It’s kind of a fun two-shot story. A quick, little dance between major movements of a much larger series. There might have been more of an impact in the series if Tynion had managed to take Marilyn a bit closer to thee center of the main storyline, but it’s fun to see the author take it in a direction in which it might have a bit more of its own gravity. Maybe that’s the best thing for Marilyn under the circumstances.
