The Department of Truth, with its red, white, and scratched-all-over cover, enters the marketplace with issue 1.
This Image book has been well advertised. James Tynion IV, in this “Tiny Onion Studios” presentation, introduces us to the low-res, low-accountability, under the table world of information manipulation. Was the moon landing faked? Are the Americans being lied to by their leaders, their own puppet-masters? Who is zooming who, and whose hands are getting caught in the cookie jar?
This is a well-designed book, thanks to Dyan Todd (Five Ghosts, Sacrifice, Big Red Robot, etc), who has prescribed a topical solution of scratchy, interrupted low resolution, blurry redacted black and white graphics. The red lines, the lines struck through, the badly scanned and repeatedly photocopied. White, dotty, and matrixed.
And lettering by Aditya Bidikar rises above the serif seas, the counters, the ascenders to the X-heights of duplicity, the conversations buried and dialogue balloons of weird shapes and agendas. With art by Martin Simmons, murky, redrawn, resurrected, replayed until unrecognizable. The lead character reminding us for a moment of a young Robert Redford, but then morphing through foggy lenses to a pawn, manipulated into joining a blurry and shape-shifting group. Want to join us? Want to play with us? It gets mighty real!
The fear IS real, the agenda is ever-evolving, the membership unlisted, but like a black hole, you know it’s there by how it changes the stars that are visible around it.
It’s muted, it’s silent, it’s deadly, it’s a cobra skin as a necktie, it’s the Department of Truth, and Big Brother is hoping you’ll get it.
Image, The Department Of Truth, #3.99 for 34 pages of content. Mature
Newsdesk