Comic Book / The Department of Truth

Who Shot JFK? Were there people on the moon, or was it directed on a set by Stanley Kubrick? Is the Earth flat? Are there Reptilians in Congress? Satanists in the senate?

With the proliferation of information, conspiracy theories have taken root in the minds of the modern era. Unfortunately for humanity, if enough people believe in something, it becomes true, and a lot of people believe in a lot of horrifying things. Luckily, the United States of America has the Department of Truth to prevent such things from becoming real.

Enter Cole Turner, an agent of the FBI who specializes in conspiracy theories that encounters something he couldn't unsee and gets the attention of the Department. Their leader — Lee Harvey Oswald — comes to him and offers him a position, and from there he enters a rabbit hole of conspiracy and intrigue the likes of which he could never have imagined.

The Department of Truth is a 2020 New Weird Horror-Conspiracy Thriller written by James Tynion IV and illustrated by Martin Simmonds. To date, 22 issues (and a Wild Fictions Special one shot issue) have been published, the last being released in November, 2022. Since then, the book has apparently been on hiatus.

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This comic has the following tropes

• Ambiguous Situation: The man who runs the Department of Truth says that he is Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who assassinated President John F. Kennedy. It is brought up multiple times whether or not he's the real Oswald, a belief-based manifestation or if this is just a codename, but a real answer is never given. This later becomes a plot point when Hawk Harrison reveals that he is working both sides, thinking that the Lee Harvey Oswald is a "wild fiction" resulting from conspiracy theories surrounding the JFK assasssination.
• Ascended Fridge Horror: The Department of Truth acts as a Deconstruction of the Clap Your Hands If You Believe trope; reality is portrayed as subjective and can retroactively change if enough people believe in a singular "fact". With conspiracy theories on the rise, the Department of Truth works to make sure that conspiracy theories don't take root because a lot of the conspiracy theories people believe in — like Reptilians or pedophilic, cannibalistic Satanists controlling the world — would be incredibly dangerous if they existed. The result is a world where modern-day society is its own Cosmic Horror Story, where human belief can literally destroy the world if left unregulated.
• Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: Apart from the aforementioned presence of Lee Harvey Oswald, a number of other historical figures feature in the comic:
  • As noted below, Aleister Crowley and Jack Parsons' occult experiments led to the arrival of the Scarlet Woman.
  • Frank Capra led the Department of Truth before Lee took over under Nixon's orders. In turn, the head of operations of the Soviet Ministry of Lies was Dziga Vertov, the Soviet filmmaker perhaps best known for Man with a Movie Camera. Stanley Kubrick is mentioned as having been involved in faking the moon landing; while his memory was retroactively altered when the landing became reality, Lee notes that he'll have "some kind of nightmare" as a result (likely alluding to the claims that The Shining featured clues to Kubrick's involvement in faking the landing, suggesting that, in-universe, those scenes reflected his fragmented memories of doing so).
• Been There, Shaped History:
  • Hawk claims that the Department of Truth attempted to create their own UFOs so that they could capture and reverse engineer it for their own benefit. This resulted in the creation of The Mothman and the Silver Bridge Collapse of 1967.
  • The Satanic Panic was originally commissioned by the Department of Truth and carried out by Hawk Harrison as a means of taking control of multiple other conspiracy theories, Hawk becoming disillusioned with the DoT and pulling the plug on the project when the Star-Faced Man appears, understanding just how dangerous it would be if it ever finished manifesting.
  • According to Harrison's father, L. Ron Hubbard and Jack Whiteside Parsons tried using occult practices they learned from Aleister Crowley to summon the Scarlet Woman. Not only do they succeed, but the sudden breach in reality results in the Cold War and an unprecedented number of UFO sightings and wild fictions that pervaded the late 40s and 50s.
• Big Bad: So far, Martin Barker and his organization, Black Hat. Their plan is to spread as many wild, inflammatory conspiracy theories as they can (especially politically tinged ones such as school shootings being faked and Obama being the Antichrist) in order to make them retroactively true and use this new reality to incite a revolution and bring down society as we know it.
• Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: Bigfoot is explored in issues #10 and #11, with Hawk telling Cole about how the Department categorizes cryptids and about how belief in Bigfoot and similar creatures can be traced back to 19th century colonialism.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: The Department of Truth's job is the make sure that Conspiracy Theories remain as dangerous ideas rather than dangerous reality, but they achieve this through gaslighting, assassination (even with bystanders perfectly willing to cooperate) and carefully selecting what should and should not be "normal", an agent of Black Hat trying to indoctrinate Cole by pointing out how they are trying to control the world by controlling the "truth". However, the alternative is to let the public's imagination run wild, the potential changes to reality resulting in monsters, Nebulous Evil Organisations of every ideology and temperament running the world, astrological anomalies and other potential world-ending scenarios.
• Black Helicopter: Their significance in anti-government conspiracy theories is discussed in issue #12. Hawk tells Cole that, while he was trying out ways to expand the power of the Department and by extension the U.S. government in the 90s, he tried to tap into the ones about black helicopters as a supposed mode of transportation by secret, powerful government agencies by sending some actual black helicopters into the Ruby Ridge standoff. When this got people killed at the standoff and lead to similar right-wing extremism incidents like the siege at Waco and the Oklahoma City bombing, it started to push him into turning against the Department and joining Black Hat.
• Brown Note Being: Entities that manifest under shared belief instill an inherent sense of fear, dread and curiosity whenever a person sees them since they are these ideas made manifest, made only more and more real when encountered. More powerful or substantial wild fictions can even result in physical illness, bleeding from the eyes and nose being the more typical symptom of this.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: The central premise of the series is that shared, collective belief in things has the power to directly alter reality to various extents. Depending on the internal consistency, fervor and number of adherents pertaining these beliefs, the effect can range from briefly willing a being into existence (such as the Bigfoot) to completely changing our reality as we know it (such as The Catholic Church successfully creating an entire century through shared belief).
• Conspiracy Kitchen Sink: Invoked and analyzed. In a world where collective belief warps reality, conspiracy theories manifest as real-life monsters, selective memories and other anomalous activity, things that only grown more and more dangerous the more sense they make to people. One of the Department of Truth's jobs is to decentralize conspiracies in a way so that not too many people can latch onto the same idea in a "too many cooks spoils the pot" kind of way. Oswald gives an example of various inane theories — citing theories like Obama being from Kenya, that 9/11 was an inside job and everything QAnon ever says — and asks Cole to put them all together. Cole is able to weave a linear, ongoing narrative based around these facts where the world is being controlled by a globalist Shadow Government, Obama is the Antichrist and the War on Terror was all a plot to destroy America, a "big picture" that the Department is trying to prevent.
• Double Agent: After becoming disillusioned with the Department of Truth upon seeing the damage he was causing by exploiting the malleability of reality, Hawk joined Black Hat and served as their mole in the Department. However, as he reveals to Cole when he admits this, he has secretly turned against Black Hat as well since he realized how destructive their plans are, and stays within the organization as an informant to Cole after being burned by the Department.
• Establishing Series Moment: The comic opens with Lee Harvey Oswald being taken into custody for assassinating the President. When he is questioned on whether or not he did it, he admits that he cannot properly remember if he did, a sign that people are already speculating on alternative truths.
• Eye of Providence: The Department has an Eye of Providence as a part of their icon, being a government agency that specializes in suppressing conspiracy theories.
• Flat World: Cole is brought in by the Department of Truth after he invited to a party of rich people who fly a plane to the end of the Earth, appearing as a giant wall of ice. Oswald explains that this is a manifestation of the "Flat Earth" conspiracy on the verge of becoming real.
• Freud Was Right: Hawk uses the phallic imagery of wands as a starting point to explain how symbolism coincides with magic and the nature of reality.
• Ghostapo: The Nazis pioneered many of the reality-warping techniques used by the Department Of Truth (and its soviet counterpart the Ministry Of Lies).
• Government Agency of Fiction: The Department of Truth is just the most recent in a long-line of agencies and organizations that know the true nature of the world — that collective belief can retroactively reshape reality — and strive to keep such things from spiraling out of control. This primarily applies to them investigating unusual activity and either killing everyone involved or de-centralizing conspiracy theorists to keep them harmless.
• Hollywood Satanism: Discussed. Hawk Harrison makes a disclaimer that real-life Satanists are far more likely to be atheists who make Satan out to be a metaphor and are relatively harmless as far as society should be concerned. However, thousands of years of fear-mongering culminating in modern day fears of baby-eating Satanists hiding in plain sight have made the concept of Hollywood Satanism a far bigger danger than Real Life Satanism. The fact that Hawk encouraged the Satanic Panic to help the Department of Truth increase their base of power certainly didn't help.
• Historical Domain Character: Given the subject of the story is "conspiracy theories", many historical characters show up, although given the premise it's always unclear what was a "historical" character and what was a "mythical" character.
• Humanoid Abomination:
  • One of the tell-tale signs that Black Hat is involved with something is a woman dressed all in all red and wears black sunglasses. She has large X's instead of eyes, and anyone who looks at her is overcome with an escalating sense of dread. If Hawk is to be believed, she is the manifestation of Babalon, the Scarlet Woman foretold by Aleister Crowley to shift the metaphysical paradigm of the world.
  • The Star-Faced Man is a Tulpa manifestation of the Satanic Panic of the 70s and 80s, later reemerging with the rise of Pizza-Gate and QAnon. He appears in the nightmares of children as an inhuman entity with a pentagram over his face eating a baby, and his presence is nothing short of traumatizing for his victims. It was him who inspired Cole Turner to become a government investigator, having encountered him in his youth, and it's when he's offered to hunt down the Star-Faced Man does he agree to join the Department.
• The Illuminati: The Enlightened Ones are a secret society that was active through the first millenium, being aware of the subjective nature of the world and seeking to undermine the Church's attempts at rewritting history through the tale of King Charlemagne.
• Insufferable Genius: Hawk Harrison is an agent from the Department of Truth since the 1960s and he is tasked with doing or undoing manifestations if needed, having taken down the ice wall and Black Hat facility in Denver because he has an intimate understanding of the subjective nature of their job. He's also a massive Troll that likes saying offensive things to people just to get a reaction out of them, best indicated by his iconic inverted-flag baseball cap. Even Oswald hates his guts, but he keeps him around because Hawk can be counted on for results. Its eventually revealed that he is a rogue agent, having become disillusioned with the DoT when the Star-Faced Man manifested in front of him after he was commissioned to create him.
• A Lighter Shade of Black: Hawk sees the Department of Truth as this, believing that is has a darker agenda than Cole was led to believe. Whatever it is he learned about Black Hat however, it seems to scare the Hell out of him way more than anything the Department had him do.
• Lizard Folk: Reptilians are real (or at least they are now) and are apparently a bitch to kill. Black Hat had learned to create a verifiable factory, producing reptilians en masse at the Denver International Airport.
• Masquerade Enforcer: The Department of Truth was created to prevent conspiracies from manifesting as a retroactive status quo. This makes them a zig-zagged example, as while most cases manifest as monsters or other things that can be killed or contained, most of the conspiracies would manifest as a Cosmic Retcon; the Department couldn't keep such abnormal things a secret if they tried because then they would have always been "normal", no matter how outlandish or horrifying it would be.
• The Men in Black: The Men in Black are a type of Wild Fiction the Department of Truth had encountered during The '50s, taking the form of a tall Grey-alien in a black suit and hat. It was his investigations into the Men in Black that led to the Department hiring Doc Hynes (as well as indirectly contributing to the conspiracy theories surrounding them).
• Moon-Landing Hoax: In issue 1, one of the first signs that Cole is heading down the rabbit hole is the film he's shown of an astronaut climbing down from the lander—with a man in a normal business suit visible in the background, standing in the wrong part of the set. It's later revealed that Lee actually did fake the Moon-landing, having broadcasted it when Nixon was just being sworn into office. Since the footage was seen world-wide, there was enough collective belief where the moon-landing really did happen, the American flag still on the moon to this day.
• New Media Are Evil: It's expressed multiple time that the internet has made the Department's job of maintaining reality that much harder, conspiracies and misinformation spreading like wildfire.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: L. Ron Hubbard and Jack Whiteside Parsons try to summon the Scarlet Woman with the intent of harnessing her power, ignoring the warnings their various associates in the occult give (including Aleister Crowley himself) considering they are intending on summoning a god. Not only do they succeed, but Babalon's manifestation results in a sudden influx of alien-based Wild Fictions invading the real world and the creation of the Doomsday Clock, starting the Cold War. If Harrison's father should be believed, they basically ensured The End of the World as We Know It, the sudden influx of reality-altering conspiracy theories being omens of this happening.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed:
  • The first issue features the Boulet brothers, heirs to an oil fortune who have been funding right-wing politicians and conspiracy theorists. They're presumably stand-ins for the Koch brothers, who likewise made their money in oil and fund conservative groups. For added humor points, they share their names with a prominent pair of drag queens.
  • In Chapter 3, the parents of a kid who died in a school shooting are continuously harassed and threatened by fans of a Conspiracy Theorist who accuse their kid of being a crisis actor. While the talking head is never named, he sounds and looks an awful lot like Alex Jones from InfoWars, who has been one of the biggest pushers of conspiracy theories about school shootings being faked.
• Our Angels Are Different: Angels are a Class-2 "Wild Fiction" that is routinely tracked down and hunted by the Department of Truth, being one of the most common types of cryptid due to the sheer number of people that believe they exist.
• Our Cryptids Are More Mysterious: There is an entire cryptozoology wing of the Department of Truth dedicated to finds and hunting down cryptids, or "wild fictions". They are placed into three categories: Class One ("Hauntings"; ghosts and demonic possessions), Class Two ("Close-Encounters"; aliens and angel sightings) and Class Three ("Critters"; monsters like Bigfoot and Chupacabra). Their level of danger goes up with their numbers, Hauntings being nothing more substantial than sights and sounds, Close Encounters disappearing as soon as they manifest, and Critters acting and behaving (and therefor being as dangerous as) real-life animals.
• Place of Power: Locations used in prevalent enough conspiracy theories tend to manifest liminal spaces that defy certain forms of logic, Black Hat having commandeered a hidden space at the Denver International Airport as a base of operations.
• Satanic Archetype: Hawk Harrison is one of the Department of Truth's oldest and most accomplished agents in spite of his Trollish behavior, is always seen wearing a cap with an inverted flag on it (which evokes the idea of an inverted cross) and is eventually revealing that he has since gone rogue. This is made all the more poignant in a flashback where he is literally made out to look like a Big Red Devil to a young, impressionable Cole Turner, having been the one to create the Star-Faced Man and the Satanic Panic of the 70s in the first place.
• Sinister Spy Agency: Black Hat is an organized agency similar to the Department of Truth that seem to be actively encouraging the propagation of conspiracies in order to change the world for their own nefarious purposes, even employing manifestations like Reptilians and the Star-Faced Man.
• Soviet Superscience: The Soviets had their own Department Of Truth equivalent, the Ministry Of Lies. It was apparently led by fabled Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov and thus shaped by his philosophical theories about the technological evolution of humans into "machine men" (i.e. men with a movie camera, shaped by cinema's possibilities).
• Straight Gay: Neither Cole Turner, nor his husband Matty have any of the campier stereotypes of their sexuality on display.
• Stress Vomit: Cole is violently sick on the plane when he sees the literal edge of the world, which turns out to be conjured by the Flat-Earthers.
• Stupid Jetpack Hitler: In issue #20 (chapter 13 in the collected volumes), Martin Barker shows Cole's husband Matty Die Glocke ("the bell"), supposedly a UFO-like superweapon built by the Nazis; according to him, it was an attempt to reverse-engineer wild fictions.
  Barker: It was Hawk's idea to lean into the sort of shit they run on The History Channel.
• Tinfoil Hat: Fitting for a story about conspiracy theories, Department worker "Doc" Hynes, who was interested in UFOs in his youth, regularly wears a tinfoil hat to this day, stemming from a close encounter with an alien "man in black" where it seemed to protect his mind from it.
• Tulpa: When Oswald explains to Cole how presumed truths like conspiracy theories can manifest as real if enough people believe in them, Cole cites the idea of a Tulpa as a comparison. Oswald proceeds to mock him for this.
• You Can't Fight Fate: When Cole asks why they need to prevent the concept of school-shooting crisis actors from being real if it meant preventing the deaths of school shootings, Ruby makes a point that the odds of the kid staying dead in the new reality far outweigh any likelihood of the them being alive and well, citing theories that they were killed after they did their job as one example.
• Who Shot JFK?: Lee Harvey Oswald isn't even sure whether he did it or not, as people's disbelief in his guilt made the matter fuzzy. Whether he ever did it before reality became unclear as a result is unknown.

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