The Department of Truth #38 // Review
It’s Florida. Hunky and Doc Hines are talking to a little girl in a theme park. What’s happened in the park is horrific, grisly and really, really difficult to explain to anyone...let alone a girl of her age. She refuses to leave the theme park without her father. They’re going to have to march right into danger in The Department of Truth #38. Writer James Tynion IV continues some of the best work of his career with artist Ben Templesmith. There’s also a peer into the history of Hollow Earth Theory that manages to completely avoid mentioning to Koreshans of...Florida oddly enough.
The girl seems confident that her father would be in the church. Hunky expresses disbelief that there would be a church in a theme park...before remembering that he IS in Florida. There is a definite danger in the theme park. Dinosaurs are moving around. Big ones. Carnivores. They’ve massacred most of the congegation. The little girl, though? She’s been spared. And she seems certain that her father has been spared as well. He is, afterall, a priest. The little girl seems confident that the dinosaurs are only going after the sinners. She’s got so much faith...
And, of course, faith in the world of The Department of Truth is going to be very, very dangerous. Face creates truth on a very fundamental level. Tynion reaches into a more action based interpretation of the central concept that he has in previous issues. The power of this particular Christian girl is kind of an interesting study and faith on a single subject level. And it says all kinds of things about the nature of the very human desire to make sense of even the most atrocious and inexplicable things. Tynion reaches right into the heart of the premise with this one.
The girl in question has a very deep and primal connection with reality itself. Templesmith has a little difficulty rendering a kind of criminally primal innocence to the page in the presentation of her as she has nothing but total confidence in her own safety, even in the face of one of the most powerful predators imaginable. The contrast between traditional conceptions of the Tyrannosaurus rex and the vulnerability of a little girl are drawn darkly against each other and fascinating, visual presentation of Tynion’s central concept. Other visuals write into a script are reaching right into the cultural consciousness of everyone. Templesmith brings those visuals to the page with sharp clarity.
There's a lot that's moving around the edges of the series, which seems to suggest a much bigger world than probably be comfortably fit into a single series. Tynion and company have been casting the precise light of a single series around bewildering 20th century history that could not possibly be more complicated. It's quite a playground for the darker edge of storytelling. The ideas are so fundamental to the basic contemporary understanding of reality that there's really no reason why a series like this couldn't just keep going.
