best of 2021

I’m sitting upright in bed, quietly crying, hoping my wife doesn’t notice.

For most of my adult life, I have 1 part joked, 3 parts bragged that I only cry when old wizards die (You know the ones), or when Ben Grimm and Johnny Storm are dramatically separated (Waid/Wieringo Fantastic Four or Hickman’s “Three”). In Junior High, the first date I ever went on was spent gulping a clearly empty giant-sized coke to stem back the tears of Gandalf’s apparent demise. She would go back to school and tell the cool 7th graders that the time was spent in all sorts of hot make out sessions, but I will remember that mostly I was trying to make out those rascally little Hobbits through the tears. Nonetheless, my reputation grows. My first conspiracy theory.

Here I am, nearly twenty years later, and the unassailable nerdiness of my stunted tearducts hasn’t changed much, but the content of The Department of Truth #3 is decidedly void of bearded magic makers. The comic by James Tynion IV, Martin Simmonds, Aditya Bidikar, and Steve Foxe continues one of the most captivating Image Comics premises in years with a dig inside the conspiracy universes of false flags and school shootings. In The Department of Truth, sufficient belief in a conspiracy can drive that fiction to manifest in reality, and the third issue focuses on a mother’s attempts to cope with the loss of her son in a school shooting. On the bottomless well of evil and inhuman agendas that insist her loss is a fiction. On the psychological and emotional trauma these conspiracies unleash. On the spiral of grief-stricken escape that could lead a woman to welcome this unreality over her own truth.

And while my wife is more than the ideal listener and confidant, I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to explain myself. I just want to cry. [Read more…] about Best New Graphic Novel: The Department of Truth Vol. 1