The Department of Truth vol. 5: What Your Country Can Do For You
How the hell does Lee Harvey Oswald wind up as the head of a government agency dedicated to shaping the collective belief of humanity in its favor? This is something that has been answered previously, but without explaining the big thing about the man’s history. You know, the thing that happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963. The cat’s about to come out of that bag as the previous volume left off with Oswald ready to give us his life’s story up to that point. Being recruited by Frank Capra. Going over to the Soviets to learn their secrets. Getting set up in a book depository on that fateful day only to realize that maybe he was just a patsy after all.
I was… anxious about this volume as the way things left off last time had me feeling that Oswald’s plan to tell the truth was just another way for him to play into Black Hat’s hands. Which is the way things have been going for the series so far. Except that what we get here is a fairly self-contained character study about one man getting caught up in multiple people’s stories and how they change him, and by extension the nation. It’s a genuinely interesting bit of backstory-filling for the title, even if his story does end on a note implying that my anxieties will become manifest next time.
That’s not all, though. We also get a two-part story about Huck, the Department’s first hunter of Wild Fictions, and how he gets the chance to go to Hollywood and look after none other than Marilyn Monroe. The truth behind his mission becomes apparent at the end of the first issue, after which the story manages the neat trick of going nowhere and nowhere interesting. That bit about Huck being the first hunter for the Department does add a bit of depth to things, but it’s also not a detail the story volunteers on its own (it’s in the solicitations). Allison Sampson does provide some art that is both well-structured and incredibly trippy and it’s easily the highlight of this story that feels like a missed opportunity.