The Conspiracy Comic That Won 3 Eisner Awards
What if the moon landing was staged, the earth actually is flat, and every conspiracy theory you have ever rolled your eyes at is true, on purpose, because somebody built it that way? That is the entire premise of Department of Truth, and it turned out to be one of the smartest comics to come out of the last five years.
Department of Truth #1 launched from Image Comics in September 2020, written by James Tynion IV with art by Martin Simmonds. The pitch follows FBI agent Cole Turner as he gets pulled into a shadowy agency whose entire job is managing which conspiracy theories the public is allowed to believe, and which ones need to quietly disappear. It plays like a mashup of Men in Black, The X-Files, and a genuine 1970s paranoid thriller, but Simmonds' collage-heavy, blurred, unsettling visual style is what actually sells the dread. This does not look like a normal comic, and it is not supposed to. Pages bleed into grainy photo textures and half-legible newsprint in a way that makes the whole book feel like evidence somebody was not supposed to find.
The numbers back up the hype. The first printing of issue #1 sold north of 100,000 copies, an enormous figure for an original creator-owned launch at Image, and the first collected volume went on to become one of Diamond Distributors' best-selling graphic novels of 2021. Tynion has picked up the Eisner Award for Best Writer three years running largely on the strength of this book, and Entertainment Weekly and the New York Public Library both singled it out as one of the best comics of its debut year. Television rights were optioned back in 2021, so there is a real chance this eventually shows up on a screen near you, which historically tends to be very good news for back-issue values on the earliest, hardest-to-find printings.
For collectors, the appeal here is straightforward. This is a modern book with real critical weight behind it, from a writer who has become one of the most decorated in the industry over the past several years, and it is still affordable relative to what a book with this pedigree usually costs once Hollywood gets involved. Buying it now, rather than after a casting or release announcement drops, is exactly the kind of quiet, well-timed pickup that rewards patient collectors later, and it is a genuinely great read in the meantime whether or not the market ever moves.
We have copies in stock. If you like your horror smart, paranoid, and genuinely unsettling instead of just loud, start here, then come find us for the rest of the run. Browse the current listing on the site to grab your copy.
https://www.terminalcitycollectibles.com/allcomics/p/the-department-of-truth-1
