Information as Guideposts for Fiction

The Division of Reality’s return proves equal components fascinating and irritating.

The Division of Reality #23 begins to inform the story of Lee Harvey Oswald, though the comedian’s unusual recurring theme of contorting real-world truth for its personal fiction continues to be both brilliantly meta or astoundingly tone-deaf. After an 18-month hiatus, The Division of Reality returns for a brand new arc, this time promising to inform Oswald’s true historical past, the infamous murderer of John F. Kennedy and the pinnacle of the modern-day propaganda division/reality-warping Division of Reality. With this subject, readers begin to get an actual sense of what Oswald’s “true” motivations are within the comics and the way considered one of America’s most infamous assassins was positioned in control of using metaphysical perception to maintain the nation at its forefront. 

The Division of Reality has at all times been a irritating comedian for me, largely due to its incomplete examination of conspiracy theories and their impression on human society. The Division of Reality treats conspiracy theories each reverently but in addition fails to look at their actual world impression and the victims they typically depart behind. We have seen time and time once more, particularly in recent times, how simply propaganda and distorted details can corrode and destroy, however the comedian ebook has by no means actually dedicated to exploring the destruction conspiracy theories carry, nor does it look at the contaminated seeds they develop from, normally pushed by bigotry or malcontent. 

The utilization of Lee Harvey Oswald is a improbable case of the comedian’s paradoxical remedy of conspiracy theories. The actual-life Oswald was a troubled man, a dissatisfied Marxist repeatedly court-martialed from the US Military who then tried to defect to the Soviet Union. Oswald had already tried to kill a retired main basic earlier than he murdered Kennedy and he deliberate Kennedy’s assassination for months. There’s a preponderance of proof displaying Oswald killed Kennedy, however the query of why he did it stays unclear. That void in Oswald’s story is the soil during which numerous conspiracy theories have grown from. 

Whereas the inclusion of Oswald in The Division of Reality wasn’t stunning on condition that he was on the coronary heart of one of many largest questions in American historical past, it was curious how he was portrayed. Due to Oswald’s historical past, his persona, motivations, and life have been scrutinized and examined by a thousand historians and psychologists. However as a substitute of utilizing these profiles to recreate Oswald, The Division of Reality has portrayed him as a gruff establishment-type, a preserver of the key fact and one of many explanation why America enjoys its supposed exceptionalism. To be blunt, the comedian has bastardized Oswald and turned him into the alternative of what he was. And at the very least through the first 22 problems with the sequence, there was by no means a transparent trace as as to whether the comedian did so intentionally or just to fill a necessity within the story, regardless as as to whether the sequence was in essence peddling the identical type of embellishment it was supposedly rallying in opposition to. 

I am glad The Division of Reality is lastly getting round to telling Oswald’s story, though I really feel pissed off by how the arc opens. There’s solely the vaguest trace that artistic understood who Oswald actually was on this subject, as a substitute selecting to reasonably joyously drag Frank Capra into its imprecise re-telling of historical past. Sure, Capra was a propogandist (he was most likely some of the profitable in historical past), however the comedian once more appears to relaxation its laurels on figuring out that truth reasonably than analyzing the rest concerning the director’s life. At one level, the comedian’s model of Capra tells Oswald that he did not discovered the Division of Reality “to battle a warfare,” when the precise Capra tried to… twice. The precise Frank Capra was an enchanting individual, one who successfully retired when the US authorities rejected him twice through the onset of the Korean Battle and went on to make science documentaries. However the comedian’s model of Capra as a substitute hones in on one level and in essence erases the true Capra instead of a falsity sharing his title. 

However, here’s what I discover so irritating about The Division of Reality. Is its remedy of Oswald or Capra or some other historic determine merely an illustration of the core message of the comedian? By using these overtly two-dimensional variations of advanced human beings, is the comedian merely displaying that it might probably create its personal fact by honing in on one level and easily rewriting the remainder of that individual’s historical past and persona? If that is the true intention right here, it is sensible, actually – an enchanting meta-narrative of kinds by depicting historic individuals and putting them in roles that they might by no means willingly enter. And actually, I am nonetheless not sure of whether or not that is what the comedian is doing, which is fairly spectacular 23 points in.

The Division of Reality is considered one of two issues: it is both responsible of the exact same thinning of the reality to craft a fictional narrative that it finds extra pleasing, or it’s in truth displaying how straightforward it’s to warp the reality by utilizing the occasional truth as a guidepost for falsehood. Whereas I think it is the previous, the latter is why I am glad that this comedian ebook is again. It is time to see whether or not The Division of Reality is sensible or exceedingly obtuse, with subject #23 being the primary to start peeling again the curtain. 

Printed by Picture Comics

On June 26, 2024

Written by James Tynion IV

Artwork by Martin Simmonds

Colours by Martin Simmonds

Letters by Aditya Bidikar

Cowl by Martin Simmonds