All stories revolve around speculation, it’s what defines the alternate realities we consume every day, and it’s the balm many apply to exit from the harsh edges of reality. Because media and conspiracy are so closely related, examining one with the other may be the most effective approach to understand how one gains influence worldwide. There is one medium that is currently particularly on the ball, with comics offering a fascinating look into the contemporary preoccupation with alternate truths.
“I think even beyond the idea of conspiracy theories, the idea of questioning authority, questioning reality, and questioning ourselves is something that’s fascinating and awesome to do in fiction,” said comic writer Ryan K. Lindsay. “The idea that there might be things we don’t understand, or that aren’t being presented to us honestly has always been a concept I’d loved seeing in fiction because it gives me a new perspective, it gives my brain options.”
Writer Ryan Lindsay and artist Louie Joyce are a frequent collaborative duo who first worked together on a “Killeroo” short story, a character Lindsay describes as “a kangaroo/man cryptid/roustabout/fella.” Their next work, of their own creation, was arguably just as Occa.
“I grew up near enough to the Harold Holt Swimming Pool to know the tragic tale of our floated away Prime Minister,” said Lindsay. “I remember knowing it would be a perfect fit for me and Louie to reunite.”
“The Many Harold Holts of Space and Time” is a short story where all the possible versions of the presumed-dead Prime Minister Harold Holt who could still be alive reappear and fight for their identity. A merman Holt punches up the Holt who escaped by submarine, and all the debates in pubs from the last 50 years come to blows.
“[The Many Harold Holts of Space and Time] comes from a kernel of reality, something real that many Aussies have considered,” explained Lindsay. “And it’s us just expanding that thought problem so far we eventually tear a hole in space/time.”
Not since the 1970s, with Pakula’s Paranoia trilogy and an American zeitgeist still reconciling the assassinations, moon landing and scandal of the 1960s, has the cultural fasincation with conspiracy been this strong. The difference now is how conspiracy can spread at fibre-optic speed. The danger grows increasingly apparent as fringe ideologies grow more and more accessible, and further intertwined. Theories like The Great Replacement, False Flags, and QAnon are practically a single monolith for their followers, based on thirty years of accelerationist, neoreactionary, and alt-right thinking.
There’s a greater level of urgency to this radicalism too, as the followers of this alternate thinking take their fringe beliefs from online to the public world in acts of violence, destabilisation and insurrection. This is what provokes the modern fascination with conspiracy in American media, as it becomes a more urgent reinterpretation of the topic that can shout at the masses from any corner of the online world.
Q: We’re seeing so many stories about conspiracies bubbling up at the moment, mainly because we’re in such a big age of disinformation. Is that a topic that interests either of you?
Joyce: X-Files is still one of my all time favourite shows so yeah I definitely love a good conspiracy theory! I do think it’s really important to be open to new ideas and possibilities and ways of thinking, but also just as important to have the level of critical thinking that allows you to engage with those ideas, ask questions, and educate yourself. Unless it’s that conspiracy about Australia not really existing, that one’s definitely true.
Lindsay: The internet has been both a bane and a wonder for thinking that falls to either side of centre. We can access anything, but alas not everyone has been equipped with the cerebral skills to walk through the minefields of text and code we see before us.
Growing up, it was gauche to truly believe any of the conspiracies that existed – Bigfoot, Area 51, etc – but now there’s an element of possibility we realise is true and once you allow that foot in the door it’s hard to start knowing which ones to let in and which to ignore. The gap between believing that your government might be lying to you [they always are, to some degree, at some stage] to thinking the Earth is a flat disc [it isn’t] isn’t that far of a stretch. Everyone thinks they’re a Fox Mulder, but so rarely do they have the charm [or critical thinking skills paired with accurate research] to actually pull off the day-to-day cosplay of our favourite [fictional] conspiracy theorist.
In September 2020 Martin Simmonds and James Tynion IV’s “Department of Truth” debuted, a longform comic series following a US government agency who work to suppress and shape the nature of public view of conspiracy theories in a world where the fabric of reality is formed by the majority belief in an idea. This hypothetical isn’t necessarily a new one, drawing on the Tibetan mythology of Tulpas, pockets of reality formed by collective consciousness, and echoing our own confirmation biases.
Simmonds and Tynion’s book rode on a wave of emerging comic stories that wanted to analyse the cultural shape of conspiracies, something less possible for the purely factual prose and documentary accounts that were more invested in charting the shape of an emerging ideology.
Comics act as a useful barometer of the public’s paranoia, trickling down from news media and eventually informing mass media like film. This was especially apparent during the beginning of the War on Terror, as superheroes militarised in “The Ultimates” and “The Authority,” and the horrors of the war came home in indie books like “DMZ.”
Beyond that however, comics have been a tool of satire and analysis for decades, with news cartoons often being the tool with which singular creators or smaller groups of commentators could express a wider perspective on hot button issues and paranoia of the time.
That golden age of American disinformation, satire and tabloids is perhaps best explored in David Aja and Ann Nocenti’s “The Seeds,” a climate-fiction story about luddites receding from a near-future society, and the journalist who discovers the romance between a woman considering this abandonment of technology with an alien who’s coming to Earth to collect the last samples of our dying planet.
Aja and Nocenti’s story began far more humbly. “I [once made] 24 hour play, and it was about a guy who ran a tabloid news office and how people would come in saying ‘Oh, I found a pig with two heads, or I found, you know, Bigfoot.’ and it was just this fun because I had worked,as an editor at a lot of magazines. I hop from magazine to magazine, and I always loved that sense of the shenanigans of an office,” explained Nocenti, the book’s writer. “This was pre-Trump … and when Trump got elected there started to be all this, you know, the fake news … David and I kind of both got really depressed because we didn’t want this tabloid-news, old-school 50s idea to be taken as a commentary on today.” It was only after the pair regeared the story, bringing in new elements of lurid colour and geometry, that they cracked the story, telling a cautionary tale of urban life in which the Little Grey Men of past anxieties clash with the psychedelic, environmental destruction of the modern anxiety.
Nocenti: Somebody said to me, why do you use the word Luddite? It’s an ugly word. Maybe it’s an ugly word … but I think that there have been unintended consequences to every next stage of tech, from the Industrial Age to today’s. Like who could have predicted that the friendly little fuzzy warm social media things would end up causing young people to commit suicide because they couldn’t match up to the beautiful life they thought was out there? So a lot of life has unintended consequences at this point. You know, whenever we introduce a new tech, there’s going to be repercussions.
The line though, from American conspiracy media to its Australian equivalent gets a little more murky. Lindsay and Joyce have reckoned with the specific ‘Australiana’ of their work in their latest collaboration, “A Fistful of Pain.”
“Looking back I’ve realised the early drafts and designs for ‘Fistful’ never really engaged with the idea that it was set in Australia very much,” said Joyce. “Melbourne was a caption at the beginning of the book, a setting, but really it could’ve been anywhere. Interestingly, during ‘Fistful’s’ development for a long time I’d always felt like something wasn’t completely clicking and I could never put my finger on it. It wasn’t until I really leaned into bringing a more Occa sense to the characters that everything actually did click into place for me visually.”
The book follows two sisters reconciling their decades-long feud aboard a cruise ship in a kung-fu action confrontation, letting its nationality inform an aesthetic rather than a subject.
“It’s a really great time for comics in Australia, an incredibly diverse array of creators and stories being produced in all different genres and formats,” Joyce continued. “I think 10-plus years ago there were very obvious groups of zinesters, mainstream comics makers, graphic novelists etc. and they all mostly stuck to their ‘scenes.’ Whereas now there’s a lot more overlap between these groups, as well as conventions and shows that bring these different styles of creators together. It feels less segmented and more like this growing community of creative voices that’s producing world class work!”
It’s inevitable that the ideas being presented in graphic media right now will make their way downstream to film and TV, “Department of Truth” is already on track for an adaptation. But the varying national responses to it, and the shape of genre in Australia, may just help as see how that happens.
Q: Do you reckon Cosmic Harold Holt is cooler than Doctor Manhattan?
Joyce: Way, way cooler! He doesn’t mope around on Mars, he flies off into the sun!
Lindsay: I think he knows when to keep his pants on.
