Review by Frank Plowright

Spurred on by a freaky and frightening childhood incident, Cole Turner has spent his entire life investigating conspiracy theories. In The End of the World he was co-opted into the Department of Truth, and it was revealed to him that such is the nature of the universe, the more people that believe in something the more chance it has of supplanting the truth. Cole was led by the hand through some shocking truths, met Lee Harvey Oswald, committed grim acts he’d never have considered possible, and was contacted by the other side of the equation.

The City Upon a Hill opens by jumping back to Cole’s childhood, which continues to recur throughout as he meets Hawk, a Department of Truth agent with a long history. So long, in fact, that it goes back to Cole’s 1980s infancy. He’s a foul-mouthed cynic who knows so much he can justifiably claim to be sure of nothing, which is the sort of twisted neighbourhood James Tynion IV drags us into. Everything can have meaning, yet everything is also meaningless. It all depends on what you believe.

Actually, it depends on how much patience you have for smug know-it-alls laying out in vast blocks of text how belief systems have been used to manipulate humanity throughout history. It starts with the church, moves through the freemasons, then to Aleister Crowley… He’ll surely reach Grant Morrison before the series is done. Two chapters of that is followed by two that are roughly 50% the prose diary of a bigfoot hunt, and the toll it takes on a family. There’s nothing wrong with that other than a feeling of marking time, and of Turner just being there to act as the disbelieving voice of the readers. Martin Simmonds sure does draw some great pages though.

You have to admire how deep Tynion’s dived into his research, but too much of The City Upon a Hill just regurgitates it while simultaneously revealing how Hawk manipulates the traditional news media. While it’s certainly the full dose of weird shit, it’s not until the final chapter that a purpose is revealed. That’s all very satisfying in pulling some threads together, but whether such a thorough immersion in other stuff was desirable is another question.

Next is Free Country, a collection of background material, while the main problems pick up again in The Ministry of Lies. Alternatively, everything before that is repackaged in hardcover as The Complete Conspiracy Volume One.