The Myth of the 20th Century: Conspiratorial and Geopolitical Narratives in Contemporary American Comic Books

PART I —Dystopian Imagination and the Twentieth Century Revisited

This paper examines how three contemporary American comic books—The Manhattan Projects, The Department of Truth, and 20th Century Men—recast the twentieth century as a landscape defined by new forms of domination. Instead of treating the century as a period marked by democratic expansion, scientific enlightenment, or the rational management of global affairs, these works suggest that its institutions and grand narratives concealed deep authoritarian tendencies. Each of the three comic books isolates a distinct dimension of modern power: technocratic, epistemic, and geopolitical. Yet what makes them particularly compelling is not merely their thematic separation, but the way they collectively expose the century’s structural reliance on expertise without accountability, narrative control without transparency, and international ambition without ethical limits.

Drawing on Gregory Claeys’s account of modern despotism, this paper argues that these comic book series articulate a shared thesis: the twentieth century did not simply generate dystopian fantasies as cautionary tales. It produced dystopian infrastructures, embedding modes of domination into the very mechanisms through which modern societies organized knowledge, governance, and global order. In Fredric Jameson’s terms, these works illuminate the "political unconscious" of modernity, revealing how utopian aspirations—scientific progress, the promise of objective truth, and the global pursuit of self-determination—were repeatedly absorbed into systems that relied on secrecy, coercion, and myth to maintain their legitimacy.

The three titles do not offer merely alternate histories or speculative distortions. They construct interpretive frameworks that show how each axis of power—scientific authority, epistemic sovereignty, geopolitical intervention—shaped the lived experience and political imagination of the twentieth century. Their narratives reveal that dystopia was not an aberrant possibility or a literary metaphor, but a structural condition produced by modern institutions themselves.

PART II — The Manhattan Projects as Technocratic Dystopia

The Logic of Unbound Innovation

The Manhattan Projects presents one of the most radical reinterpretations of mid-twentieth-century scientific culture in contemporary graphic fiction. Rather than treating the historical Manhattan Project as a symbol of scientific triumph shadowed by ethical ambiguity, Hickman and Pitarra transform it into a vast technocratic engine operating with total autonomy. The historical event becomes merely the visible fragment of a sprawling scientific regime whose power exceeds any democratic oversight. Within this world, rationality ceases to appear as a humanist endeavor and instead becomes indistinguishable from authoritarian will. Knowledge is no longer a tool for understanding the world but a weapon for reshaping it.

The comic suggests that modernity’s celebration of scientific expertise masked the emergence of a new kind of ruling class. Scientists become sovereign actors, not advisers; the state becomes their instrument rather than their sponsor. The logic of experimentation supplants the logic of governance. Discovery and innovation become an end in themselves, detached from social responsibility. Hickman’s depiction of the Project as a “state within the state” illustrates how the twentieth century’s fascination with technological breakthroughs enabled forms of authority that operate outside any public visibility.

Oppenheimer, Feynman, von Braun, and the Collapse of Scientific Humanism

The comic book’s most potent critique of technocratic ideology lies in its portrayal of historical scientists as the embodiments of a corrupted scientific ethos. Rather than venerating their historical accomplishments, Hickman reimagines them as monstrous or morally vacant figures shaped by the century’s faith in expertise.

Among many others based on historical figures, the Oppenheimer twins, one historical and one fictional, condense the tension between humanist science and its dystopian potential. Joseph Oppenheimer’s cannibalistic consumption of intellect literalizes anxieties about scientific overreach: the thirst for knowledge becomes parasitic and predatory. What appears as brilliance reveals itself as all-consuming domination. Hickman thus dramatizes the idea that scientific discovery, divorced from ethical restraint, can mutate into tyranny.

Richard Feynman, by contrast, is not depicted as malicious but profoundly indifferent. His charm, curiosity, and technical competence function as screens for his abdication of responsibility. Hickman uses this figure to explore what can be described as moral sleepwalking: the transformation of moral problems into technical ones, allowing violence to be committed under the guise of procedure. Feynman becomes the emblem of a scientific worldview that distances itself from the consequences it enables.

Werner von Braun, cybernetically augmented and ideologically fluid, expresses the continuity of technocratic rule across political systems. His seamless transition from Nazi engineer to American visionary reveals the adaptability of scientific elites, whose survival depends less on ideology than on states' capacity to exploit their expertise. Hickman’s depiction mirrors Claeys’s assertion that modern despotism thrives when specialized elites are granted autonomy in exchange for technological advancement.

Technocracy and the Illusion of the State

One of the most important conceptual interventions in The Manhattan Projects is its inversion of the traditional relationship between science and the state. In classical dystopian narratives—such as Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World—the state wields science as an instrument of control. Hickman reverses the dynamic: science becomes the true sovereign power, while political institutions are relegated to ritualistic or symbolic functions. Presidents undergo occult initiations, bureaucracies serve ceremonial purposes, and political leaders are portrayed as puppets manipulated by scientists.

The Projects enjoy unlimited funding, extrajudicial authority, and unrestricted access to emerging technologies. They operate like a shadow regime, insulated from accountability not because they are concealed from the public, but because the state itself has accepted its subservience. Hickman ridicules Cold War bureaucracy by depicting it as a grotesque theatrical diversion that conceals technocratic hegemony. In this world, the bureaucratic state is not a rational administrative machine but a spectacle that masks the real players and the distribution of power.

Scientific Utopianism and Its Violent Reversal

The comic dramatizes how Western technoscientific optimism, especially in the postwar period, was haunted by the potential for authoritarianism. Instead of offering utopian futures—peace through technology, exploration without conquest—the Projects expand imperialism into new cosmic and metaphysical terrains. Space becomes a colonial frontier where alien civilizations are subjugated or exterminated. Parallel dimensions become laboratories for extraction, experimentation, and conquest. The rhetoric of discovery dissolves into the logic of domination.

Even artificial intelligence, represented by the digital resurrection of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, manifests as an extension of technocratic power. Rather than transcending human limitations, AI becomes the posthuman subservient to elite authority. Knowledge itself becomes militarized: every discovery, from interdimensional travel to autonomous weaponry, is turned toward conflict.

Visualizing Technocratic Domination

Nick Pitarra’s artwork reinforces the comic’s thematic argument through a visual vocabulary of excess, distortion, and grotesquerie. Bodies appear stretched, deformed, surgically augmented. Technological apparatuses crowd the page, filling every available space with cables, instruments, and machinery. The result is an aesthetic of claustrophobic innovation, where the very density of detail mirrors the suffocating totality of technocratic rule.

The grotesque serves as both a formal device and a political critique, revealing how the manipulation of bodies and environments becomes the marker of a scientific regime that has abandoned humanist constraints. Ritual chambers and experimental rigs, recurring motifs throughout the series, construct a visual lexicon that presents science as a kind of occult power: a system of knowledge that demands obedience rather than understanding.

A Closed Dystopia

Unlike many contemporary dystopias that preserve a space for resistance, The Manhattan Projects offers none. The scientists' power is so overwhelming, their control so absolute, that no emancipatory horizon exists, only endless conflict between opposing factions. Alien civilizations are annihilated, political leaders are sidelined, and military opposition is futile. The narrative thus constitutes a closed dystopia, one in which the structures of domination are total and irreversible. The fear it articulates is not that scientific elites might one day seize control of the world, but that modernity already granted them the tools to do so and hold onto it in perpetuity.

Through grotesque exaggeration, Hickman and Pitarra produce a narrative that reflects the anxieties described by Claeys: that the twentieth century’s celebration of scientific progress concealed a profound authoritarian logic, and that technocracy may be less the opposite of despotism than one of its most sophisticated forms.

PART III — The Department of Truth as Informational Dystopia

Truth as Weapon, Belief as Infrastructure

Where The Manhattan Projects examines the authoritarian potential of scientific sovereignty, The Department of Truth turns toward a different but equally unstable domain: the governance of truth itself. In Tynion and Simmonds’s world, collective belief exerts ontological force. If a conspiracy theory gains sufficient popular traction—flat-earth cosmologies, Satanic panics, political assassinations—it begins to reshape material reality retroactively. Reality becomes provisional, dependent on the intensity of public belief.

This conceit reframes the twentieth century as an era defined not primarily by technological advancement but by contested meaning. The century’s proliferation of propaganda, mass media, psychological warfare, and state secrecy forms the substrate of the comic book's informational dystopia. The Department’s task is not merely to suppress falsehoods but to manage reality, preventing belief clusters from altering the world in service of the status quo they can control. In this way, the comic dramatizes Claeys’s claim that modern despotism depends as much on the management of interpretation as on direct coercion.

Belief and the Ontology of Modernity

The idea that belief shapes reality functions as both allegory and critique. It echoes late twentieth-century theories that describe truth as socially constructed, mediated by institutions and narratives. But Tynion radicalizes the concept by literalizing it: belief does not merely distort perception; it reorganizes the world. This produces an unstable epistemic environment, one in which controlling belief is equivalent to controlling reality.

The Department conducts epistemic policing, manipulating narratives to prevent them from becoming materially destructive. Programs such as reality reconciliation and event fabrication demonstrate how the state engineers plausible deniability or injects counter-narratives to neutralize conspiratorial momentum. In this world, secrecy is not primarily a tool of political manipulation but a structural necessity. To reveal the truth would be to risk destabilizing reality itself.

The comic invokes what might be called the collective unconscious of American culture—its anxieties, traumas, and mythic residues—and treats these materials as political forces. Conspiracy theories become not merely distortions of truth but manifestations of unresolved cultural conflict. The public becomes a co-creator of reality, expanding the sphere of political agency while simultaneously making reality itself vulnerable to manipulation.

Characters as Vectors of Epistemic Tension

The comic book’s central characters embody competing attitudes toward truth and power. Cole Turner, formerly an FBI analyst specializing in analyzing conspiracy culture, becomes the moral center of the narrative. His struggle reflects the conflict between democratic ideals of transparency and the institutional logic of strategic deception. Cole’s conscience does not permit him to accept the Department’s methods unquestioningly; he becomes the site of ethical resistance within an increasingly authoritarian structure that drives the whole series’ narrative.

Lee Harvey Oswald, who in the comic’s fictional narrative did not commit the JFK assassination and survived to afterfall, reimagined as the director of the Department, personifies the fusion of bureaucratic rationality and metaphysical sovereignty. He administers reality not only as a political construct but as an ontological system, performing the role of a technocrat-mystic whose authority depends on both secrecy and interpretive control through the Cold War and beyond.

The Black Hat, the Department’s antagonist organization, represents a competing sovereignty that seeks to exploit the ontological power of belief. Rather than stabilizing reality, they aim to proliferate alternative truths to destabilizing extremes. Their presence highlights the vulnerability of a world in which narrative authority has fractured under the pressures of mass communication, ideological polarization, and digital conspiracy networks.

Secrecy, Interpretation, and the Boundary of Authority

Tynion’s depiction of secrecy differs markedly from Hickman’s. In The Manhattan Projects, secrecy enables scientific elites to obscure their domination. In The Department of Truth, secrecy is framed as a tragic necessity, a response to the precariousness of reality itself. Yet this necessity does not absolve the Department of authoritarian implications. By monopolizing interpretive authority, the agency becomes nearly indistinguishable from regimes that manipulate information to consolidate power.

Cole’s discomfort with “necessary lies” mirrors Bauman’s analysis of late-modern institutions, which justify harmful or morally ambiguous decisions through appeals to systemic necessity. The Department insists that truth must be suppressed because, under these conditions, it is dangerous. In controlling the real, the agency transforms itself into a world-authoring force after the fall of the Soviet Union and the Ministry of Lies, its Soviet mirror organization.

Visualizing Epistemic Instability

Martin Simmonds’s art reinforces the narrative’s argument through a semiotics of disorientation. Instead of the physical grotesque that characterizes The Manhattan Projects, Simmonds employs layered collage, blurred textures, distorted typography, and fragmented perspective. Panels bleed into one another, images fracture, and visual noise interrupts narrative clarity. This aesthetic captures the informational saturation of late modernity, the difficulty of distinguishing signal from noise, truth from conspiracy.

The reader is forced to navigate unstable images, mirroring the characters’ struggle to interpret a world where meaning itself is volatile. The artwork thus becomes a formal metaphor for epistemic instability, embodying the collapse of shared reality that the narrative theorizes.

The Ambiguous Horizon of Resistance

Unlike Hickman’s closed dystopia, Tynion sustains a tension between domination and dissent. Cole Turner’s persistent moral hesitation serves as a point of resistance, as do the appearances of journalists, whistleblowers, and dissident agents. These figures reveal that epistemic authority is contested, fragmented, and vulnerable. The series does not offer a clear emancipatory resolution. Instead, it ends in a state of escalating instability, with reconciliation yet to be determined (the series is still being published). Both the Department and the Black Hat operate according to their own authoritarian logics, leaving the reader in a world where truth is contested and reality is perpetually uncertain.

PART IV — 20th Century Men as Geopolitical Dystopia

Geopolitics as the Terminal Expression of Modern Authority

If The Manhattan Projects reveals the authoritarian potential of scientific sovereignty, and The Department of Truth shows the coercive potential of interpretive sovereignty, 20th Century Men confronts the most materially devastating axis of modern power: geopolitical sovereignty. Camp and Morian situate their narrative within the overlapping conflicts of the late twentieth century, especially the Soviet–Afghan War and the broader Cold War. Their story fuses real historical events with alternate history and superhero mythology, creating a world in which imperial ambitions, ideological rivalry, and technological escalation shape the lived reality of civilians and soldiers alike.

The comic book portrays the twentieth century as a global battlefield where utopian ideologies—American exceptionalism, Soviet socialism, postcolonial liberation movements—collide with violent consequences. Unlike the speculative exaggerations of Hickman and Tynion, Camp grounds his dystopia in historical realism. The catastrophes he depicts are recognizable not as fictional projections but as intensified versions of events recorded in recent memory.

From Domestic Authority to Imperial Projection

Camp traces how the logics of internal governance—technocratic control and epistemic manipulation—are projected outward onto the global stage. Scientific elites in Hickman’s world monopolize the future; Tynion’s agencies monopolize reality; Camp’s geopolitical actors attempt to monopolize global imaginaries. Ideology becomes an export commodity. Foreign intervention becomes a method for extending the reach of national narratives. Development, modernization, anti-communism, and socialist internationalism function not as altruistic programs but as instruments of influence and profit.

This dynamic echoes Claeys’s claim that modern despotism is not confined to domestic structures but extends through imperial ambition. In Camp’s world, the Cold War appears less as a conflict of ideas than as a competition between authoritarian mechanisms disguised as emancipatory visions. Both superpowers externalize their internal contradictions by imposing them on regions like Afghanistan, where ideological conflict becomes material devastation.

Conspiracy, Ideology, and Wartime Legibility

For Camp, conspiracy is not merely a cultural phenomenon, as in Tynion’s narrative, but a geopolitical tool. States interpret foreign events through frameworks of suspicion: who armed a particular militia, who orchestrated a coup, who funds insurgent violence. These interpretive frameworks are not paranoid fantasies but instruments of statecraft. By framing conflicts in conspiratorial terms, governments justify intervention, maintain ideological coherence, and construct legible narratives that transform chaotic events into manageable stories.

Camp also emphasizes the narcotics trade, proxy militias, and foreign intelligence networks that shape the Afghan conflict. Instead of depicting conspiracy as an aberration, he presents it as the gravitational field of Cold War geopolitics.

The Body Politic and the Scale of Violence

The three comic books construct dystopia on different scales. Hickman manipulates the individual body; Tynion manipulates the cognitive body; Camp manipulates the national body. In 20th Century Men, nations become experimental subjects in global competition. Afghanistan becomes the crucible where competing political futures are tested. The Soviet Union appears as a wounded superorganism in ideological decline. The United States emerges as a hypercapitalistic empire whose self-mythologizing justifies intervention.

Camp’s protagonists embody these structural pressures. Platonov, engineered as the pinnacle of Soviet utopian ambition, becomes the emblem of a political project that consumes its own idealists. Thomas Goode, the super-powered President, personifies the technopolitical spectacle of American power. His extraordinary abilities amplify the empire's arrogance more than its wisdom.

Azra—the central Afghan figure—anchors the narrative in lived experience. Her story resists the flattening effects of geopolitical abstraction. Through her, Camp presents the Afghan people not as passive victims but as individuals navigating cultural, historical, and familial pressures. Azra embodies a form of agency that neither superpower understands nor accommodates, an insistence on identity that persists despite imperial encroachment.

Violence as Infrastructure

Stipan Morian’s art refuses the aesthetic distance often associated with war comics. Instead of romanticizing conflict, the artwork foregrounds its material reality: destroyed infrastructure, mutilated bodies, malfunctioning machinery, and exhausted soldiers. The comic visualizes war as an operational system rather than an episodic spectacle. Violence becomes the infrastructure upon which geopolitical orders are built. Unlike Simmonds’s portrayal of semiotic chaos, Morian’s illustrations depict the collapse of political order as a physical and environmental catastrophe.

Geopolitics and the Failure of Utopian Narratives

Camp dismantles the Cold War’s ideological binaries by showing how each superpower mirrors the other in its reliance on coercion. Both deploy technological spectacle, externalize violence, and frame their ambitions through civilizational narratives. Afghanistan becomes the site where these mirrored futures collide, revealing the dystopian underside of both socialism and liberal democracy. The comic demonstrates how utopian promises, once institutionalized, evolve into instruments of domination.

Resistance and Its Limits

Although 20th Century Men is pervaded by devastation, it does not eliminate the possibility of resistance. Resistance emerges not as a revolutionary program but as ethical friction. Azra refuses the narratives imposed upon her by foreign powers. Platonov’s disillusionment exposes the moral bankruptcy of the Soviet project. Thomas Goode’s ambitions in the end are subsumed by capital, and he surrenders to the shareholders' narrative in the name of profit. These gestures do not overturn the system; they interrupt it, revealing cracks in the façade of imperial certainty.

The Final Arc of Modern Dystopia

Camp completes the dystopian spectrum initiated by Hickman and Tynion. Where Hickman shows the dangers of unbounded innovation, and Tynion reveals the authoritarian logic of truth management, Camp exposes the violent consequences of geopolitical ambition. The twentieth century emerges as the origin point of modern dystopia not because it produced tyrannical regimes, but because it constructed the infrastructures—scientific, epistemic, imperial—through which contemporary domination operates.

PART V — Comparative Synthesis: Modernity as Distributed Dystopia

Taken together, the three comic books reveal a shared understanding of the twentieth century as a period in which distinct modes of power coalesced into a networked system of domination. Although each narrative focuses on a different domain—scientific expertise in The Manhattan Projects, epistemic authority in The Department of Truth, geopolitical violence in 20th Century Men—their arguments converge on a single claim: that modernity produced not one dystopian regime but a constellation of authoritarian structures distributed across institutions, states, and global networks.

Technocratic power manipulates matter and futurity. Epistemic power manipulates truth and perception. Geopolitical power manipulates territories, populations, and ideological narratives. These domains reinforce one another. Scientific innovation supports imperial ambition; imperial ambition depends on narrative control; narrative control relies on technological mediation. The dystopian condition is not produced by any single institution but by their interdependence.

Conspiracy becomes the underlying logic that binds these spheres. It arises from the opacity of scientific institutions, the instability of interpretive regimes, and the covert operations of geopolitical actors. Violence functions across registers—material, epistemic, and imperial—revealing a modernity structured by coercion rather than emancipation.

Utopian projects collapse under the weight of bureaucratization, institutionalization, and coercion. Aspirations for scientific progress give way to technocratic domination. Ideals of truth and transparency devolve into informational authoritarianism. Dreams of liberation and development mutate into imperial violence.

Sovereignty thus shifts from the territorial to the ontological and the geopolitical. Hickman’s scientists create worlds; Tynion’s Department determines what is real; Camp’s superpowers reshape global space. Resistance remains possible yet constrained. Cole Turner’s moral hesitation, Azra’s refusal, Platonov’s disillusionment—these acts of defiance illuminate the limits of domination but cannot wholly escape it.

The twentieth century emerges as the foundational terrain of modern dystopia because it built the institutional architectures that continue to define the twenty-first century. Scientific innovation, state secrecy, ideological competition, and technological acceleration converge to form the structural conditions of contemporary power.

Conclusion: The Twentieth Century as the Origin of Modern Dystopia

The three comic books examined here collectively argue that the twentieth century should not be remembered as an era of rational progress, shared truth, or stable international order. Instead, it was the century that constructed the infrastructures of modern dystopia. Hickman reveals how modernity manufactures new gods of innovation. Tynion shows how it manufactures new truths and realities. Camp shows how it manufactures new empires and destroys any opposition.

Through their combined narratives, these comic books demonstrate that dystopia is not merely a literary genre but a political condition—a dispersed system of domination embedded in the structures of scientific authority, epistemic control, and geopolitical ambition. This condition continues to shape contemporary institutions, technologies, and global relations, suggesting that the dystopian imagination is not a warning about the future but a diagnosis of the present.

References

Bauman, Zygmunt. (2000). Liquid modernity. Polity Press.

Camp, Deniz, & Morian, Stipan. (2022–2023). 20th Century Men. Image Comics.

Claeys, Gregory. (2017). Dystopia: A natural history: A study of modern despotism, its antecedents, and its literary diffractions. Oxford University Press.

Hickman, Jonathan, & Pitarra, Nick. (2012–2015). The Manhattan Projects. Image Comics.

Jameson, Fredric. (2005). Archaeologies of the future: The desire called utopia and other science fictions. Verso.

Tynion IV, James, & Simmonds, Martin. (2020–). The Department of Truth. Image Comics.