So, interesting turn of events in the world as the comic I’ve pulled from the pile that I had been planning to cover since last week is somehow evergreen in terms of some of its subject matter. At times, it’s hard not to look back on certain series and see them almost as hyperbolic in their aims—that’s what any strong satire can do. But then, in two decades, that hyperbole just becomes standardized to the point where reality feels like the series of Onion headlines that it is. Anyway, we’re looking at The Nightly News by Jonathan Hickman this week and you’ll be pleased to know it first released in 2006.

The Nightly News is a great many things: a scathing look at the media industrial complex that has worked to dictate public opinion since the Telecommunications Act of 1996, a vision of cult-like behaviors that had emerged in a post-9/11 America and the extremes they could indulge in, and an accurate reading of the pay-for-play attitudes that have permeated Washington DC for decades. It’s also a book that uses the comic form in ways that I still have not seen replicated fully since its release. Outside of that, let’s talk about The Voice and John Guyton. The Voice is the figurehead of a cult who no one has ever met. John is the Hand of the Voice, an extension the Voice’s will and that will is to kill journalists—dozens in a single attack that opens the first issue. And through the six issue run, it only besets further violence, mayhem, and a sense that the story is playing some kind of trick on us.

Outside of its ability to see the arc of public discourse twenty years early, The Nightly News is a series that populate its pages with characters we will hate but are continually compelled to read their story through to the end. It’s a delicate balance to hold all of these plot elements together while inter-weaving the narrative of a man at his lowest point being recruited into a cult and becoming the new de-facto leader of said cult without making us outwardly hate him from the offset. But you want to see what John Guyton is going to do. Even after his de-programming and a private meeting with The Voice—still unseen—that drags him back in, we’re still fascinated by the depths he’ll sink to carry out his doctrine. It’s a doctrine he dies for, all in service to the very people he was trying to kill.

There are portions of this story that I haven’t even been able to touch on since there’s a density to this six-issue series that asks for more to be dragged out of it—I don’t even go into the page layouts and how their disjointed nature can further enforce a disconnect between the reader and the perceived story. But then that’s what makes a good story. That and a good dozen charts. 

Get excited. Get predictive.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, 510, 651, & 674) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.