Who doesn’t love an adventure?
Hitting the figurative road, going places you’ve never been and experiencing life in an altogether different way to normal – it’s intoxicatingly alluring and thrilling beyond measure!
Unless, of course, you’re A Thing Called Truth‘s Doctor Magdaelene Träumer, a workaholic scientist working in medicine R & D who has devoted seven thoroughly intense years of her life to coming up with super cheap medical devices which have the capacity to change the delivery healthcare, and in the process, change the world forever.
It’s heady prospect, one that has consumed her to such an extent that she has let her marriage die, completely trashed any semblance of work/life balance and failed to spend any of her income on anything at all beyond the very basic things like food, shelter and utilitarian clothing.
Hers is the furthest from an adventurous life that you could find, and really, who would hope to find anything that banal, but she is content with her tightly constrained world because it means so much to her; everything else is unnecessary, or so she thinks, including, most clearly, anything extraneous like cavorting across Europe on a barely-planned road trip.
Which is precisely where she herself when a series of wholly unexpected events sees out of work and stripped of her all-consuming purpose and in the company of Dorian Wildfang, a woman who’s her total opposite and who cares only about fulfilling the last wishes of someone very near and dear to her.
They couldn’t be further apart, something which is brought boisterously and hilariously to vibrant life by Iolanda Zanfardino and Elisa Romboli, an Italian creative team who takes us, and poor beleaguered Mag she’s known, on a glorious adventure that pays no heed to order and convention and owes its very vibe and raison d’etre to chaos, impulse and a heady amount of grief-impelled urgency.
Brimming with a 80s/90s blockbuster vibe – think a film like Romancing the Stone where an unwilling straitlaced protagonist ends up on an unscripted adventure with a far more free-spirited soul – the five-part A Thing Called Truth series, which hopefully is just the start of a longer, wilder adventure, is just the adrenaline-laced shot in the arm you need.
Pell-mell, pedal-to-the-metal throughout, A Thing Called Truth surges ahead almost from the get-go, whether it’s trading off Mag’s manically obsessed workplace energy or Dorian’s desperate need to live out what her now-dead loved on could not, near really ceasing to draw breath or to slow for too much in the way of the very thing Mag wants, which is a return to normalcy (her brand of it anyway), order and calm.
For all of its rush to adventure, A Thing Called Truth also manages to invest the series with a sizable amount of emotional resonance, with Mag’s distress at her life unspooling at a fearsomely unhinged rate and Dorian’s palpable grief at her loved one’s death and her own confrontation with possibly looming mortality, all given a chance to be expressed and to become a part of the story.
This is a narrative that has all the trappings of a manic blockbuster trip to the wild extremes but with the soul borne of real, raw, vulnerable humanity, all of which is brought alive by artwork so expressive and colourfully rendered that you can practically feel the adventurous nature of the story leaping out of every action-packed but often heartfelt panel.
The moment for instance when dark corporate forces conspire to rob Mag of her idealistic dream is brought to the fore by facial expressions writ large with every last piece of the now ex-scientist’s agony on display in heartrending vivacity.
The same applies to Dorian when she’s at the bedside of her loved one, grappling with their death, and her grim reality of her own genetic trip down the same road, and then when she decides to live out their bucket list of travel dreams inspired by the movie scenes they love; in each and every one of these pivotal scenes, the artwork is so alive, so human, so raw and real that it feels like the emotional energy of the page is rippling right over you.
It’s a powerful visual representation of grief in a number of forms – both Mag and Dorian are in mourning for wholly different but no less than meaningful people and things – and it bolsters the already impressively affecting writing which neatly dances between great loss and exciting, redemptive possibility.
One of the most delightful parts of A Thing Called Truth is that it is, like so many blockbusters in cinematic form before it anyway, a larger-than-life road trip romantic comedy, one based on an outlandish start that Mag initially hates and that Dorian is sanguine about, which sees the two polar opposites falling head over heels in love.
This vibrantly heartwarming queer love story, which comes with wholly originally imaginative riffs on rom-com staples like the meet-cute and the airport epiphany, is a joy to read because it remembers in all the adventuring and devil may care mayhem and living out of “missions” in Rome, Madrid and Paris – movies referenced include La Dolce Vita, Roman Holiday and Gladiator – that humanity and the heart come first and that grand adventures and even life itself only matter a damn if the people with us mean something too.
Watching Mag and Dorian come to mean a great deal to each other is a sapphic joy that infuses A Thing Called Truth, a series already rich in banality-busting mayhem and fantastically vibrant artwork to match, which surges onto the roads of Europe, far away from the grinding gears of the everyday and into our hearts as we watch two woman who think they have nothing in common come to realise that maybe, just maybe, they will come to mean the world to each other.
