#1. A Comic Guide to Mocking the Truth

In the comic “A Comic Guide to Mocking The Truth,” artist Samplerman (Yvan Gullio) uses famous conspiracy theories of the 20th century as a playground to experiment with images, information, and imagination. The artist plays with fake news and tells improbable stories where visual elements contradict the text, and the text is obviously pure invention. Exploring the impact of technology on our ways of seeing and perceiving information, he includes in his stories some of the significant media artists who have worked with mockumentary: Orson Welles (1915–1985), who fooled radio listeners in the 1930s with a story about an alien invasion; Nam June Paik (1932–2006), the first video artist, who envisioned our omnipresent media environment early on; Peter Greenaway (*1942), who paid homage to the fictitious victims of violent unknown events; and the artist-activists The Yes Men (Jacques Servin, *1963; Igor Vamos, *1968), who have pranked big corporations many times using their propaganda codes. This is how the artist describes the comic playlist: “The viewer is supposed to be complicit in my prank jokes. Each page is a chapter from a collection of short comic mockumentaries and a fake guide for fake journalists. At the same time, the stories are fake stories about real people, and the existence of a parallel universe of fake information is fueled by the audience’s need to explain any existing mystery. For this project, my style remains my usual meticulous and chaotic digital collage mix. Besides using scans of old comics from the letterpress/pulp paper era, I have added some journalistic pictures and charts to bring the historical, ancient news flavor to my pages. Some documents being nonexistent or unavailable, I have used an AI text-to-image generator to produce some fake graphic evidence for my silly stories.”