Back when I was promoting the Esoteric Dialogue comics, I’d occasionally get people asking me why I chose to write about conspiracy theories. They’d often follow up with: do you believe in this stuff?
Picture this - it was 2010. I was a recent college graduate with a BA in philosophy and creative writing and living back with my folks in Florida. We were in the throes of the worst economic recession of our age, and while dealing with a classic “post-graduate malaise,” I had aspirations of writing and publishing comic books. I searched for ideas and would do little free writes on all the stupid ideas that came to my mind when I was sitting in front of my computer or at a café with a notepad. Nothing was good. At all. I didn’t think so anyway. I didn’t have anything that was particularly funny or worthy of hanging a story onto.
One night I was hanging out and my friend, Javi, starts on about these shape-shifting reptilian aliens that came to Earth thousands of years ago who control all the world’s governments and major banks and who’ve been behind all of the major events in world history in one way or another. I said, “Javi, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” He doubled down and seemed unphased by my dismissing disbelief.
My friend and comics collaborator, Matt Salazar (matrayzar.com), was there that night too. A few days later, Matt and I were trying to work on comics stuff when he said that he had looked up the crazy reptilian conspiracy Javi was rambling about. After watching a few YouTube videos, I admit my complete disbelief morphed into a curious obsession. Maybe I was smoking too much weed at the time (I was), but this stuff just started to make sense and snap together. Sure, there weren’t literal dragon-dinosaur-aliens that were posing as our world leaders, but I was starting to believe that there were truly some otherworldly forces at work behind the veil of what we see and experience every day.
The deeper I went, the more the narrative tied into religion and spirituality. Ancient history mixed with religious tales and creation myths. It was an obvious way to tie it altogether. It brought me back to being a small kid in the early 90s. Certain family members on my dad’s side would literally scare the hell out of me with tales of demonic heavy metal, possessed Troll dolls, and the black magic of Dungeons and Dragons. They were residuals of the satanic panic of the 1980s. The things they’d tell me were literally unbelievable, but being so small, it became an ingrained worldview.
The things I was watching and reading on the internet about this world of conspiracies and dark alternative histories were also literally unbelievable, but they seemed like they kind of made sense the more I “tied the pieces together.” People like Alex Jones, David Icke, Bill Cooper, and Jordan Maxwell became characters in this weird, twisted, fantastical narrative. I read books by Zecharia Sitchin about the alien Anunnaki race, spent time on the AboveTopSecret message boards, and countless hours of YouTube videos on topics like secret bases on the moon, esoteric government experiments, and ancient creatures like the biblical race of giants called the Nephilim.
But I was never a true believer. Not 100%. I always kept a fairly healthy dose of skepticism with everything I came across. It’s almost like I wanted to believe it; like I wanted it to be real. The chaos of the planet starts to make a lot more sense when there’s something you can point to and say, “That’s why things are so screwed up!” It’s easier to digest. It’s less complex. It lets you be painted as part of the Rebel Alliance fighting against the Evil Empire.
I grappled with all of this - the ancient aliens, the reemergence of my satanic panic fears, my own personal dissatisfaction and bad habits - and realized that the most constructive way I could wrestle with it all was to use it as fuel for my fiction. After all, conspiracy theories are the best kind of science fiction because they’re threaded with truths. I finally felt I had something worthy of hanging a story onto.
Given that Matt was experiencing his own journey in the world of conspiracy theories, it just made sense to us to make comics based in this crazy realm. There was so much to pull from; it seemed like a bottomless well of material. One night we gave it a name - Esoteric Dialogue - the secret conversations we were having with each other, with our potential readers, with the art we were creating, and with the conspiracy world at large.
A few years and a couple of states later, I was living in Chicago where we had published Esoteric Dialogue #1 and #2 in 2015. I went to every comic shop in the city getting copies on their shelves and got the opportunity to table at amazing conventions like Chicago Zine Fest, Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (CAKE), Small Press & Alternative Comics Expo (SPACE) in Columbus, OH, and Short Run in Seattle. It took a long time and a lot of work to get to this point, and we were starting to feel like we wanted to mix things up and explore some new creative avenues. We began doing short comics for Lumpen Magazine and collaborated on an illustrated poem called The Seeker.
This is around the point I felt I was starting to move away from my fascination with the conspiracy theory world. The grappling I had been doing through the fiction helped bring me through to the other side. It didn’t really hit me like it used to. Instead of being endlessly intrigued by this stuff, I found myself being mildly amused at best. I liked it better as fiction than I did as a lifestyle.
Things started to change around 2016. The recession had receded but the world was getting more tense. On top of that, I was noticing that a lot of the conspiracy theory communities I was familiar with were aligning themselves with Trumpism. It was frustrating seeing groups of people who prided themselves as being free and independent thinkers ally themselves with a person and political movement that had great success preying on people’s ignorance and fears. It was about this time that I first came across QAnon which was presented to me as the new big conspiracy theory that thousands were actually buying into. I watched their videos, and it was disappointingly obvious that it was just some pro-Trump propaganda.
Conspiracies just weren’t fun anymore. No longer was it about ancient aliens, secret societies, secret government experiments, or UFO contactees. All I heard about now was how every mass shooting was a false flag operation designed to take guns away or that all liberals were pedophiles (à la Pizza Gate). Conspiracy theories had become mainstream. The President himself was spouting them from the White House. People were taking it way too far. It felt icky and hateful. I didn’t want to be a part of it. And when the pandemic started, everything got turned up 1000%. I became much more interested in debunking dangerous misinformation people I knew were publicly spewing than making fiction out of it.
There’s so much I could say about the world of conspiracy theories that I feel this blog post could probably be a 100-page essay, or more. The theories that come out of various outsider political communities do fascinate me. No matter where on the political or cultural spectrum you point to, they’re going to have outlandish (although perhaps compelling) theories. But right-wing conspiracies disgust me and left-wing conspiracies annoy me. My favorites have always been the fantastical ones. But regardless of how I feel about this stuff today, one of the biggest things I got out of the whole experience was discovering the power of using fiction to process thoughts and emotions. Typically, the stuff we write best is the same stuff that intrigues and mystifies us. The magic is in the mystery, after all.
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