Tree of Smoke

Sergio drifts through post-revolution Havana cataloguing his own ironic detachment as missiles approach and his bourgeois world dissolves around him. Like Skip Sands, he is a man whose intelligence has been weaponized against his ability to act, leaving him a connoisseur of his own moral paralysis.

The series traces the cartel war as a parallel intelligence theater in which the Colombian state, the DEA, and the sicarios all maintain competing mythologies of righteousness. As in Johnson, covert violence becomes a generational inheritance, leaving children to discover that the official story was always a cover for something stranger and sadder.

Hemon's linked stories braid Cold War espionage, exile, and Sarajevo's siege into fragments where history is felt as static interference between the émigré and his lost city. The collection shares Johnson's faith that war's truths can only be approached obliquely, through anecdote, archive, and dream.

Muyanga's curatorial broadcasts treat radio as a clandestine instrument of solidarity, weaving liberation songs across borders the way Johnson's PSYOPS officers weave folklore into propaganda. The project insists that signal itself is political, and that what travels through the air can either heal or colonize.

Reframing Tezuka through a war-crimes investigation, the series watches a detective robot interview survivors of a desert conflict whose justifications keep multiplying like spores. The atmosphere of postwar grief and quiet, accreting horror echoes Tree of Smoke's belief that wars never properly end, only migrate into the bodies that fought them.