The Department of Truth #12

Milwaukee, 1987

The issue opens in Milwaukee in 1987, in the Turner family home. Mrs. Turner sits across from a red-haired woman who says she is there to represent the family and to get Cole’s story into the public record before the same thing happens elsewhere. The visitor speaks in the language of protection. She says that children are being harmed by Satanists and that the country needs to hear directly from a boy’s mother rather than wait for a distant retelling years later.

The contrast between the woman’s polished pitch and the home’s domestic setting is important. A television, a child’s drawing, a coffee cup, and a family telephone surround a conversation that is already being treated as national material. The visitor says she once wrote for The Sentinel, knew Cole’s father, and has contacts at the National Enquirer and NBC Nightly News. She proposes that the family move to River Hills, buy a large house with strong walls, and let the story become a public event. She denies being an agent, calling herself only an upstanding American who cannot tolerate what Satanists are doing to children.

The issue does not identify the woman’s employer or prove that her media contacts are genuine. Her use of the language of outrage, her knowledge of the family, and her ability to turn a frightening drawing into a national pitch make her approach resemble a recruitment operation. The scene shows how a conspiracy narrative can enter through an apparently helpful stranger: the family is offered safety, recognition, and money at the exact moment when fear has made ordinary judgment difficult.

The child and the red-faced figure

Cole’s childhood is represented through a sequence in which he accuses an adult of lying and is answered by a figure in a red, star-filled space. The figure bears a red face marked by a star or pentagram-like shape and speaks to the child as if the two already share a secret. It agrees that all grown-ups are liars, then adds a distinction: only some adults know they are lying, and it is better to be one of the people who knows than one of the people who does not.

The figure promises to explain when Cole is older and sends him back to his cartoons. The scene gives the lie a seductive structure. The child is not told simply to distrust everyone; he is told that knowledge of deception creates a privileged class. That promise anticipates the logic of both Black Hat and the Department. Each institution claims that ordinary people cannot see the forces shaping their lives, and each offers selected recruits the status of those who understand what the public does not.

The issue does not name the figure as the Star-Faced Man, the Woman in Red, Martin Barker, or any other established identity. Its visual language connects it to the series’ red-star imagery, but the exact relationship remains unresolved. The figure may be a manifestation, a memory shaped by later knowledge, a staged encounter, or several of those things at once. What the scene establishes is that Cole’s earliest experience of conspiracy language is intimate and emotionally charged rather than purely political.

The Department’s search for Martin Barker

In the present-day investigation, Cole is with Department personnel after an exhausting Bigfoot operation. He complains about the smell on his shoes and the way the Department can turn an airport hotel into a secret headquarters. A conversation about Martin Barker shifts the case from a single manifestation to a person who has learned how to make many narratives grow at once. Hawk is described as someone who helped turn abstract fears about government power in the 1980s and 1990s into concrete forms that could be used by real people.

Beneath the Library of Congress, Hawk and another Department operative review what they know. Martin Barker was born outside Dallas in 1965, has no surviving family in the available records, and may not even be using his real name. A hostile biography in the files says his father was Satan and his mother the Whore of Babylon. The grotesque wording is presented as a lead or manufactured identity rather than verified genealogy. The investigators suspect that the Barker family helped underwrite Black Hat’s organization, but even that conclusion is framed as an inference from incomplete records.

The team considers several explanations for Barker’s behavior: he might be a paperback horror fan, a devoted reader of violent fiction, or someone who has been building a distributed system whose author cannot be found. The uncertainty matters because Black Hat does not operate like a conventional office. Its influence is designed to erase the trace of the person who started the story.

Black Hat’s decentralized influence engine

The issue provides the clearest description yet of Black Hat’s modern method. The organization scrapes data from social-media platforms to find people most inclined to believe a particular frightening claim. It then boosts a carefully selected narrative into the communities already prepared to receive it. A story about reptilian breeding camps in Denver can be introduced to one audience, while a story about secret government camps and black sites is offered to another. The surface language changes, but the underlying direction remains the same.

Black Hat encourages the first believers to add details: breeding tubes, locations, dates, photographs, names, and imagined connections. Once the story has enough texture, the original posts can be removed. Their echoes continue through the communities that copied them, and the narrative begins to look as though it emerged everywhere at once. The organization can then simplify the claim for a broader audience, stripping away the reptilian element for people who reject it while keeping the deeper suspicion of hidden government power.

The Department’s analysts describe the result as a decentralized influence engine that erases its own source. Black Hat can move a narrative toward a tipping point in days, while the Department may need months to identify and contain it. At that point, the conspiracy’s believers manufacture evidence in response to their own expectations. A fringe idea becomes large enough to alter the world without the mainstream recognizing the moment at which the change occurred.

This mechanism is an in-universe account of Black Hat’s operation, not a description of how real social-media systems secretly function. The issue uses familiar technologies and real cultural anxieties to dramatize the series’ central premise: consensus reality can be changed by manipulating the paths through which people encounter a claim.

The Denver Airport and the tulpa question

The search for Barker takes Cole to a Department location associated with Denver. The pages show a vast underground or hidden base, helicopters, and a landscape that is difficult to separate from an hallucination. Cole is told that the base is beneath the Denver airport, an idea that belongs to the mythology of the scene rather than a confirmed statement about the real airport. The agents discuss whether the helicopters are tulpas. Their answer is evasive: the machines did not begin that way, but they have become something close to it.

The exchange extends the series’ treatment of thought-forms. A machine may begin as an ordinary object, become a symbol in a conspiracy story, and then acquire a presence that no longer depends on the original object. The black helicopter is both a physical aircraft and an icon of extrajudicial authority. The issue does not establish that every helicopter shown is supernatural or that the Denver installation exists in ordinary space. It does establish that Department personnel are willing to work inside a reality where an image can become an instrument and an instrument can become an image.

Barker’s history of borrowed fears

Barker begins his account by saying that he has always understood how to piggyback on existing fears. When he joined the Department, rumors were spreading about an all-powerful secret hand behind the government. The real government, he says, was small enough that ordinary people could never find it. The line is characteristic of Barker’s method: he does not invent fear from nothing. He looks for the point where a public suspicion can be connected to another suspicion and then made to carry more weight than either had alone.

He recalls the fluoridation conspiracies, including the claim that chemicals in drinking water were intended to engineer a more docile population. Barker says he paid people involved in fluoride treatment to become Department agents, while insisting that no mind-control drug was added. The distinction is morally unstable. The Department may not have committed the act claimed by the rumor, but it embeds agents inside the social world that produced the rumor and then uses the rumor’s credibility as a resource.

The same pattern appears in stories of cattle mutilations and unmarked black helicopters. Ranchers see helicopters arriving near mutilated animals, and the image of secret aircraft becomes attached to a wider fear that the government is operating outside the law. Barker describes the stories as arriving alongside anxieties about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Book of Revelation, and the idea that a hidden police force might be preparing for the end times. Each claim supplies an emotional bridge to the next.

From the 1970s to the New World Order

Barker’s chronology moves through the political and cultural atmosphere of the 1970s: left-wing terrorism, bombings, cults, assassinations, economic decline, and the aftermath of Vietnam. He describes a country in which children see violence in uniform on television and adults lose faith in institutions that once promised stability. The issue does not present this as a complete history. It presents Barker’s retrospective explanation of why certain stories found audiences.

The rise of Ronald Reagan is described as a bright national dream offered to people desperate to believe in something. Later, the collapse of the Soviet Union creates a different anxiety. The fear is no longer that the world will end in a clear confrontation between superpowers, but that global trade, international institutions, and corporate power will quietly dissolve American sovereignty. Barker links those fears to stories about George H. W. Bush, the Clintons, the New World Order, and a globalist military-industrial complex. These are conspiracy claims within the dialogue, not established facts.

Barker says he decided to capture some of that belief and wield it as a weapon. The phrase explains the issue’s title-level conflict. Belief is not merely an object to be studied. It can be collected, shaped, and aimed. The Department believes it can use a controlled dose of suspicion to stabilize consensus. Barker discovers that the dose cannot always be controlled once it enters a population already looking for an enemy.

Ruby Ridge, Waco, and Oklahoma City

Around 1992, Barker says, he wanted to demonstrate how much power the machinery had accumulated. The militia movement was growing, and he chose a small armed camp at Ruby Ridge as the place to test the system. The issue’s fictional account makes Barker responsible for designing the blueprints of a narrative that would turn government authority into a monstrous enemy. He says the plan did not remain an experiment.

Barker was not at Waco, but he says the machine he designed was already in motion. Twenty-five children died in the siege, and he describes the deaths as the price paid to prove the kind of power everyone already suspected the government possessed. He then mentions Oklahoma City and the additional children who died. The confession is full of disgust at his earlier self. Barker says he wanted to push the belief around and does not know how much more he kicked off with the experiment.

The real-world events named by the issue have their own documented histories, legal records, and competing interpretations. The comic’s Barker is a fictional participant in a fictional network. His confession should not be read as a claim that the Department or Black Hat caused the real events outside the story. Within the series, however, the tragedies reveal the lethal consequence of treating a population’s fear as a laboratory.

Barker turns against the machine

Barker says that his turncoat moment came around the time he worked as a real agent with Mr. Barker, after he stopped being a kid playing with toys and became afraid of the power being thrown around. The details are deliberately unstable. The issue allows Barker to speak in a mixture of biography, cover story, and confession, so the exact sequence of his recruitment, betrayal, and relationship to the Department remains uncertain.

Hawk is identified directly as Black Hat, and Barker apologizes for having been absent for a while. The reunion takes place inside a helicopter whose destination Cole does not know. Barker then tells Cole that he is going to the place where they first met, when Cole was only a kid. That statement connects the adult interrogation to the Milwaukee sequence without explaining whether Barker himself was the red-faced figure, the man behind the media approach, or a witness to a third actor. The issue uses the uncertainty as pressure: Cole is being returned to the first memory before he has been given a stable account of it.

Homeward flight

The helicopter’s final instruction is simple: they are going to Milwaukee, and Cole is going home. The line carries no comfort. Home is the place where the family story was first approached as a media product, where a child learned that adults were lying, and where a red-starred presence offered secret knowledge as an identity. The return suggests that Cole’s recruitment did not begin with the FBI investigation that opened the series. It began earlier, in a household that had already been marked by competing explanations.

The image of the aircraft over a red geometrical field turns the journey into a movement through the Department’s own symbolic language. The helicopter is at once a transport, a conspiracy icon, and a possible tulpa. The flight carries Cole through a story about black helicopters while literally using the image that story made powerful. The issue ends before the Milwaukee confrontation, leaving the next chapter to determine whether the past can be investigated without being rewritten.

Continuity significance

Issue #12 connects several threads that had previously moved in parallel. Cole’s childhood, the Star-Faced imagery, Black Hat’s distributed method, Hawk’s institutional history, and the Department’s willingness to manipulate public fear now occupy the same narrative field. The issue does not resolve every connection. Instead, it shows why the gaps matter. A person who remembers a red figure may be recalling a manifestation, a recruitment tactic, a family story, or a later narrative placed over an earlier memory.

The issue also changes the scale of Black Hat. The organization is not only a faction with cells and leaders. It is a method for finding receptive audiences, seeding details, removing origins, and waiting for evidence to appear. Barker’s remorse does not undo the method; it demonstrates that the method can outlive the person who designed it.

For Cole, the central question becomes personal. He is not simply investigating why people believe in Satanists, black helicopters, or hidden bases. He is trying to learn whether those beliefs entered his life through his family, through the Department, through Black Hat, or through the reality effects produced when all three met. The issue leaves that question open but makes it impossible for him to return to an uncomplicated childhood memory.

Real-world references

The issue draws on the American Satanic Panic, which involved allegations that organized Satanists were abusing children and controlling institutions. It also invokes real conspiracy traditions about fluoride, cattle mutilations, unmarked helicopters, the New World Order, and secret government programs. Hal Lindsey and the Book of Revelation appear as references within Barker’s explanation of how apocalyptic language can be attached to political fear.

Ruby Ridge, the Waco siege, and the Oklahoma City bombing are documented historical events with extensive public records. The comic places them inside a fictional account of narrative manipulation, but the historical record must remain separate from Barker’s confession. The issue’s fictional claim is that Barker designed a machine that helped generate the surrounding belief. That is a statement about The Department of Truth’s continuity, not an assertion about the causes of those real events.

Visual language and publication

Martin Simmonds separates the issue’s time periods through radically different palettes. Milwaukee is drawn in warm oranges, greens, and childlike shapes that make the family home look safe until the red figure enters. The present-day Department scenes are cut by black wires, screens, and red blocks. Barker’s confession becomes a field of helicopters, blood, stars, and fractured faces. The style makes the page feel like a memory being processed by several institutions at once.

The issue’s title page identifies it as Chapter Nine: Revelations. The credits list James Tynion IV as writer, Martin Simmonds as artist, Aditya Bidikar as letterer, Dylan Todd as designer, and Steve Fox as editor. The indicia dates the Image Comics publication to August 2021. Its story follows the previous issue’s Bigfoot investigation and leads directly into the return to Cole’s early life.

Unresolved questions

The issue does not identify Martin Barker’s birth identity, his exact status within Black Hat, or the point at which he became a Department operative. It does not confirm whether the red-haired woman in Milwaukee worked for the Department, Black Hat, a publisher, or herself. It does not name the red-faced figure speaking with child-Cole, and it does not establish whether the Denver base exists as ordinary architecture, a manifestation, or a mixture of both.

Those uncertainties are not missing facts to be filled in by assumption. They are part of the issue’s design. Every institution in the story benefits from an incomplete record, and Cole’s return to Milwaukee is a test of whether memory can survive the people who have tried to weaponize it.