The Department of Truth #13

The house and the school

The opening pages complete the return begun in the previous issue. Cole sits in a vehicle with Hawk and Barker as Milwaukee passes outside. He asks whether they are going to kill him. Hawk answers that, if that had been the plan, it would have been easier to shoot him on the flight from Denver. The threat is not removed; it is relocated. Cole is being taken somewhere his own memory can be used against him.

Cole identifies the house where he grew up. He says his parents split after what happened to him, that his grandparents raised him on the west side near Brookfield, and that once he started driving he never came back. Hawk says Cole’s mother kept the house for a while and never stopped believing what she thought happened to him. She did not welcome the family at holidays, and Cole’s father never found the words to apologize. The conversation gives the supernatural case a family consequence before the issue explains what the case was.

At the school, Hawk tells Cole to put down the gun and walk down memory lane. The school does not look as Cole remembers it, but Hawk says thirty years will do that. The building becomes a test of memory: a room that appears to have been kept in storage, a passage that leads behind the play-doh, and a staircase to a basement where the school supposedly kept a monster. Cole knows the architecture is wrong. The wrongness is exactly what the Department wants him to feel.

A teacher, a suicide, and the limits of truth

Cole remembers a teacher who took him to the hidden staircase. He later learned that she killed herself, but not until he was a teenager. By then the lies had been exposed, yet exposure did not repair the damage. Cole says that truth feels as though it should be more powerful and that shining a light on lies ought to make the world better. Hawk answers that more often than not, it does not do much at all.

The exchange is one of the issue’s sharpest statements about the series’ ethics. The Department claims to preserve a workable reality, but Cole’s own life demonstrates that disclosure can arrive too late to save anyone. His mother, father, teacher, and grandparents were forced to live with a story that had been placed in their home. Even if the story is revealed as false, the relationships altered by it remain altered.

The school’s impossible basement therefore functions as both a literal manifestation space and a map of memory. It contains the fear that Cole carried, the institutional story that organized the fear, and the later realization that no single revelation can return him to the child he was.

The historical shape of Satan

Cole asks Hawk whether the school is where he is finally going to reveal that it was real. Hawk refuses the premise and begins a history lesson. He describes the Satanic Panic as a culmination of superstition and scapegoating that reaches back at least a thousand years. His account begins in medieval Europe, after the conversion of the Roman world and the rise of the Catholic Church as an organizing institution.

Hawk argues that the Church combined surviving traditions and festivals from older pagan religions with selected scriptural ideas, then named the resulting figure Satan. Hell became a punishment intended to force conversion. Communities that kept other faiths were painted as witches and devil worshippers. The issue presents this as Hawk’s explanation inside the fictional world. It is not a substitute for the complex documented history of Christian theology, European pagan practice, or the development of witchcraft accusations.

The lesson then turns toward Jewish communities. Hawk says that rumors after the First Crusade described Jews killing themselves and their children rather than being forcibly converted. Over time, the rumor lost its context and became blood libel, the false accusation that Jews used the blood of Christian babies in religious rituals. He describes the claim as a corrosive thread woven through Western civilization. The issue uses the history to show how a fear of outsiders can become an inherited story even after the event that supposedly began it has disappeared.

Scapegoats and the need for an author

Hawk reduces the pattern to two human instincts: fear of outsiders and a drive to protect children. Cole immediately objects that the process must be more than instinct. He does not like conspiracy theories that present themselves as faceless forces; he wants there to be a person who made a decision. Hawk says that institutions benefited from the pattern. The Church could decide who belonged in society and who did not, then choose villains and heroes.

The argument becomes a disagreement over moral responsibility. Hawk is cautious about assigning intent because intentional authorship can become another conspiracy story. Cole is unwilling to excuse an institution simply because its actions were distributed across centuries. Their exchange mirrors the problem facing the Department. If every harmful narrative is treated as an emergent cultural accident, the people who fan it into a flame escape accountability. If every story is assigned to a hidden master, the explanation can become another manifestation.

The issue holds both positions at once. The Satanic Panic is shown as a historical process with real institutions and real victims, but its fictional extension also includes deliberate agents who know how to use the process. The truth is neither a single mastermind nor an innocent chain of misunderstandings.

Michelle Remembers and modern panic

The modern chapter of the lesson centers on Michelle Remembers, a book presented as the account of a young woman who recovered memories of Satanic abuse. Hawk describes the book as a beautiful, monstrous object that supplied a missing piece for a culture already filled with preschool trials, daycare scares, and stories about children being corrupted. The issue treats the book as an influential narrative within its fictional history, not as evidence that the alleged rituals occurred.

Hawk distinguishes the real-world Church of Satan from the fantasy of a hidden child-abusing religion. He describes Satanists as strange, goth, libertarian people who often use Satan as a metaphor for anti-authoritarianism and are generally atheists. The distinction matters because the Satanic Panic depended on collapsing a real religious organization, horror-film imagery, rebellious music, and fabricated allegations into one enemy.

The issue invokes Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen as examples of fictional imagery that could be mistaken for a description of reality. It also references the aftermath of the 1960s counterculture and the mass suicide at Jonestown. Barker’s narrative does not claim that the films caused the panic. It shows how images, news stories, religious rhetoric, and public anxiety can be assembled into a single cultural atmosphere.

Barker’s recruitment of Cole

Barker explains that his job was to play with the narrative in order to tip the balance toward the America he wanted. Televangelism was growing, and he pushed the people who distrusted it to take up more space. He links together stories about gay men dying from a mysterious blood disease, cities bankrupting the country from within, and an atheistic superpower capable of destroying the world with nuclear weapons. These statements are the language of the character’s strategy and should not be read as factual descriptions of the people or events named.

Barker says the public needed a book and a story that could make all those fears feel connected. When Cole’s childhood drawing showed a man with a star scarred into his face who wanted to eat babies, Barker saw the missing piece. Cole was not an aggressive child. He was soft-spoken and polite, exactly the kind of witness whose story could be sold as an innocent account of evil. Barker planned to make him a celebrity, place his story in megachurches, and collect the money that followed.

The scheme began locally. An interview ran a picture of Cole’s drawing and described his memories. Cole remembers crying on the way to the studio, while his mother tried to stop him from continuing. Barker says the first interview was only the start of a larger operation. The media story would create a public demand for more stories, and each new story would make the star-faced man easier to recognize.

The creature in the hotel room

After the first interview, Barker saw the drawing again in his hotel room. The page shows the picture beside a bed, alcohol, and the ordinary debris of a night away from home. The figure in the drawing then appears in the room. It tells Barker that it is hungry. The speech changes from ordinary lettering to a black and red voice, separating the manifestation from the documentary tone of the confession.

Barker says it took him almost an hour to kill the thing. It was not fully formed; it flickered in and out of existence, an unfinished idea struggling to become a body. The image makes the mechanics of manifestation visible. The creature is born from a drawing and a media narrative, but it cannot stabilize without more belief. Its hunger is not only physical. It needs attention, repetition, and a public that expects it to be there.

Barker shut down the coverage because he understood what would happen if the creature entered the world. Lee was furious, believing Barker had become afraid of ghosts, but Barker says he knew that the creature would eat real children if everyone believed that was what it did. His account does not make him innocent. He created the conditions for the monster and then destroyed it when the consequences became visible.

Angels, monsters, and the Department’s offer

Cole asks whether Barker is trying to make him believe that the Department are the bad guys and Black Hat are the good guys. Barker replies that he is only repeating what he was told to do. Hawk adds that Cole is being brought into the operation because Barker believes he is susceptible to the lesson. The conflict is no longer about which faction has the better story; it is about who gets to decide what Cole must believe in order to act.

Barker says angels are only as real as people make them. The statement is immediately complicated by the evidence of the creature. The Department and Black Hat have both used the language of angels, demons, and tulpas, but the labels are strategic. A being that looks like an angel can be made into a savior or an invader depending on the story surrounding it. A being created as a monster can become real enough to attack, even when its original image was a child’s drawing.

The two men enter what Barker calls Mr. Barker’s office, the real headquarters of Black Hat. The architecture is dark and unstable, as if the headquarters is a narrative space rather than a conventional building. Barker offers Cole a gun and tells him to fire every bullet into the monster’s head. He also warns that the creature knows more than Cole does and that it has been waiting for decades.

Ruby, the vans, and the attempt to learn

Hawk tells Barker that he should have killed the monster and returned it to the Department, where it could be studied for every piece of intelligence it might provide. Barker says he has already frisked a cell phone from one of the agents and called Ruby. She has been listening to the conversation and knows how many people to send in twelve vans. The detail shows that Barker’s operation is not a private confession. It is a live contest between surveillance, betrayal, and the ability to move personnel before the other side can react.

The creature becomes a source of intelligence for both factions. The Department wants to contain and interrogate it. Barker wants to prove what it means and use the proof against the Department. Black Hat wants the monster to remain a sign of institutional failure, while the Department wants to keep the public from learning that a child’s drawing can become a predator. Neither side treats the creature as a life with an independent claim to survival.

The issue’s moral pressure comes from this instrumental language. The monster is dangerous, but it is also a product of choices made by adults who wanted an enemy. Killing it may prevent further violence; keeping it alive may reveal how consensus reality works. The series refuses to make the practical decision ethically clean.

The two Lees and a living embodiment

Barker tells Cole that the Department needs someone in its inner circle who understands tulpas and magic. He invokes a strange event in 1963 and distinguishes between two Lees: the Lee Harvey Oswald taken by the Department and the Lee killed by Jack Ruby. One is the man who had been an agent with the Department since the late 1950s; the other is the shadowy idea of an assassin spreading through the press.

Barker says the Department saved the wrong Lee. Hawk calls the public Oswald a tulpa, while Barker describes tulpas as wrong things, scars on reality. He says the creature in front of them is the cold, dripping, wet black heart of America. The language is interpretive rather than a neutral classification. It expresses Barker’s belief that a manifestation can embody a culture’s worst fear and that the Department’s interventions may have preserved the wrong version of history.

The issue does not replace the historical Lee Harvey Oswald with the fictional character. It uses the documented name as part of a fictional distinction between a Department operative and a public assassin. The real historical record remains separate from Barker’s claim that one Lee was a tulpa.

The shooting and the Woman in Red

Hawk orders Cole to shoot. The gunfire knocks Barker down, but the creature is still present in the surrounding space. Barker asks why Cole is trusting Hawk with all of this and whether Hawk believes Cole can fix it. Hawk answers that Cole was chosen by the Woman in Red, whom Barker also calls Babalon. The exchange links the school, the star-faced drawing, and the larger mythology around the Woman in Red without proving that she directly created the creature.

The final image shows a red, human-shaped figure surrounded by fractured red marks and voices calling Cole’s name. The creature’s form is no longer the simple star-faced drawing from the childhood interview. It has become a composite of Barker’s media campaign, Cole’s fear, the Department’s lesson, and the expectations placed upon it by both factions. Its unfinished nature has changed into something more deliberate, but the issue does not show what happens after the shooting.

Barker’s last words promise that the experience will come down to Cole and make him proud. The line can be heard as paternal manipulation, Black Hat recruitment, or a prediction that Cole’s role in the conflict has already been written. The issue leaves the exact speaker of the final promise obscured, preserving the uncertainty around the Woman in Red and the creature’s agency.

Continuity significance

Issue #13 completes the Milwaukee movement begun in issue #12 and turns Cole’s childhood memory into a central case. The red-faced figure from the home, the teacher’s impossible staircase, the local interview, and the hotel-room manifestation are connected without being collapsed into one simple flashback. Each scene may be a different stage of the same narrative or a later reconstruction of it.

The issue deepens Barker by making him both architect and frightened witness. He wanted to manufacture a national enemy, but when the enemy appeared he tried to suppress it. His guilt does not restore the children or families damaged by the panic. It only reveals that the people who build a story may lose control of the thing they built.

Cole’s conflict with the Department also changes. Hawk offers him a history lesson that explains how Europe, Christianity, blood libel, modern media, and Satanic Panic can form a single line of transmission. Cole wants a person to blame, but the issue shows that blame can be distributed across institutions, audiences, and the people who deliberately fan a fear. His future decisions will have to account for both structural power and individual responsibility.

Real-world context

The issue’s references to Satanic Panic, Michelle Remembers, Jonestown, Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen, medieval blood libel, televangelism, AIDS stigma, and nuclear fear are real cultural materials. They are used to show how an imagined enemy can be assembled from older religious accusations, modern media, and political anxiety. The comic’s explanation is fictional and should not be substituted for the historical record of those subjects.

Michelle Remembers was a real book whose claims became part of the wider Satanic Panic. The comic adapts its narrative role rather than confirming the alleged memories. Likewise, the historical Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby belong to documented twentieth-century history, while the two-Lee explanation belongs to the series’ fictional continuity.

Visual and publication notes

Martin Simmonds moves the issue from green Milwaukee night to ochre medieval stairways, then into a purple and red media nightmare. The school’s impossible basement is built from luminous darkness. The monster’s voice is rendered in black and red balloons, while Barker’s confession often appears as paper fragments laid over painted bodies. The pages make history feel like a physical room that Cole must walk through.

The indicia identifies the Image Comics issue as September 2021. 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 cover presents a blurred face behind fractured red and blue bands, while the closing title image shows red horns and a fallen figure. The visual language carries the issue’s argument: the monster is an image that has learned how to stand.

Unresolved questions

The issue does not confirm the exact identity of the teacher, the red-haired woman, or the person who first brought Cole’s drawing into the media. It does not establish whether the Woman in Red selected Cole before the Satanic Panic, because of the panic, or in response to the creature’s manifestation. It also leaves unclear whether the final red figure is the same being Barker killed in the hotel room, a later form, or a second manifestation produced by the Department’s return to the school.

The issue’s uncertainty is part of its canon. Cole is shown a version of his past by people who each need him to accept a different moral. The record remains unstable because every explanation is also an attempt to control what the monster means.