The Department of Truth #35

The house of strange people

The issue begins in a remote house where Cole is not yet the investigator in control of a case. He is a guest, a captive, or a recruit whose status has not been decided. A red-marked woman is being fed by another figure, while a voice says that Cole can come upstairs because there are many strange people in the house. The scene refuses the clean distinction between host and monster. The people living there may be ordinary fugitives, manifestations, or both at once.

Frank and Hunky appear among the house’s workers and technicians. They are surrounded by computers, boxes, and improvised equipment, and they discuss creating access to the outside world without giving the outside world access to them. The phrase describes a practical security measure, but it also describes the group’s relationship to consensus reality. White Hat wants to watch the public world, influence it, and remain hidden from the institutions that currently define it.

The house contains protective sigils and conversations about magic. One speaker says that he is not a fan of magic, but that structured belief systems around protective symbols can be useful. He has carved signs into the trees around the building. The scene does not establish that the symbols possess supernatural power independently of belief. It shows people experimenting with a system of meaning because ordinary security has failed and because the group suspects that the Department can reach them through stories as easily as through surveillance.

A liaison and the helicopter

A helicopter arrives over the forest. The people below ask whether the passenger is all right and whether he should be shot if he tries something. The response is practical rather than ceremonial: the visitor is Martin Barker, and he has come with a request involving Lee. The helicopter makes the house look less like a permanent headquarters than a temporary island surrounded by hostile airspace.

Barker’s arrival is also the issue’s first open movement between factions. He has been associated with Black Hat, but he enters a place that will later identify itself as White Hat. The scene does not show a formal truce. It presents a meeting arranged because the older conflict has become too dangerous for separate institutions to manage. The group’s weapons and contingencies indicate that nobody assumes good faith.

The visual design turns the helicopter into a black silhouette against a pale sky. It could be an extraction vehicle, an attack platform, or a government transport. Its meaning depends on who is looking. For Cole and the residents, it is the outside world arriving at the edge of their hidden one.

Lee and Barker face each other

Barker introduces Lee as the ghost of the twentieth century and identifies him as the director of the Department of Truth. The description is deliberately contradictory. Lee is physically present, yet he is treated as a ghost because his life has become inseparable from the stories built around him. He is also the director of an organization whose public history cannot acknowledge him.

Lee asks Barker who he is and accuses him of pretending to be someone he is not. Barker answers that he has known who Lee was supposed to be for years, but the person he sees is not doing what the role requires. The argument is not about a secret name alone. It is about whether a person can leave the story that made him useful.

Barker wants to know why Lee reached out and what he is trying to accomplish. He says that the Department has been re-staffed and its mission shifted to match the new zeitgeist. He also says that a liaison with the White House has been whispering the name Black Hat since childhood and proposes that the factions stop wasting energy fighting long enough to see where their goals align. His offer is tactical. It does not erase the history of Black Hat’s violence or the Department’s attempts to control him.

The creatures and the target on the head

Lee replies that Barker once believed granting power to the creatures his work created would give Barker a way to stop him. The wording makes the manifestations sound like weapons or instruments, but Lee insists that their existence has changed the balance. He asks how many minds he shapes every day and how close he is to winning. The boast may be literal within the comic’s reality, metaphorical, or deliberately manipulative. The issue leaves that scale unresolved.

Lee describes Washington as a symphony of him. He suggests that the city’s political movements, media narratives, and public fears are already responding to his influence. Barker answers that a target has been placed on his head and that the people pursuing him will not stop until they believe he is gone. The exchange turns consensus into a battlefield of attention: whoever is believed to be alive, dead, guilty, or necessary becomes the next object of force.

Lee then asks Barker what he stands for. Barker responds that he stands for the end of Lee and the end of the current story, followed by the beginning of a new one. The phrase is a declaration of regime change rather than a promise to restore an earlier order. Both men are trying to end a story, but neither describes what ordinary people will be allowed to believe afterward.

The three stories

The safe-house group later describes three stories that need to be told. The first is Lee’s story. The second is the story of the Department. The third is the story of Black Hat. The speakers do not claim that these accounts are equally humane or equally true. They use the three stories to explain why the current conflict cannot be solved by simply choosing a side and destroying the others. Each organization has created people, creatures, and records that keep its version of the world active.

Cole is told that his story is significant, just as the Woman in Red chose Lee and later chose him. The comparison positions Cole as an active narrative subject rather than a detective who merely records events. His choices are valuable because they can become a story that competes with the Department’s official account and Black Hat’s dark history. The issue does not establish that Cole has freely agreed to become that symbol.

A speaker introduces the idea of a binary: if White Hat is going to be the good side, it must lean into the same language that allowed the other factions to organize themselves. Another character rejects the binary as too simple. The disagreement is important because White Hat’s name is both a moral claim and a strategic costume. The group wants the public force associated with heroes without pretending that its members are innocent.

White Hat’s mission

The group says it has little money and few resources, but it has clarity of purpose. It wants to protect people from the spread of dangerous fictions. That mission sounds close to the Department’s original justification, yet the group also criticizes the Department for creating or weaponizing the very stories it claims to contain. White Hat therefore defines itself by method as much as by goal.

The residents argue that the Department and Black Hat have technologies and resources far beyond anything they have ever possessed. They believe those organizations have placed people in charge who hold their own visions of America and want to hurt others. The claim is presented through the group’s perspective; the issue does not provide a neutral census of the factions.

White Hat proposes using less dangerous fictions to keep the hostile forces busy. One speaker recalls a small incident in West Virginia and suggests that minor stories can occupy the opposition without harming large populations. This is not a declaration that fiction is harmless. It is an admission that White Hat intends to practice controlled narrative intervention. The moral distinction depends on whether the group can keep its stories limited once people begin believing them.

The Georgia Guidestones

The meeting takes place near the site of the Georgia Guidestones. The characters discuss the monument’s construction and the 1980 unveiling. A speaker describes anonymous sponsors operating under the pseudonym Robert Christian and the message presented to the world as the stones were revealed. The text on the stones is rendered as a field of competing commands: maintain humanity, guide reproduction, unite humanity, protect people with fair laws, avoid petty laws, balance rights with duties, and pursue truth, beauty, and love.

The issue uses the monument as a physical example of a text that invites interpretation. It is a set of instructions carved into granite, but the characters disagree about whether the instructions are a practical program, a provocation, or a conspiracy signal. The comic’s fictional claim that the site carries a deeper role in the Department’s conflict is not part of documented history.

The stones also mirror the safe house. Both are structures built to hold a system of belief in place. The monument presents itself as permanent; the house hides among trees and depends on secrecy. In both cases, a message survives because people choose to preserve it, argue over it, or fear what will happen if it is ignored.

Cole Turner becomes White Hat

Cole watches the group explain that its members include people and creatures expelled from the Department. A speaker asks whether the Department can regard these beings as legitimate once it has forced them into the world. The question reaches beyond legal status. It asks whether an institution that manufactures a manifestation can later deny the manifestation’s personhood when the creation becomes inconvenient.

The group tells Cole that it has manifested a potent fiction and suspects that the fiction will be useful. It calls the figure a boogeyman, a word that turns childhood fear into a strategic resource. The statement is not a revelation that Cole himself is the Star-Faced Man. It suggests that a story associated with Cole has acquired enough force to be used by another organization.

On the final page, a large white cowboy hat hangs above the room while a red-haired woman welcomes Cole to White Hat. The image is theatrical and unsettling. The hat is a symbol of the good side in a familiar moral language, but the people beneath it are surrounded by files, broken floorboards, and uncertain identities. Cole has not been given a clean rescue. He has been offered a new story in which his trauma can become an instrument.

Suspicious Minds, Part 3

The backup story returns to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1977. The streets around Graceland are filled with cameras, fans, police, and people who have come to see Elvis Presley. A Department operative named Lee speaks by telephone with Hunk, who is working among the crowd. Hunk complains that the Russians have placed an agent in the operation and that the agent has begun some kind of smear campaign.

Lee says that Elvis Aaron Presley is not a man in the sense that matters to the Department. He is not treated as an ordinary American citizen whose private life is beyond the institution’s reach. The operative says there is a tipping point at which an individual’s story becomes America’s story. Once the image has absorbed enough attention, the Department claims a political interest in the person beneath it.

The argument is framed through the language of an asset. Lee says that the image and the human being are different things, and that the institution can take over the image to make the national story easier to manage. The backup does not claim that the historical Elvis was controlled in this way. It imagines a fictional Department that sees his celebrity as a reality-making mechanism.

The story then shifts to Elvis performing beneath the American flag while hands reach up from the crowd. He is shown as a vessel for national anger, sexual energy, rebellion, and nostalgia. Lee’s narration says that the country is broken and that the public can turn an ordinary conflict into a murder story. The performer’s image is powerful precisely because different groups can project their own America onto it.

The operation ends in a room where Lee and Hunk speak over bodies and broken equipment. Lee admits that he does not understand most of the boundary between truth and fiction, but he trusts his instincts about the creatures that must be contained. He says that the story belongs to the person who has lived it, even when the institution wants to take it away. The final images return to a crowd, a newspaper, and Elvis’s face, leaving the public myth alive after the private operation has ended.

Real-world context

The Georgia Guidestones were a real granite monument erected in Elbert County, Georgia, in 1980. They carried inscriptions in several languages and became the subject of conspiracy theories, especially around the identity of the sponsors and the meaning of the text. The comic’s use of the site as a meeting place and as part of a hidden narrative is fictional.

Elvis Presley was a real American singer and performer whose recordings, stage persona, and public image had enormous cultural influence. Memphis, Sun Records, Graceland, and the 1970s setting are historical materials. Lee, Hunk, the Department’s attempt to control Elvis’s image, the Russian agent, and the manifestations surrounding the operation are fictional.

The issue uses the phrase “better angels” as a moral shorthand for people who want to protect others. The phrase has a long history in American political rhetoric, but White Hat’s self-description should be read as an in-universe claim. The organization’s methods and consequences remain under examination.

Art and publication

Martin Simmonds divides the main story into unstable color fields. The remote house is green, rust, and white, with faces appearing in the grain of the walls. The Lee–Barker conversation is pale blue and almost empty, as if the landscape has been drained so that the two men’s claims can fill it. When Lee speaks of the minds he shapes, painted faces and red fragments gather around him like a chorus.

The Georgia Guidestones sequence is arranged as a broken grid of panels and inscriptions. The monument is not allowed to remain a single object. Its commands overlap, disappear under paint, and reappear as competing instructions. The visual treatment captures the issue’s argument that a written system can become unstable when people use it for different purposes.

The indicia identifies The Department of Truth #35 as a February 2026 Image Comics publication. James Tynion IV is credited as writer, Martin Simmonds as artist, Aditya Bidikar as letterer, Dylan Todd as designer, and Steve Fox as editor. The backup “Suspicious Minds, Part 3” is credited to Scott Snyder, Joshua Hixson, Jordie Bellaire, and Aditya Bidikar. The listed covers are by Martin Simmonds, Caleb Ady, Dylan Burnett, and Tyler Boss.

Unresolved questions

The issue does not identify every White Hat resident, explain the red-marked woman’s nature, or establish whether the protective sigils work through supernatural force, psychological conditioning, or both. Frank, Hunky, Doc, and the other people in the house are associated with the group, but their exact ranks remain unclear.

The conversation between Lee and Barker leaves open whether Barker is negotiating in good faith, attempting to extract Lee, or trying to prevent an even larger war. Lee’s claim that he shapes minds every day may describe a manifestation, a propaganda network, or his own grandiose belief. The issue does not settle the question.

Cole’s welcome into White Hat is the clearest event in the issue, but it is not a resolution. The faction calls itself protective while planning to use stories as tools. The next stage of Cole’s life will depend on whether he can distinguish a safer narrative from a kinder one, and whether White Hat will allow him to tell his own story once it has made him useful.