The Department of Truth #36

A Fox broadcast and a private revelation

The opening image is a television news set marked “FIX NEWS.” A male anchor reports that, despite the Clinton administration’s promises to confront escalating violence, polls show many Americans feeling less safe than ever. His co-anchor, Diane, says that she locks her doors at night. The exchange is familiar, almost banal, until a sick man in a hospital bed answers the television as though it were a direct message.

Mr. Gaines holds a book and says that the Lord Jesus himself called him to build something. He is speaking from a hospital bed, but the images make the room feel like a broadcast studio. The red scan lines of the television pass across his face, merging the patient’s testimony with the news program’s language of danger. Gaines does not describe his project as entertainment or profit. He describes it as obedience.

Mr. Gaines, or Huck

The nurse calls him Mr. Gaines, establishing the name used in the room. Lee later calls him Huck, a field nickname that connects the dying man to a longer history of hunting boogeymen. Hunky is identified as Huck’s son, so the issue places a family line inside the Department’s institutional line. The father spent his life chasing manifestations; the son now sits in a room where their images are sorted and watched.

Gaines’s body is failing. He coughs hard enough to frighten the nurse, who remarks that he should have choked long ago. The humor is cruel because the people in the room have learned to treat catastrophe as routine. When Lee arrives, Gaines says that the monsters got him in the end. Lee answers with the intimacy of an old colleague rather than the authority of a director.

Lee and the hospital protocol

Lee asks the nurse to give the old coworkers the room. He and Gaines speak about the field office’s improved protocols. Gaines curses the younger generation for learning from his mistakes, while Lee says that Darla is settling in and that Gaines’s daughter is twice the hunter he ever was. The exchange makes the Department’s history personal: its methods have been paid for by the bodies of the people who first tested them.

Gaines says he was glad to serve as a guinea pig for the country. The phrase is not an admission that the Department acted ethically. It is the bitter self-description of a man who accepted danger as part of the job and now knows that the institution can outlive the people it used. Lee’s final question—how his boy is settling in—turns Hunky into the inheritor of an unfinished war.

Deviation 9: Reality and the Beast

The title page moves from the hospital to a room lined with televisions. Hunky kneels among the screens in a red shirt bearing the words “I Want to Believe.” The phrase links him to the cultural language of UFO belief, but Hunky is not a passive believer. He is a technician, handler, and collector of stories.

He introduces a desiccated Harpy to the other people in the room and jokes about the creature’s speech, its offensive opinions, and the possibility of giving it a pet name. He also points out a smaller creature in an overflowing container and describes another as though he were showing off animals in a private menagerie. The jokes are a defense against fear, but they also expose a dangerous intimacy. Hunky has begun to treat manifestations as companions, specimens, and media personalities at the same time.

Rock Bottom and the screen wall

A senior man arrives and calls the place Rock Bottom. The name suggests a basement, a last resort, and a place where the Department keeps what it cannot publicly acknowledge. The visitor criticizes Hunky for watching the television wall all day. Hunky answers that there is nothing else worth doing, and that watching the tube is useful.

The room’s technology is deliberately old-fashioned: curved screens, exposed cables, and a desk that looks like a television control booth rather than a modern intelligence center. The obsolete equipment makes the space feel trapped in the era when broadcast news became a national nervous system. Hunky’s body is illuminated by signals he cannot turn off. When the screens flare, the room appears to breathe.

News as an atrocity exhibition

Hunky’s narration moves through images of Baghdad, Kuwait, soldiers, explosions, and live coverage. He says that any country could have been dragged through Vietnam by the skin of its yellowed teeth, then argues that America doubled down on televised catastrophe. In his account, the news became a twenty-four-hour atrocity exhibition: if no war was available, another story had to be found.

He mentions the 1990s media environment, the expansion of cable news, and the sale of stations to billionaires who push political angles. The issue does not offer Hunky as a neutral historian. His speech is angry, vulgar, and wounded. Yet the pictures behind him show a reality that supports part of his diagnosis: the nation’s fear is being packaged, repeated, and sold until the difference between information and spectacle becomes difficult to see.

The figure that emerges behind Hunky’s speech has a skull-like face, red eyes, and a grin cut across its jaw. Whether it is a literal manifestation or a visual embodiment of the argument is not stated. It represents a world in which the truth is no longer controlled by an institution; it is ground into dust until only fear, hate, and paranoia remain.

The newcomer in the grey shirt

The television room receives a new man wearing a grey shirt. An older agent complains that Lee’s decision to bring in a “geek kid” was a bad idea. Hunky does not recognize the newcomer and says that he will have to read before he can be useful. The newcomer answers that he is cataloguing an A-system, a line that marks him as a researcher rather than a field hunter.

The old agent’s contempt is part of the Department’s generational conflict. He believes that one heavy man in a grey shirt cannot hold the line when the country’s stories are colliding. Hunky responds that he does not know who the newcomer is, but the exchange leaves open whether the boy is an analyst, an informant, a manifestation, or a future recruit. The issue deliberately withholds a name, making his first appearance a question rather than a biography.

The television theme park

The case began with Gaines’s belief that God called him to build a full-scale recreation of Noah’s Ark. The nurse reacts with disgust because the project has become a theme park, but Gaines insists that it is not an idolatrous attraction erected for greed. He says that it teaches the truth of God today. The contradiction is the point: a private religious conviction has been converted into a public machine for manufacturing conviction in others.

The screens show a smiling family and a presenter describing the coming attraction. The language of charity, donations, and Christian entertainment blends with an unseen threat. A girl cries that the dinosaurs are coming for her. The image turns a familiar biblical story into a predator’s mouth. The beast is not simply an animal from the past. It is the form taken by a story when the story’s caretakers insist that every detail must be physically present.

Faith, evidence, and the beast

The issue does not say that Gaines’s faith is false. It shows that the Department can encounter a case where belief, commerce, television, and physical construction reinforce one another. The attraction gives visitors an environment in which the biblical narrative can be experienced as architecture. The more people accept the attraction as proof, the more pressure the story exerts on the world around it.

The final image of the beast is a wide, toothed grin emerging from darkness. The creature is associated with the theme park, but the page does not assign it a stable taxonomy. It may be a manifestation of Noah’s Ark, a response to the child’s fear of dinosaurs, a product of the Department’s containment failure, or a composite of several beliefs. The safest conclusion is that the case demonstrates a transformation from story to environment to predator.

Cryogenically frozen celebrities

The issue’s case-file page is numbered 266 and titled “Cryogenically Frozen Celebrities.” It describes the long-running rumor that Walt Disney’s body or head was cryogenically preserved, then separates the rumor from the documented record of Disney’s death and burial. The file notes that James Hiram Bedford became the first person legally cryogenically preserved after his death in 1967, while the Disney story continued to mutate in popular culture.

The case file belongs beside the main story because it concerns the same pressure point: a public image that refuses to remain attached to an ordinary body. The rumor turns a dead celebrity into a future event. The Department’s interest is not whether Disney is literally frozen under a ride. It is how a story about suspended death can remain useful long after the facts are settled.

The page includes photographs and diagrams of facilities, tubes, and preserved bodies. Their evidentiary look is important. The images resemble proof, but the file’s prose warns that the cultural power of the rumor comes from its appeal, not from evidence that Disney was preserved. Within the series, documentation is never automatically neutral.

Real-world context

The Clinton administration, the Gulf War, Vietnam, CNN’s coverage of Baghdad, Ruby Ridge, and the Oklahoma City bombing are real historical references. The issue compresses them into Hunky’s argument about televised fear. The compression is a character’s interpretation, not a complete account of American media history.

Noah’s Ark is a religious narrative found in Genesis and in related traditions. Modern creationist attractions have used large-scale exhibits, museum displays, and theme-park techniques to present a literal reading of the story. The fictional park in this issue, its manifestations, and its connection to the Department are invented for the comic.

The Walt Disney cryonics rumor has circulated for decades, but Disney’s official burial place is Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. James Bedford’s cryopreservation is documented, although the long-term revival imagined by cryonics advocates remains unproven. The comic’s file uses that difference between record and rumor as part of its examination of belief.

Art and publication

Ben Templesmith’s art makes the issue look like a television that has been left on through the night. The hospital pages carry red scan lines and sickly green light, while the screen room is built from blue-white rectangles that erase the edges of the characters. The television wall is a landscape, a surveillance system, and an altar.

The case file on cryogenic celebrities changes the texture completely. It uses a typed report, photographs, diagrams, and blue paper, creating the impression of material that has been stored in a Department drawer. David Romero is credited with the case-files art, while Dylan Todd’s design work makes the file look official without proving its claims.

The indicia identifies the issue as a March 2026 Image Comics publication. James Tynion IV is credited as writer, Ben Templesmith as artist, Aditya Bidikar as letterer, Dylan Todd as designer, and Steve Fox as editor. Martin Simmonds, Ben Templesmith, Chloe Brailsford, and Martin Simmonds for the Invincible variant are credited for the listed covers.

Continuity and unresolved questions

Issue #36 establishes that Hunky is Huck’s son and that Huck’s work in the field helped shape the protocols used by later agents. It also places Lee in direct contact with a dying veteran and confirms that the Department continues to manage manifestations through specialized rooms, files, and personnel. The issue does not say whether Hunky accepts the Department’s mission or merely survives inside it.

The relationship between Gaines’s Ark and the beast remains open. The story does not name the creature, show the full attraction, or explain whether the Department contained it. Nor does it establish whether the broadcast scenes are live, recorded, or generated by the manifestation itself. Hunky’s screen wall may be a monitoring system, a reality engine, or both.

The new grey-shirted recruit is similarly unresolved. He has been brought in by Lee, seems to work with records and systems, and is treated as an outsider by the older agents. His introduction connects Issue #36 to the Department’s future personnel changes without reducing him to a convenient answer. The issue ends with the screens still glowing, suggesting that the next threat will arrive first as an image.