The Department of Truth #37

The house beside Lake Champlain

The first pages are set in Burlington, Vermont, in 1989. Hunky and Darla are children standing near the lake with rifles. Their targets are angel statues, not living enemies, but their father treats the exercise as a field drill. When Hunky misses one statue, the father tells him plainly. Darla shoots more accurately and receives the approval Hunky wants. The scene is a family memory shaped by instruction: the children are being taught that appearances may conceal a threat, and that hesitation can be more dangerous than fear.

The father’s talk about an alien invasion is delivered with the same calm used for chores. He is not ranting in a street-corner costume. He is a professional who has made suspicion ordinary. The lake, the statues, and the children’s teasing create a domestic setting for the Department’s later philosophy. Before Hunky learns institutional language, he learns that the world is full of signs and that a responsible person must decide which signs deserve a bullet.

The Department office in 1996

The story jumps to a Washington office in 1996. Lee Harvey Oswald is present with Hunky and Hawk Harrison, and the conversation turns to dinosaurs in Florida. Hawk jokes about Jurassic Park and Steven Spielberg, but his joke becomes evidence of the problem: popular entertainment has given the public an image of dinosaurs that can be summoned by shared expectation. Hawk also says that his father shot Bigfoot and witches, a boast that links his family history to the field culture Hunky inherited.

The room’s absurdity is deliberate. A group of government operatives is willing to consider living dinosaurs, yet the adults still argue over whether the report is a prank, a religious project, or a manifestation. Lee’s presence places the case inside the Department’s older machinery. Hunky and Hawk represent a younger generation that has grown up surrounded by movies, television, and conspiracy stories; their evidence is already contaminated by the images those media supplied.

A van made into a ghost

The field team travels in a plain white van lined with custom tin foil. The improvised lining is described as a way to make the vehicle a ghost to surveillance, turning a familiar conspiracy trope into Department equipment. Hunky, Hawk, Doc, and Charity move through Florida with the nervous efficiency of people who have done this before. Their vehicle looks ridiculous from the outside and serious from within, which is characteristic of the series’ treatment of hidden institutions.

Doc carries a field guide and speaks in the language of procedure. The group does not simply drive toward a monster; it identifies a site, evaluates the people running it, and tries to determine how many manifestations may be loose. That distinction matters. The operation is containment and assessment, not a hunting trip where every creature can be killed without consequence.

The Birth of Jesus Holy Adventure Park

The Florida destination is called The Birth of Jesus Holy Adventure Park. Its entrance combines religious architecture, dinosaur imagery, and the visual grammar of a media complex. Statues and skeletons stand behind fences, while a building marked “Recording Studio” promises that the park’s message will travel beyond its gates. The attraction is a physical argument: the founder wants visitors to experience a literal Christian history, and the experience has been designed to make disbelief feel like rebellion.

The park’s name is not treated as a joke by its staff. Inside the boardroom, executives discuss funding, false adherents, teenagers lost to drugs and pregnancy, homosexuality and AIDS, evolution, and the recruitment of soldiers for Christ. Their language reveals an institution that sees entertainment as a tool of discipline. Dinosaurs are valuable because they can be made to serve a larger campaign about sin, obedience, and the recovery of a threatened audience.

Charity, the faithful child

Charity is the founder’s daughter and the park’s most visible believer. She is blond, confident, and convinced that God and guardian angels protect her. When she calls herself a warrior for God, the words are not presented as a private metaphor. She believes the park is a battlefield and that the Department agents may be instruments sent to protect it. Her conviction makes her useful to the operation, but it also makes her vulnerable to the story her father has built.

Charity is not merely a frightened witness. She repeats the park’s doctrine, speaks about devils stalking God’s kingdom, and helps the team move through the grounds. Her faith is sincere even when the institution around her is exploitative. The issue keeps those facts together. A belief can be emotionally honest and still become part of a machine that manufactures danger.

The first creatures

The team reaches the park’s dinosaur grounds and encounters creatures that are too lively to be statues and too unstable to be natural animals. Hunky fires at one of them. The violence is abrupt, but the image does not settle the nature of the target. Doc explains that the dinosaurs are pseudo-physical manifestations of collective belief shaped by modern impressions of dinosaurs. The creatures have weight and teeth, yet their bodies are assembled from culture rather than fossils.

Charity declares that she killed one of the beasts, claiming the event as proof of her calling. Doc corrects her without dismissing the danger: destroying one manifestation does not mean the narrative that produced it has ended. The park has been built to repeat the story, and the recording studio is designed to broadcast it. As long as the story continues to recruit believers, more bodies may be possible.

The founder’s doctrine

The park founder argues that dinosaurs are described in the Bible and that the animals were intended to strike fear into human beings. His explanation turns the creatures into a sermon. They are not evolutionary evidence in his account; they are moral instruments, beasts whose presence should make people better. The comic does not endorse this reading. It shows a man using scriptural language to give his attraction authority and to protect its funding from criticism.

The boardroom conversation makes the business model explicit. Donations, audience retention, and the production of “soldiers for Christ” are discussed in the same breath. The park’s claim to truth is inseparable from its need to survive financially. This is the kind of environment in which a manifestation can grow: a story is repeated by staff, staged for visitors, recorded for television, and defended as a test of loyalty.

The Mokele-Mbembe file

Case File 322 introduces the Mokele-Mbembe, a long-necked creature associated with reports from the Congo basin. The file describes an elephant-sized animal said to live in rivers and swamps, then traces the way European writers and later expedition stories reshaped those reports. Modern creationists funded searches for a living dinosaur because the animal could be used as an argument against evolutionary science.

The file’s historical account is more cautious than the theme park’s doctrine. It does not treat the legend as zoological proof. It explains how a local or regional tradition can be translated, sensationalized, and placed inside a global argument. In the Department’s world, that process matters because belief does not need to be accurate to become physically consequential. A retelling can acquire the force of an original event.

The park breaks open

At the gate, Doc identifies the team as federal officers and says that they answer to a higher power. The statement is both cover and theological provocation. Two unusual visitors are already at the entrance, and the guard’s uncertainty becomes panic. Blood appears, a guard is shot, and a dinosaur attack turns the park’s controlled spectacle into a real emergency.

Doc drives the van through the chaos while Hunky and Hawk try to understand the scale of the outbreak. The scene refuses the clean geometry of an action sequence. Statues, fences, bodies, crosses, and screens overlap, making it difficult to tell which objects are props and which have become active. The park was built to collapse the distance between display and belief; once the creatures appear, that design works too well.

A story made physical

The Department’s explanation of the dinosaurs is deliberately limited. Doc identifies them as pseudo-physical manifestations, but he does not provide a complete formula for their creation or a reliable way to reverse it. Modern dinosaur films and museum imagery have supplied the visual vocabulary, while the park’s theology supplies the emotional charge. The result is not a resurrection of prehistoric life. It is a new organism made from expectation.

The distinction also preserves the series’ three layers of truth. The dinosaur is canon within the comic. The founder’s claim that scripture proves living dinosaurs is an in-universe belief. The real history of dinosaur science, creationism, and Mokele-Mbembe folklore remains outside the fiction, available as context but never converted into evidence that the fictional attack occurred.

Fathers, children, and inheritance

Hunky’s childhood returns whenever the operation becomes personal. His father’s training at Lake Champlain explains why Hunky can shoot, why he distrusts appearances, and why he treats fieldwork as a family obligation. Darla’s competence is established early; she is not a decorative sibling but a hunter whose judgment the family respects. The issue’s later references to her also connect the Florida operation to the larger Department network.

Hawk brings a different inheritance. His father’s stories about Bigfoot and witches are boastful, but they reveal how the Department’s field culture circulates through families. Each generation receives a mixture of expertise, superstition, trauma, and jokes. The series does not offer a clean professional lineage. It offers children who have been taught to survive inside a world where the stories their parents mocked may become real.

The recording studio

The recording studio is the park’s most consequential room because it gives the dinosaur story a route to an audience. Its presence means that the manifestation is not confined to visitors who walk through the gates. The park can turn an encounter into a broadcast, a testimony, or a proof package. Every camera increases the number of people who may see the creature, and every viewer becomes part of the atmosphere in which the creature can persist.

Hunky understands the danger but cannot simply destroy the studio without knowing what else has been recorded. The Department’s mission is therefore contradictory: it must prevent a larger outbreak while using the same tools of evidence and transmission that helped produce the outbreak. The issue leaves the operation unresolved, ending with more creatures possible and the park’s ideology still intact.

Fifteen-minute cities

Case File 322 closes with a separate subject: 15-Minute Cities. The file describes a planning idea associated with Carlos Moreno, a Sorbonne professor, in which everyday needs are reachable within roughly fifteen minutes on foot or by bicycle. Proponents describe walkability, community, reduced car use, and lower fossil-fuel consumption. Paris and Portland appear as examples of cities where related policies have been discussed or implemented.

The file then traces the backlash that grew after COVID-19 lockdowns and mask mandates. Critics claimed that neighborhood planning would become a system of restricted movement, vaccine passports, climate enforcement, or a component of the “Great Reset.” The comic records those claims as conspiracy culture, not as established planning policy. The file’s placement beside the dinosaur story shows how radically different subjects can be pulled into the same machinery of suspicion.

Real-world context

Mokele-Mbembe is a modern cryptozoological legend associated with the Congo basin. Reports have been filtered through colonial travel writing, popular books, expedition publicity, and creationist campaigns. No verified zoological evidence establishes a surviving sauropod in the region. The issue uses the legend to examine how a story can be altered by the people who want it to prove something.

The 15-Minute City concept is an urban-planning framework, not a universal program for confinement. The conspiracy narratives described in the case file developed through social-media posts, political rhetoric, and pandemic-era distrust. They should not be confused with the fictional Department operation or with the comic’s manifestations.

Dinosaur creationism and literal readings of biblical passages have a documented place in modern religious culture, including museums and attractions that present dinosaurs alongside Genesis. The Florida park, its founder, Charity, the Department agents, and the attacks are inventions of the series.

Art and publication

Ben Templesmith draws the park as a collision between tourist spectacle and military incident. Dinosaur bodies are heavy enough to tear through fences but unstable enough to dissolve into marks, smoke, and screen glare. The contrast between the children’s lake house and the Florida attraction gives the issue a visual history: Hunky’s private lessons grow into a public catastrophe.

The Mokele-Mbembe and 15-Minute Cities files use photographs, diagrams, passports, maps, and typed captions to imitate an evidence packet. David Romero’s case-file art and Dylan Todd’s design make the pages look archival without asking the reader to mistake the presentation for proof. Martin Simmonds, Ben Templesmith, and Vanesa R. Del Rey are credited with the listed covers.

The indicia identifies the issue as a May 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.

Continuity and unresolved questions

Issue #37 expands Hunky’s family history, establishes Darla as a capable hunter, and places Hawk and Doc alongside Hunky in a field operation. It also confirms that the Department treats religious attractions, broadcast infrastructure, and cryptid lore as parts of a single reality-management problem. The story does not explain how many dinosaurs escaped or whether every manifestation was destroyed.

The founder’s theology remains his own claim, and Charity’s language may reflect both sincere belief and years of institutional conditioning. The issue does not establish whether she understands the Department’s explanation of the creatures or whether she interprets the agents as guardian angels. The relationship between her faith and the manifestations is intentionally unsettled.

The 15-Minute Cities file does not connect the urban-planning controversy to the Florida dinosaurs. Its purpose is comparative: it shows another case in which a practical proposal becomes a container for fears about control, identity, and hidden power. In the Department’s archive, the distance between those subjects is exactly what makes their shared emotional force worth studying.