The Department of Truth #38

Training in Delaware

The flashback opens in Delaware in 1993 with Hunky running an obstacle course. His father, Huck, tells him to lift his feet. Darla moves through the course more easily, and Hunky’s frustration is sharpened by the fact that she is younger and more precise. The exercise is not presented as ordinary childhood play. Their father is preparing both children for work that will require endurance, attention, and the ability to keep moving when the story around them becomes impossible.

Hunky coughs during the training. The sound is small but persistent, and it changes the meaning of his later toughness. He is not an invulnerable action hero; he is a sick child who has been taught to treat weakness as a problem to solve. Darla can spell “Sasquatch,” a joke that doubles as evidence of the family’s vocabulary. They learned the names of the threats before they learned how to live outside them.

Back to the park

In 1996, the Department team returns to the Florida park. Doc quotes the Bible about being strong and courageous and says that Charity is all right. Hunky remains focused on the practical question: how many Wild Fictions are loose? His phrasing places the dinosaurs within a broader category of manifestations, but it does not make every creature identical. The park may contain multiple stories, each with its own body and audience.

Charity refuses evacuation because she will not leave her father. She says the church leaders asked her to lie and say there were no real dinosaurs. To Charity, that demand was not a correction but one interpretation of truth. The statement shows how quickly institutional authority can split a shared reality. The same people who built the park now want the evidence hidden, while Charity believes the creatures prove that her faith was right.

The church trail

Charity leads Hunky, Doc, and the other agent through the park’s trails and recording buildings. She insists that the park contains no secular movies, yet she believes the Department agents were sent as guardian angels. Her words are not a stable theology; they are an attempt to fit a federal operation into the story she already knows. The cross, the dinosaur, and the camera become interchangeable signs.

The team passes bodies and blood. Charity recognizes one dead man as someone who must have given his life to slay a beast. She calls him good but flawed, then prays over him. Her attention to the “awful men” around the park hints that she has noticed the difference between the founders’ public language and their private conduct. Faith does not make her blind. It gives her a framework in which every contradiction must be interpreted.

The Department’s old mistake

Hunky and Doc acknowledge that they do not need to kill every creature. A human cost remains, and the park’s violence is partly a problem of the Department’s own design. Hunky says they have been dealing with the consequences of something made a few decades earlier. Doc adds that they were proud of what they created and then tried to unmake it.

The exchange is one of the issue’s most important pieces of institutional history, but it remains deliberately incomplete. It does not identify a single experiment, monster, or leader as the origin of every Wild Fiction. It establishes instead that the Department has participated in the production of the problems it now claims to manage. Containment is therefore also an act of self-concealment.

The thing above the containers

A large dark manifestation hangs above rows of alien heads or containers. It has wings, a heavy silhouette, and the visual suggestion of an extraterrestrial threat, but the issue does not give it a name. Captions state that the Department made the problem worse, that many lives were lost, and that the repercussions continue. The page functions as a memory of institutional violence rather than a solved origin story.

The image also echoes the issue’s broadcast technology. The bodies below resemble stored evidence, while the figure above resembles an image that has outgrown the screen. Whether the scene is a flashback, a symbolic montage, or a literal facility is not established. Its canon fact is narrower and more disturbing: the Department’s history includes failures that still shape current operations.

The recording studio attack

Hunky and Doc enter the sound studio while red and green lettering turns the creature’s roar into a physical force. A blast or manifestation tears through the room. The studio’s equipment makes the attack feel like an assault on transmission itself: microphones, speakers, monitors, and bodies occupy the same space. Hunky raises his rifle and says that a soldier for Christ needs his sword, borrowing Charity’s language before firing.

The issue does not provide a clean count of the dead or identify every person on the crew. The safe account is that the studio is attacked, people are endangered or killed, and the Department struggles to prevent the broadcast from multiplying the event. The sound motif matters because the park’s power has always depended on turning belief into a repeatable signal.

Charity finds her father

In an empty chapel, a heavy man emerges through the screen of an old television. Hunky asks whether anyone from the crew is alive and the man asks if Hunky is police. When Charity arrives, he recognizes her. She embraces him, and he first claims that God protected them. The scene briefly resembles a reunion before he mocks God and calls Charity stupid.

The founder’s contempt reveals the commercial core of the park. He says that “God” is a word used to fill seats, raise donations, and avoid taxes. The phrase is a confession of fraud, but it does not erase the manifestations. His cynicism helped create the environment in which the stories became physical; his disbelief is too late to restore control.

A family quarrel with a monster behind it

Charity says she does not understand her father. Hunky calls the confrontation a family matter, an unusually ordinary phrase in a room where a dinosaur and a cross occupy the same frame. The founder tells Charity that she and the alumni let the creatures loose and that she has no idea what she is dealing with. Charity answers with a gun.

A large winged or serpentine form rises behind her, aligned with the cross and the television screens. The page does not settle whether the entity is a guardian, a devil, a dinosaur-related composite, or an image assembled from several beliefs. Charity’s action is clear: she chooses to fight the man who taught her the story, even while claiming that God remains on her side.

The founder’s death

A dinosaur attacks the founder in the room. Charity says that she will honor her father and fires repeatedly, her body becoming a silhouette amid muzzle flashes, televisions, and the beast’s moving jaws. The violence is both rescue and execution. She is defending the people around her, but she is also ending the life of the person who made the park and shaped her beliefs.

The broadcast turns the private confrontation into public evidence. Monitors show fragments of the attack, and the dinosaur appears to move between the room and the screens. The Department’s control of the image is still incomplete. It can choose what to transmit, but it cannot guarantee that viewers will interpret the transmission in the intended way.

The Second Coming of Terror

Hunky later stands with an older American-flag-hatted agent in a television room. They estimate that the signal reached approximately 2.8 million homes. A title card calls the operation “The Second Coming of Terror.” The phrase turns a containment maneuver into a program, a spectacle that can be scheduled and repeated. The older agent says that the broadcast is teamwork, while Hunky recognizes that the idea has been taken out of his hands.

The Department’s strategy is to confuse viewers. If the public receives several incompatible versions of the event, no single account can harden into a dominant reality. Hawk has piggybacked on Hunky’s plan and suggests turning the material into a late-night movie. The tactic may muddy the waters, but it also treats fear as a resource. The agents are not merely hiding a monster; they are managing the emotional conditions in which the monster can be believed.

Charity’s protected belief

Charity survives and says that she was never in danger because God was watching over her. Doc tells Hunky to turn off the cameras so the congregation will not see “this part.” The instruction confirms that the Department is editing the event in real time, preserving a usable story while removing evidence that could destabilize it. When Doc asks whether the newfangled equipment can be operated remotely, Hunky believes it is already off, or at least says that he thinks so.

Charity’s belief becomes the raw material for the Department’s narrative. Her conviction is genuine, but it is also useful: the agents can present her as a survivor, a chosen child, or a witness whose account supports the park’s theology. The issue does not say whether Charity knows she is being used. Her faith protects her psychologically while making her a powerful transmitter.

The Library of Congress debrief

At the Library of Congress, Department personnel discuss the operation. Darla and the field team are sweeping the Everglades to make sure that no other lizards slipped out. The detail confirms that the danger is not over when the cameras stop. Physical containment and narrative containment have to continue together.

The agents praise the broadcast because it confused viewers and muddied the waters. Hunky wants to write a full report and tell the truth about Charity, but the older agent warns that the airwaves are not what they used to be. Hunky says he will type the report and asks to visit the hospital. The exchange connects the public operation to the private cost waiting in Huck’s room.

Huck’s death

The final pages state that Huck passed away the previous night. Hunky sits in a room of blank televisions, and a voice tells him that Huck would be proud. The issue does not identify the speaker with certainty. The voice may be a colleague, a memory, a transmission, or another presence in the Department’s television system. What is certain is that Hunky is left alone with the screens his father helped make necessary.

Huck’s death completes the movement begun in Issue #36. The veteran who served as a field guinea pig is gone, while his children remain inside the institution. Darla is still operating in the Everglades; Hunky is writing reports and managing broadcasts. The family survives through work, but the work has consumed the family’s older generation.

Hollow Earth Theory

Case File 074.C traces Hollow Earth Theory from the eighteenth century into modern conspiracy culture. Edmund Halley proposed a hollow or layered Earth as a speculative explanation for magnetic variation. John Symmes later argued for concentric shells and openings at the poles, campaigning for an expedition he never made. The file treats both men as historical thinkers whose ideas were not supported by modern geology.

The report also discusses William Fairfield Warren’s Paradise Found, nineteenth-century arguments about hidden lands and human migrations, and the pulp-fiction tradition that turned inner worlds into adventure settings. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Hollow Earth stories have been combined with Bigfoot, UFOs, secret bases, and polar mysteries. The comic records this mixture as a cultural genealogy, not as evidence of a subterranean civilization.

Real-world context

Hollow Earth ideas have appeared in scientific speculation, religious writing, fiction, and conspiracy culture. Halley’s proposal belonged to an early period when the Earth’s interior was poorly understood. Symmes’s concentric-shell model was rejected, and no polar openings or inhabited inner continents have been verified.

William Fairfield Warren’s Paradise Found argued for a northern origin of humanity and connected biblical and mythic traditions to a lost homeland. Later pulp novels and films borrowed the imagery without turning it into geological evidence. Modern claims that link Hollow Earth to UFOs, Nazi bases, or cryptids belong to a changing folklore of hidden worlds.

The Florida park, its founder, Charity, Hunky’s broadcast, the Department’s old mistakes, and Huck’s death are fictional events in The Department of Truth. The case file’s historical material helps explain the imagery but does not authenticate the story.

Art and publication

Ben Templesmith gives the issue a broadcast texture. The Florida rooms are saturated with blood-red lettering, green monitor light, and black shapes that refuse to stay inside their panels. Charity’s gunfire becomes a punctuation system, while the founder’s body appears to pass through a television as though the screen were a door.

The Delaware flashback is more open and physical. The obstacle course gives Hunky and Darla room to move, but the recurring cough and Huck’s instructions make the landscape feel like a training ground for grief. The Hollow Earth file shifts again into diagrams, maps, and speculative documents, placing a paper history beside a family’s irreversible event.

The indicia identifies the issue as a July 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, and V. Gagnon are credited for the listed covers.

Continuity and unresolved questions

Issue #38 confirms that Hunky and Darla were trained by Huck before joining the Department’s later operations. It confirms that the Florida dinosaurs are part of a wider category of Wild Fictions and that the Department has previously helped create or worsen manifestations. It also records a deliberate broadcast to millions of homes, followed by selective suppression of the most destabilizing footage.

The issue does not establish the identity of the winged or serpentine entity above the containers, the full history of the Department’s old failure, or the exact number of people killed at the park. It does not prove that Charity’s father literally became part of the television. The images are canon, but their mechanism remains uncertain.

Huck’s death leaves Hunky with a report, a television room, and a voice that may or may not be external. The story does not say whether Hunky will expose Charity, protect her, or use the broadcast to strengthen the Department’s position. The next stage of the series inherits the consequences of a successful operation: the public has been confused, the monsters are not all accounted for, and the people who made the lie possible are grieving inside it.