The Department of Truth began as an Image Comics ongoing series by writer James Tynion IV and artist Martin Simmonds. Its publication history follows the same movement as its story: a recognizable sequence of monthly comics gradually opens into a larger archive of altered histories, secret institutions, manifestations, and competing accounts of the past. The numbered issues provide the spine of the work, while specials and collected editions reorganize that material for different kinds of reading.
Image Comics’ series record identifies the run as ongoing and lists issue #38, dated July 15, 2026, as the latest released numbered chapter, with issue #39 listed for October 28, 2026. The publisher also records a special issue #0, the Wild Fictions hardcover, seven trade paperbacks, and two Complete Conspiracy deluxe hardcovers. These publication facts belong to the real history of the comic. The conspiracies and institutions described inside the stories belong to the fictional continuity.
Image Comics lists the series, its creators, numbered issues, specials, and collected editions.
The order in which stories were released is the most reliable public structure for following revelations, even when individual issues move through historical flashbacks.
Image Comics, James Tynion IV, Martin Simmonds, release dates, formats, and collection announcements are part of the documented publication history rather than the comic’s fictional world.
An ongoing Image Comics series
Image Comics presents The Department of Truth as James Tynion IV’s first ongoing Image series alongside Martin Simmonds. That description places the book in a recognizable publishing tradition while the series itself questions how recognizable traditions are made. The early chapters use the format of a conspiracy thriller: an investigator enters a hidden organization, receives a dangerous explanation, and discovers that the explanation changes the meaning of familiar history.
The monthly structure gives those discoveries a measured rhythm. Cole Turner can receive one piece of the Department’s history, then spend a later issue confronting the consequences of that piece in a case involving a witness, a manifestation, or an older archive. The gaps between releases become part of the experience because readers carry unanswered questions from one issue into the next. The book’s suspense depends as much on the timing of disclosure as on the content of any individual revelation.
Simmonds’ visual language contributes to that publication identity. Documents, photographs, television images, diagrams, and distorted memories can occupy the same page without settling into one stable level of reality. The series’ production history is therefore not separate from its subject. Each issue is a physical object that asks how an image earns authority, how a caption directs memory, and how a sequence can make an impossible account feel archival.
The numbered sequence
The numbered run begins with The Department of Truth #1, which introduces Cole, Lee Harvey Oswald, the Department, Black Hat, and the premise that collective belief can move reality. The sequence then expands through cases involving the Satanic Panic, the Star-Faced Man, the Woman with No Eyes, UFO folklore, preschool testimony, cryptids, and the Department’s own earlier operations. The issue numbers provide the cleanest path through those revelations because flashbacks are positioned to answer questions raised by the present-day investigation.
Image Comics’ current archive lists issues #29 through #38 as released between March 2025 and July 2026, with #39 scheduled for October 2026. The run also includes issue #0, dated October 1, 2025. Because #0 was published after the original opening sequence, its position in publication history differs from its position in any chronological reconstruction of the fictional events it depicts.
A release list is not the same thing as a story chronology. The series moves between Dallas in 1963, medieval Europe, the Cold War, the Satanic Panic, and Cole’s present. A reader following the numbered order encounters those historical passages at the moments chosen by the creators. Rearranging them into a single calendar can clarify one strand while erasing the suspense produced by delayed context.
The special issue #0
The Department of Truth #0 is a later special issue in the publication record. Image Comics lists it with an October 1, 2025 release date and identifies a backup story involving a secret history of Elvis, written and drawn by guest creators Scott Snyder and Josh Hixson. The special expands the series’ publication field without replacing the opening issue as the natural beginning of the main numbered narrative.
A special can sit at the edge of continuity while still revealing the book’s methods. The Department of Truth has always treated public icons, cultural memory, and manufactured evidence as material that can be reorganized by belief. A backup story about Elvis belongs to that same imaginative territory, but its guest-creator status and special format distinguish it from the central monthly sequence.
The release date also matters because it prevents a common confusion. The number zero suggests an opening chapter, yet publication chronology places the special after decades of the numbered run. Reading it first is a valid experiment for a returning reader who wants a thematic preface. For a first reading, the original #1 remains the point at which Cole’s investigation and the Department’s doctrine are introduced.
Collected editions and the shape of the archive
The trade paperbacks gather the numbered series into volumes that make the book’s architecture visible in larger movements. Image Comics lists volumes 5 and 6, with volume 7 scheduled for August 26, 2026. Earlier volumes establish the progression from Cole’s recruitment to the Department’s historical operations and then into the widening conflict with Black Hat. The trade format allows a reader to move through those transitions without the pauses of monthly publication.
The Wild Fictions hardcover is a different kind of collection. Image Comics lists it with a September 25, 2024 release date, and the title signals its emphasis on manifestations, cultural forms, and historical cases rather than a simple block of numbered chapters. The collection’s place in the publication record matters because “Wild Fiction” is both a Department classification and a way of organizing material around creatures, legends, and thought-forms.
The Complete Conspiracy deluxe hardcovers gather the series at a larger physical scale. Image Comics lists Book 1 with a May 3, 2023 date and Book 2 with a June 17, 2026 date. Deluxe editions change the experience of the art: page texture, reproduction size, and the accumulation of documents and visual fragments can make the series feel closer to an evidence archive than to a disposable monthly pamphlet. That material effect is part of the book’s identity without becoming evidence about the fictional Department.
Creators and the division of authorship
Tynion’s writing gives the series its layered structure of investigation, institutional history, and belief mechanics. A chapter can move from a conversation about a conspiracy theory to a historical flashback and then to a physical manifestation without treating those movements as equivalent. The writing establishes what a character sees, what a faction claims, and what the larger story leaves unresolved.
Simmonds’ art makes those distinctions unstable in productive ways. An image can appear as a photograph, a memory, a television frame, or a hallucination while retaining enough visual continuity to make the reader ask whether the form has crossed between layers. The artist’s use of color, texture, distortion, and documentary composition is not decorative atmosphere. It is part of the argument about how evidence acquires force.
The series also records collaborators through special material, letters, guest stories, covers, and collection design. Those contributions belong to publication history and should remain distinguishable from the work of the main creative team. A variant cover can echo a character or a manifestation without adding an event to the fictional timeline.
Publication order and story order
Publication order is the safest foundation for a first reading. Start with #1 and continue through the numbered sequence, placing #0 after the issues that preceded its release. This order preserves the creators’ decisions about when Cole learns about Oswald’s survival, when the Department’s earlier experiments are disclosed, and when Black Hat’s criticism begins to reshape the meaning of the organization’s mission.
Story chronology is more complicated. The series includes the 1963 Dallas operation, the 1967 West Virginia experiment, medieval history, Cold War flashbacks, the Satanic Panic, and present-day investigations. Some events are presented as records whose reliability is itself disputed. A calendar that places every scene in one line can imply certainty where the story provides only an institutional claim.
Collected-edition order follows the release and editorial organization of the volumes rather than a reconstructed chronology. It is useful for readers who want a continuous run or who are moving between trade paperbacks and deluxe hardcovers. Special material can be read alongside the collection in which it appears, but its publication status should remain visible so that a supplement is not mistaken for an issue in the original sequence.
The expanding record through issue #38
By the release of issue #38, the series has moved beyond the initial question of whether conspiracy theories can become true. The publication record now contains a long investigation into the Department’s origins, Black Hat’s strategy, the relation between cultural symbols and manifestations, and the cost of preserving a shared reality through secrecy. The accumulation changes the meaning of early scenes. Oswald’s first explanation to Cole is no longer an isolated lesson; it is the opening statement of an institution whose history continues to contradict its own doctrine.
The later numbered issues are part of the public release record, while the exact plot treatment of each issue depends on direct review of the primary pages. Release metadata can establish that an issue exists, when Image Comics lists it, and how it belongs in sequence. It cannot by itself establish a character’s motive, a manifestation’s identity, or a revelation’s place in the fictional chronology.
That distinction protects the integrity of the publication history. A comic is both a physical release and a story. The release date, publisher, format, and creators can be documented from the publisher’s record. The events inside the issue must be described from the issue itself, with uncertainty preserved where the art and writing deliberately refuse a final answer.
Adaptation and the life beyond the page
The series’ publication history also includes the possibility of adaptation, but a development announcement is not an episode and a reported attachment is not a released production. The fictional story remains anchored in the comics by Tynion and Simmonds. Any adaptation record belongs to a separate real-world history that tracks rights, producers, writers, directors, cast, platform, and status through primary or reputable industry announcements.
This separation matters for The Department of Truth because the series already treats media as a reality-making technology. A television adaptation would become another representation of the Department’s world, not a new chapter of the comic’s canon unless the rights holders explicitly define it that way. The publication record can note the adaptation’s existence without importing its reported plans into Cole’s biography.
The same principle applies to interviews, solicitations, cover reveals, and promotional artwork. They can explain how the book was marketed or produced, but they do not automatically establish a fictional event. The archive grows strongest when each kind of evidence retains its own identity.
Current publication status
Image Comics lists The Department of Truth as ongoing. The publisher’s current series page records #38 as released on July 15, 2026 and #39 as forthcoming on October 28, 2026, alongside the collected editions and specials described above. Solicited dates can change, so a forthcoming entry remains a publication promise until the publisher records it as released.
The continuing status preserves the central tension of the series. A finished chronology would be easier to summarize, but the book’s subject is the instability of accepted accounts. New issues can revise the history of the Department, change the context of a character’s memory, or reveal that a previous explanation belonged to a faction rather than to the story’s final truth.
The publication history therefore remains open in two senses. More comics may be released, and the meaning of earlier comics may continue to change as those releases arrive. The numbered sequence, the collected editions, and the publisher’s record provide the stable exterior of that process. Inside it, the Department’s archive remains contested.
References
- Image Comics series pagePublisher record for creators, issue dates, specials, and collected editions.
- The Department of Truth #1–#38Primary comic sequence; story chronology remains distinct from release chronology.