If you’re any sort of normal person, you’re probably one of the zillions who stayed the hell away from last summer’s X-Files movie, I Want to Believe. It featured a very angry Xzibit in a prominent role, and hinged on the magical psychic connection created when a Scottish comedian priest shares a very, um, special relationship with a little immigrant boy who grows up to become a black market organ harvester. So, yeah, it’s garbage. Which is to say, even if you did see it, its overwhelming rubbishness probably didn’t incline you to pick up the comic book spin-off series that was released to coincide with the film. Likewise, publisher Wildstorm is probably wondering why they ever secured the X-Files comic book licence, though the seventh issue of the series dutifully came out last week.
I picked up the first issue (actually #0) a couple days before seeing I Want to Believe, when the world was still beautiful and birds still sang and children still smiled and the only X-Files movie anyone had seen, Fight the Future, was actually pretty fricking sweet. So when I saw the name Frank Spotnitz, one of the main architects of the show’s engaging and nonsensical “mythology,” on the cover of this comic, I figured it was worth a shot. If I had only known the quality of work Spotnitz was doing on the new movie, I’d have avoided the comics as though they smelled like so much Flukeman.
Not that this series has much—or anything—to do with the movie, other than a shared sense of opportunity squandered. The comic even seems to thumb its nose at diehard ‘philes—surely the only audience for these pamphlets—by ignoring the franchise’s continuity entirely. Of course, considering that the last time we saw Mulder and Scully in the new movie they were paddling out to sea in a rowboat waving us goodbye (not a word of a lie), the urge to jettison some recent narrative developments is understandable. But some kind of connection to the series’ driving force and sense of purpose would have been welcome. Instead, Spotnitz and the writers who follow him borrow only the loose concept and the barest of character sketches from the original, and try and fill out these husks with the skinniest of stories.
Spotnitz scripts a couple numbers about an urge to murder that seems to jump between different people like a virus, and an urge to suicide that seems to jump between different people like a virus. After the fourth issue, longtime comics scribes Marv Tomb of Dracula Wolfman and Doug Master of Kung Fu Moench arrive to relieve Spotnitz of his duties. As seasoned vets—unassuming contributors to a 1970s nerd zeitgeist (horror, comics, martial arts) analogous to the kind that the X-Files would foster in the ’90s (sci fi, conspiracies, fanfic)—the comics authors provide the kind of professionalism, pacing, and storytelling know-how that is lacking in the TV writer’s first few try-out issues. Not that Wolfman and Moench’s stories, one about Chinese mysticism and the other about cave-dwelling cannibals, are especially good—they’re not. Still, they’re nowhere near as hamhanded and unintentionally funny as Spotnitz’s moments of meaningfully silent glamour-shots and sub-ironic dialogue (“Yeah, well, it’s not every day a missing woman turns up after 17 years… not having aged a day.” Dun dun dunnn!)
If the stories are by-the-numbers at best, then Brian Denham’s art is strictly paint-by-numbers, a starchy realism so slavish and careful that it quickly becomes artificial and glaringly prefabricated. I don’t remember much about the Topps X-Files comics that ran alongside the TV show in the ’90s, but I do remember that series artist Charles Adlard had a cartoony enough style that his Mulder and Scully were something like actors, pliable and adaptable in their roles. Denham’s characters, in contrast, look like clip-art, photos snipped from fan mags and pasted into the panel borders, meant to induce geek-gasms due to their uncanny likeness to their real-life counterparts, but more likely just to stun us with their big dead eyes and frozen plastic features. Moench in particular does encourage Denham to loosen up and try some collage or wildly different styles for flashback sequences, but we’re so soon returned to the land of stale and unconvincing photorealism that our brief detour may as well go unregistered.
So do these comics do anything right? Sure: Spotnitz, for instance, orchestrates a few gruesome, face-melting revelations that are very much worthy of the TV show. Wolfman allows some of Mulder’s dry wit to come across—a difficult task, considering Ducohvny‘s not actually on the page smirking his oneliners into our livingrooms. Moench’s collision of Native spiritworld folklore and Hollow Earth conspiracy showcases the typical X-Files style of jumping to conclusions at its most winning and kooky. Even Denham’s adherence to strict realism means that he refuses to skimp on the backgrounds, allowing him to ground us in specific cityscapes and concrete locales. Too, there’s none of the hokey-jokiness that marred later seasons of the series, and nowhere in sight is the will-they-won’t-they Mulder and Scully yawnfest which the series creators seem to have thought we always wanted more of, but which never resembled anything so much as watching mum and dad sneaking a smooch, yuck. But with only one issue left to go in this thing, I doubt these few bright moments in a dull series will coalesce into anything especially brilliant—maybe they could print it using the black oil? have it be a facsimile of a Lone Gunman issue? implant a sinister microchip in every copy? Barring that, though, I’d have to agree with Scully, that chronic sceptic: there’s no x-file here, Mulder.
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