Season 10: Five years after we saw the last of The X-Files
And so, after a “Monster-of-the-week” second movie, the mythology of The X-Files continues once more after eleven years of absence — more than the length of the series itself! With creative input for the framing of the story and perhaps little more from Chris Carter, who comes out from XF retirement for the occasion, long-time XF fan Joe Harris is the writer. This is a new situation, where the creator teams with a fan to conceive the next steps in the story begun in 1993, in what is described as a fully canon continuation of the story.
The X-Files are not new to comics. XF comics started appearing as early as 1995, with the first issues (writer Stefan Petrucha / artist Charles Adlard / covers Miran Kim) proving to be the best of them. The relationship of the comic creators with the all-controlling Ten Thirteen Productions was not an easy one though, perhaps because Carter was not a comics man himself (as per Frank Spotnitz), and the comics stopped in 1998. There was a revival led by Frank Spotnitz around the hype of I Want To Believe in 2008, which was the closest thing XF got to a reboot separate from its main continuity; and a year later a cross-over (with horror series 30 Days of Night), which is another route franchises take when the main story has been told and characters have become part of popular culture. “The X-Files Season 10” is wholly new in the storytelling direction the comics take, and in the interest the creator (Carter) shows to them.
Important to note too that issues #1-5 “10X01: Believers” was already drafted by Harris when Carter joined the team for course-correction and advice.
Not being a supporter of the marketing-friendly idea that ‘the writers could continue the stories of these characters forever’, my interest in a continuation of XF has remained because Carter keeps repeating there is one final chapter in the mythology he wants to tell. This interest has been scaled down by the irrevocable damage to the XF mythology that seasons 8 and 9 did and by a second movie that, though decent was far from perfect. I’ll follow Season 10 with a hope that it will add something to the mythology in continuity with what has come before and with a clear mindset of moving towards a conclusion of the story somewhere down the line.
At this stage of Mulder & Scully’s characters and personal journey it’s difficult to imagine them investigating monster-of-the-week type cases and the most magical step would be to re-attempt what was done in seasons 8 & 9, i.e. introduce new characters perhaps coached by Mulder & Scully to take over these investigations. The IDW team and Joe Harris have treated the fans with a lot of respect up to now and teased all the upcoming issues in all the right ways invoking our feelings of nostalgia; it will be interesting to see whether this fan service will extend towards storytelling decisions that do disservice to the general picture (the promise of the return a certain deceased character in particular is already iffy). We will come to that in time.
The issue: A new art form
The season kicks off with a story split in five issues. It will be best to analyse the story when we will have the full story, but the discussions while the story is still developing brings us back to the time when the show was still on the air — which is exactly the point! A full review of the Believers arc will come with issue #5.
One comics issue at 22 pages is very short, however the writing is tight (whole comments on what happened before Season 10 and on what the characters are feeling right now could be made around individual panels, enhanced by Walsh’s art!) and launches us right in the thick of the action. If this were an episode, it would roughly correspond to a teaser + the first act out of four, so roughly 15 minutes which is roughly the time it take to read it. If this were an episode, the wait for the next one would last one week and not one month. These frustrating elements are inherent of the periodic comics world: it’s a different medium and we have to accept that patiently while the artists do their work. Another solution would have been to do a graphic novel (a series of them?) with more pages, more time to refine the artwork and more time between issues; but that is actually a much more rare form in comic books, in particular for licensed comic books from previously existing franchises. This is, after all, a profit-oriented enterprise. For patient X-philes/readers, you can discover the story in bulk when it gets collected, for example bundling every six issues (as with The Walking Dead, or with Joe Harris’ original series Great Pacific).
On an entirely different style, mixed media, I would have loved to see Dave McKean do the X-Files. However, even if Michael Walsh’s art can still bear some improvement (certain perspectives, some details…), I find the overall esthetic with thick black lines and marked contrasts very well adapted to the X-Files — this is reminding me of the Adlard approach in early Topps comics. This “classic comics” approach sticks much better to the XF universe than a great share of modern comics that are post-processed a lot in terms of colouring/lighting on computer, or the semi-photorealistic approach of the 2008 Wildstorm comics. This “old-style” also fits well with the classic cinematic approach the X-Files had, breathing cinema into television in the 1990s. Walsh has acknowledged that he’s studying framing and camera shots from the show to inform his art, which is good.
The story: A new threat
Spoilers below! (more…)