The follow-up to the first volume of The X-Files Official Archives in 2020 has now been postponed many, many times since its original announcement for December 2023.
Now in an interview with The Wrap, author Paul Terry teases the next volume, for March 7, 2027. On the publisher’s site, Abrams Books, now says March 9, 2027. Let’s hope it will happen this time!
“The X-Files: The Official Archives: Volume II: Extraterrestrial Activity and the Syndicate” will cover the show’s mythology — so you can be sure I’m very excited to hold this in my hands! At 360 pages, it’s also 60 pages longer than Volume 1, it’s going to be big!
Note the date on the cover page next to Terry’s name: 7/3/2023, which is probably when he finished making it, already over three years ago (Volume 1 had 3/21/20, and it was published in September 2020).
The interview includes the first look of the interior: looks like the last page on 5X20: The End (the burnt X-Files office) and the first page on Fight the Future (Blackwood county, Texas).
As with Volume 1, there will be a meta-narrative woven into the files. I am guessing it will be again about Agent Leyla Harrison putting together this collection of files, or it could be something else. Terry says: “Mulder and Scully’s investigations into extraterrestrial activity and the Syndicate was often very dangerous. With volume two, I felt it was important to capture the spirit of that. And so, as the reader studies the case files, they will gradually pick up on something else that is going on. Something perilous. It heightens the classified nature of what Agents Mulder and Scully, and others, investigated, in search of the truth.”
It will cover everything from the beginning all the way to the revival, so I’m curious how and if the book will deal with the jump from the original mythology to the revival’s reworked mythology that swept several things under the rug (or contradicted what came before, take your pick).
Of course, rather than any new information on The Truth of it all, the joy of this book will be more the physical object itself, and the replicas of props and images unearthed by Terry at the Fox archives!
Why the accumulated delays? We don’t know. But we can theorize it had something to do with Disney’s takeover of Fox and the subsequent streamlining of their merchandising. Maybe they were keeping such a release handy to go together with the release of the Coogler/Yale project on Hulu/Disney+, in which case this new release date gives us a hint as to when that is coming out.
