The mysteries begin to pile up.
Creative Staff:
Story: Joe Harris
Art: Carlos Valenzuela
What They Say:
Dana Scully has survived abduction, cancer, motherhood by mysterious means, and surrendering her “miracle” baby. But she’s never encountered anything like these “Acolytes” before, or the mysterious “Deacon” who’s saved her from them. Plus, Mulder follows a lead to Arlington National Cemetery and the final resting place of the “Lone Gunmen.”
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
While returning to the world of X-Files wasn’t as complicated as I thought it might be on some level, I’m still in that kind of weird disconnect with it since it has been ages since I last interacted with these characters. The book did get us off to a rocky start since it just jumped right in without a brief refresher, which even longtime fans could appreciated, but as it got going and peeled back its outermost layers, it was relatively easy to reconnect with it and move forward. One of the natural advantages to a series like this is that like the novels, the budget doesn’t matter and they can do a lot more, go to more places and just be a lot more creative in general. The creepy factor was certainly upped the last time around and this installment works it from a different angle as it has to play to the slow but building tension of what’s going on across a couple of different fronts.
The second issue works on this expansion by bringing in FBI Agent John Doggett, who is investigating things in Wyoming with the Blackstone XL pipeline where there were calls in for mysterious things going on from an anonymous source. His piece doesn’t get too far here, but seeing him back on the job and discovering that things are not right inside the pipeline itself as it’s transporting something other than oil sets off all his alarms for obvious reasons. But he also gets snookered along the way as at least some of the crew are in on it, and having a potential layered approach of what the moneyed interests are really up to with this pipeline opens all sorts of possibilities. But it was just fun to see Doggett again as it brought back all kinds of memories, so giving this character another lease on life is welcome.
The main focus here though is with Mulder as he’s trying to find out what happened to Scully since things went down badly before. His investigation with Skinner again has him feeling like he’s being fed only so much information, though he’s more than willing to come up with theories on his own. What’s intriguing though is that we get some new information about what happened to Scully’s baby with where it ended up and that there may be a real connection with the mother/daughter that came to Scully’s office, which we already saw involved in her disappearance. This fills in a few blanks of what happened after the baby was born and really does redouble Mulder’s efforts to figure all of this out. The pain coming off of Skinner with it is palpable though since he knows he’s responsible in many ways for a lot of this.
Scully’s not ignored in this issue, thankfully, as her being awoken in a mysterious and seemingly isolated place in the middle of the woods nowhere in a cabin is just the start of the weirdness. With the cabin being done up within large symbols on the ground, there’s a bigger game going on here that she doesn’t get time to figure out as she’s being attacked by those that kidnapped her, which makes little sense. But with the idea of sacrificing her for whatever goal it is they have, since hey speak in an alien tongue, she’s not able to progress there much. But it is amusing to see that when she does get a form of help from a stranger that walks into the area, her first accusation is that he’s an alien-human hybrid. Considering her role as the skeptic so long ago, she continues to have come a long way…
In Summary:
This installment has a lot of things going on as it’s establishing more of the different pieces and there’s definitely some interesting things to it, once you adjust to being back into the property and its mindset. Sometimes it feels like it’s forcing things in a little too hard, such as the Lone Gunmen and their new post-death super secret lair that Mulder has gained access to, but I liked seeing Doggett back and where his part of the arc could take him. The humor from Mulder is toned down a lot from the first issue, to the benefit of the book, and the seriousness has gone up a couple of notches to compensate. While I’m not thrilled that they have to deal with the baby storyline and all it represents, I’m definitely enjoying in a basic kind of way seeing these characters back in action again after all this time.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: IDW Publishing via ComiXology
Release Date: July 17th, 2013
MSRP: $1.99
