IDW has gathered Stefan Petrucha and Charlie Adlard's amazing X-Files series of comics into one collection, available in hardback and e-book. I can't recommend it enough. Soon enough I'll be looking at the new series from Chris Carter, but for my memory this series from Petrucha was hands-down the finest adapted comic ever. In it, Petrucha went beyond what was expected and gave us soul-searching, heart-wrenching stories of hidden cities and forgotten secrets.
So I thought I'd do something special-- in the spirit of the manuscripts that the intrepid Agents Mulder and Scully are always finding, I thought I'd re-run a series of in-depth looks at each issue that I did when the issues were new. Of the 9 issues reprinted, I have found them all, with the exception of my review of Issue 7 which appears to have been half lost.
Enjoy!
X-Files Classic
Issue 1: "Not To Be Opened Until X-Mas"
Publication Date: January 1995
Overview
After
a covert group steals the "Fatima Prophecy" from the Vatican, Mulder
wants to read it, but he and Scully quickly discover that there are a lot of
people willing to kill -and get killed- for the chance.
Locations
·
New York
· Washington, DC
Creative Team:
Writer: Stefan Petrucha
Artist: Charles Adlard
Colorists: George Freeman, Laurie Smith
Letterer:John Workman
Cover:Miran Kim
Synopsis
Wednesday,
1:10 a.m. At Our Lady of Fatima, Brooklyn , New York, a young man comes for his
last confession. The priest recognizes the man, who is bleeding from a gunshot
wound and appears so wounded that the priest says "My son, I can hear your
heart beating." The man says the priest must reveal his secret, and the
priest agrees, before the man throws himself through the stained-glass window
to the street below, saying "Tell them I have committed... the Final
Sin!"
At FBI headquarters, Fox Mulder gives Dana Scully one of his slide shows. He
tells the story of the Fatima Prophecy: In 1916 the Virgin Mary reportedly
began to appear to three children in Portugal. A pilgrimage to see the virgin
began. On October 13, 1917, fifty to eighty thousand people saw a "silvery
disk" flying around. The oldest child, Lucia, grew to adulthood and became
a nun, committing the Virgin's prophecies to writing. The final prophecy was
sealed and sent to the upper echelons of the vatican with instructions that the
prophecy not be opened until 1960. In 1930 the Fatima appearances were accepted
by the Pope as a true miracle. In 1960, Pope John XXIII privately opened and
read the final prophecy, and announced that it "did not relate to his
time," but in private fell to his knees, weeping.
History lesson concluded, Mulder tells Scully about the John Doe who died at
the church, and that he claimed to be part of a covert team that stole the
Fatima Prophecy from the Vatican. Mulder is interested in the Fatima prophecy
because of the "silver discs" and suspects that the prophecy, which
no one outside the Vatican has read, is UFO-related.
Mulder and Scully visit the church where the John Doe's body is still held.
A crowd has gathered to be near him. The priest tells M&S the John Doe told
him merely that he had helped steal and had read the prophecy, but had not
revealed what was in it. Further, even though he died of gunshot wounds, the
priest says that the man's heart could be heard beating audibly before he died.
Rigor mortis has yet to set in, and the body smelled of roses -- indications of
a miracle. Scully balks at the believers, suggesting that each of these
symptoms could have perfectly ordinary causes: "Loud palpitations,
hallucinations, even the smell are also symptoms of several poisons." She
wants to do an autopsy. The gatherers throw snow-balls at M&S, and Scully
says, "I'm here for the FBI, not the Weekly World News. "
At Vatican City, Rome, a Cardinal meets a general in the United States Army.
The General reveals that there is an American agent who has infiltrated the
terrorist group that stole the prophecy. The group is led by a former
seminarian named Nikolai Varasoi, who the Cardinal says was disillusioned with
the church after the violent death of his brother. The church wants the
prophecy back; the General says the army will be happy to arrange for it to be
returned as soon as the army gets it and has a chance to study it.
Scully performs the autopsy after moving the body to the morgue. She
discovers that the John Doe had one clean shot to the shoulder, and he did not
die from that. She begins to consider poisoning when she is interrupted by two
visitors, an older woman and her young granddaughter. The woman convinces
Scully to allow them to touch the body for its healing powers while she goes
out for coffee. She returns and find the body gone. Outside, Mulder sees two
men stealing the body and putting it into a car. He pursues the black limousine
to La Guardia Airport but loses them as the men board a jet owned by the Halo
corporation.
In the South Bronx, Varasoi the terrorist and two of his men make a phone
call to the man who has hired them to steal the prophecy. One of the thieves
touches the prophecy with his bare hands and Varasoi says that he will did just
as Orbach, the John Doe, did. The third thief pulls a gun on the other two, but
they are interrupted by a strange sound. They realize the phone call to their
contractor was tapped, and the authorites are coming. But instead a strange
light comes out of the sky and a high-energy beam disintegrates the man who is
holding the prophecy. Another of the thieves tries to pick it up and the beam
destroys his hand.
M&S go see a wealthy man named Newton, the Halo honcho, who collects
mystical and religious artifacts, and would be just the type to commission the
Fatima prophecy theft. Newton tells them one of his jets was reported stolen.
M&S suggest maybe Newton put them up to the theft, Newton responds he'd
love to read the prophecy - just as Mulder would - but he is innocent of the
theft.
M&S visit the site where the thieves were fried by the UFO and retrieve
the hand of one of the thieves. The fingerprints are those of CIA/NSA man Greg
East. So the government has a man among the thieves.
Greg East, in the small hotel room he shares with Varasoi, complains over a
transmitter to his bosses in the secret government. He says he lost his hand,
wasn't warned the operation would get so dangerous. The employer replies that
another player, "Aquarius," stepped in, and was responsible for the
alien firepower. East says that Varasoi has treated the paper with poison but
his glove should protect him. Varasoi awakens and discovers East about to read
the contents of the prophecy to the employer on the phone.
Back at the FBI, Skinner and Cancer Man tell Mulder he's off this unassigned
case. Mulder suggests some secret arm of the military wants the prophecy, and
Skinner says to back off. There's no way Mulder will get near it. M&S
return to the Newton Estate and stake it out. Soon a flying saucer appears, one
of the small prototypes flown by the air force. Scully shoots it down. They
consider trying to fit it into their car when they are over-run by gun-wielding
SWAT troops attacking the estate. "Ready to admit you're in over your
head?" asks Scully. Mulder realizes that if the thieves are going to turn
the prophecy over to Newton, they won't do it here, where the government
expects, but some other place all are familiar with: the church.
In front of the church in the snow, Newton receives the prophecy from
Varasoi and shoots the terrorist for his trouble. M&S appear and demand the
prophecy. Newton says fine, he'll give it up, but he wants to read it first.
M&S run towards Newton as the wind picks up. Newton is shocked by what he
reads and sees a giant image of the Virgin, with an alien, bulb-eyed face. Then
the snow dies, and M&S find Newton dead of a heart attack. Mulder picks up
the prophecy, nearly gets to read it, despite Scully's warnings about the
dangers involved, but before he can, he and Scully are surrounded by the guys
in black with the guns. He has to hand it over. As a Christmas gift, Scully
gives Mulder a t-shirt that reads, "Everyone else got to read the Fatima
Prophecy, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt." .
Presentation
- Stefan Petrucha is a crafty writer. His scripts are
well-researched, which helps with a project like X- FILES, because many of
the stories are grounded in, as it were, "real" matter, such as
the Fatima Prophecy used here. One has to appreciate the effort Petrucha
and the editorial staff have gone to in finding paranormal subjects the
series itself hasn't yet addressed. But more than this, one notices
immediately that Petrucha has done a fine job in capturing the way the
main characters speak. Mulder and Scully banter the way they do on TV, no
more and no less. Also, the scripts share the story-telling methods of the
series, borrowing the type-set placement titles, etc. This will remain
true throughout Petrucha's run on the book, indeed, it will improve. This
is important to note mainly because the ability to echo the series
successfully can make or break any tie-in. The fact is, a lot of tie-in
works, comic or novel, fail to deliver what the audience wants: more of
what they have come to love. Petrucha beats the X-FILES novels in this
regard hands down, IMHO.
- The covers are truly unique, the painted work of Miran
Kim. They give the series a look that separates it from other tie-in
comics like DS9, suggesting a more mature, television-like feel.
- The internal artist's version of Mulder is not bad, and
definitely resembles David Duchovny. Adlard is less successful with Scully
here- she may as well be Madelyn Pryor- but she grows, over the issues, to
look more like "herself."
Story
- The plot really winds, and almost demands a re-reading
or two to get that Varasoi *did* poison the prophesy so one would die from
touching it. Interestingly, there's a moment at the end, when Mulder wants
to read it, that Scully's faith surfaces again: she warns Mulder not to,
even if he is gloved. She believes it has power. (Which, of course, it
does, as we saw when Newton had his killing vision. The vision,
incidentally, is of an alien Virgin Mary, although it might have been
Mulder's imagination. This comic thus places itself not only in the second
season but in the frame of mind of the second season- there *are* mystical
powers at work, no question, and the government knows it (unlike in, for
instance, in the first season, when one couldn't be quite sure if Mulder
might be wrong and Scully depressingly right.)
- Mulder gives a bit of a creed to Newton, when asked
what lengths he will go to know the truth- here, to read the prophesy that
might vindicate his suspicions that the aliens have been on earth for a
long time, and might even be the angels of old: "I would gladly risk
myself, my career, and quite possibly my life for that privilege. I would
not, however, under any circumstances risk the safety or well-being of
anyone else."
- This issue came out in January of 1995, a year before
the episode REVELATIONS aired. REVELATIONS happened to also feature a
corpse that smelled of roses and failed to decay normally. Note the
interesting problem Petrucha faces, and can't avoid. No-one could have
known that when the series finally threw us a Catholic Bone, Mulder and
Scully's idiosyncracies would switch. In that episode, Mulder becomes the
doubter, looking for any explanation for the strange occurrences. Scully,
lapsed Catholic that she is, suffers something of a faith-in-science
crisis and finds herself looking to her religious beliefs for answers.
Petrucha's script echoes that issue, but takes a more expected route:
Mulder actually suggests that the rosy body and lack of rigor mortis
"sounds like a miracle." Scully responds: "I'll embrace
that possibility only after the long list of things I can explain has been
exhausted. But this is difficult. I may be a lapsed Catholic, but my
father believed."
- Interestingly, Cigarette Smoking Man, or as Mulder
refers to him, Cancer Man, is shown in Skinner's office. Indeed, CM often
appeared there in the first and second season, although his role was never
made clear. More recently, Skinner has said he no longer knows how to
contact him, although this may be a fib.
- I'm not so enamored with Petrucha that I won't point
this out: the scene where Scully lets Grandma and Girl in with the body is
clever -- she recognizes the placebo effect of faith, and the girl is
grieving and wishes to gain comfort from a blessed thing. Scully says she
can't allow it, but she’ll slip out for some coffee and "maybe I'll
forget to lock the door." This allows the terrorists to retrieve the
body. Clever, but this seems way out of line for a by-the-book stickler
like Scully, even if she does have a Catholic itch.
Things to Watch:
Petrucha
introduces a few items and characters that will play a part in later issues:
- "Aquarius" is referred to by the agents on
the other end of the conversation with the agent who has infiltrated
Varasoi's terrorist outfit. Aquarius is the code-name of a secret
government group, here sending the deadly, small flying saucer, presumable
similar to the saucers that the Air Force flies in the PILOT episode.
Aquarius will appear later, figuring so largely that one will be surprised
how casually Petrucha slips them in here. Indeed, Aquarius is Petrucha's
own little comic-universe corner of the conspiracy that haunts the entire
series; and they will drive the first twelve issues in one great story
arc.
- The first of the t-shirts is given. There will be more.
- Scully says she enjoys Mulder's slide-shows. The slide
shows are Petrucha's way of dumping an awful lot of information on the
reader at one time, a technique used in the series as well. It works.
There will be more.
Surveillance Quotes
Petrucha
opens each issue with a quotation, and they are all memorable, so I'll be
including them. This issue's quotation: All would be well.
All would be heavenly-
If the damned would only stay damned.
-Charles Fort, 1919
Issue 2: "The Dismembrance of Things Past"
Publication Date: February 1995
Overview
At least fifty-four people insisted that a UFO crashed in Neola, Kansas in 1947. When Mulder and Scully go to investigate the recent deaths of the last witnesses, they find out that
whatever happened at Neola, it isn't over.
Locations
· Neola, Kansas
· Washington, D.C.
Creative Team:
Writer: Stefan Petrucha
Artist: Charles Adlard
Colorists: George Freeman, Laurie Smith
Letterer:John Workman
Cover:Miran Kim
Synopsis
In Neola, Kansas, Jake Edwards awakens at 6:00 am as a shadow passes over his face. He walks to the window, smiling, and says, "I remember." A single bullet crashes through the window and hits him in the forehead.
An hour later, in
Washington, Fox Mulder is sleeping on the couch while an episode of KUNG FU
plays on television. He is awakened by a group of Men in Black when one of them
shuts off the tv. He is ushered in his robe out to a limousine where he joins
Scully in the back seat as the driver speaks cryptically and throws Mulder a
file. The file regards,
among other things, General
William Palmer, a name Mulder recognizes. S&M are dropped off at the next
block.
S&M drive into Neola,
Kansas, "Home of the Flying Saucer," as Mulder tells Scully what he
knows about the famous "Neola Incident." In 1948, something landed in
the fields and fifty-four witnesses claimed it was an alien craft, which the
military denied, of course. In the past three months, four of those witnesses
have died, leaving only three of the original fifty-four still alive. Neola
itself is something of a tourist trap, with vendors hawking flying saucer
balloons and memorabilia on every corner, leading Scully to doubt that the 1947
incident is anything but a local legend.
S&M visit the home of
the retired General Palmer, who does not speak since losing his vocal chords to
cancer. Mulder tells Palmer that he and Scully have been sent by someone in the
military to talk to him. Palmer was made a laughingstock after coming forward
as a witness in 1948. Palmer writes a note on a piece of paper. "You are
both idiots. Go away."
As they leave, tears roll
down the mute soldier's face.
Scully does an autopsy on
Jake Edwards, the only recently dead Neola witness to have been obviously
murdered. All the others died of seemingly natural causes. However, Edward's kidneys
are discolored and smell of an unusual, slight citrus odor.
Meanwhile, Mulder attends a
lecture by Meg White, another of the few remaining witnesses to the Neola
Incident. White talks about her memories of the incident. She says her memories
are eidetic - so vivid as seem to be happening around her, every touch and
sound immediate and present. The smell of oranges comes back to her for some
reason. She remembers seeing a large crashed spacecraft, even touching the
tentacle-like hand of the wounded alien inside, then looking into its eyes. Her
lecture is interrupted by the ravings of a mad old man named Kent, who shouts
disjointed things about the government thinking they're gods because they know
which stories to tell. Mulder can't get Kent to talk to him, but he does have a
conversation with Meg White after her lecture.
Meg White says that Kent talks
like a witness to the Neola Incident, but she doesn't recall him being there.
They drove out to the actual site of the incident, in a field near the woods.
Fifty-four people at a large camp-out, and not one with a camera, she says,
"Can you believe the luck?" Meg White begins to look pale and dizzy
and see lights, and asks Mulder
if he smells oranges. Mulder
calls for an ambulance as she begins to murmur, more of the memory coming back.
She had an argument with her sister the night of the incident, an argument she
had forgotten until now. She asks about the oranges again and this time Mulder
smells it. He covers his nose, but Meg White tells him it makes no difference,
"they" told the witnesses that the gas will even get through the
skin. Meg is shot in the forehead.
Scully is washing up after
her autopsy when the sheriff tells her Mulder is in jail for shooting Meg
White. Scully visits Mulder in his cell, and can tell he's been exposed to
something. Mulder says he actually recalls killing the woman but knows he
didn't do it. Mulder is feverish, but he tells Scully he's figured out that
there was never a UFO crash at Neola, but rather an experiment in
memory-altering by the government. He tells Scully he thinks the crazy old man
at the lecture might know something about it.
Scully goes to see the
near-lunatic Jonas Kent. She enters his dilapidated farm house, wondering: if
the government planted the false memory of a downed UFO in this town, what were
they trying to hide? She finds Kent in his house, and he confirms that they
have all been exposed to an orange gas. Helicopters came in 1947 and gassed the
whole town. He begged his wife not to go outside, but she insisted. Shock troops
swamped the town with the mind-altering gas. Colleen, Kent's wife, was taken,
and they tried to take his memory of her away, too. Kent tells Scully to
remember the name of Colleen Kent.
General Palmer barges into
the house wearing the same shock-troop gas-protective outfit Kent described. He
has guarded the Neola project for four decades, even pretending to be mute and
senile. A few of the witnesses have started to remember what really happened,
so Palmer had to arrange their deaths. But Kent and White have had their true
memories come back only because of S&M's prodding. Palmer says Scully is
Kent's murderer, and gasses her, giving her a vision of shooting Kent with her
own gun. Palmer demands to know who sent S&M, but the old man jumps on
Palmer. Palmer shoots the old man but is given a heavy dose of the gas. Palmer
dies with the name Colleen on his lips and orange gas pouring through the
house.
Scully reports from a
hospital bed that Palmer has been placed in custody for murder. He claims the
gas has given him amnesia. Mulder and Scully are both suffering effects of
amnesia, as well. Mulder is wheelchair bound. He tells Scully the case is far
from over, even if there was no downed UFO at Neola. He asks Scully the name of
the woman Kent referred to, the lost wife. Scully says she cannot remember.
Presentation
· Ack! Scully is a blonde in this issue! And she still doesn't look much more like Gillian Anderson than she did in issue #1. (Note - in subsequent reprints, such as in X-Files Special Edition Number 1, reprinting issues 1-3, and the first trade paperback, reprinting issues 1-6, the color has been changed to brunette. But still...)
Story
· Mulder's search for Samantha Mulder, his abducted sister, plays a key role in just about every move Mulder makes in the comic series. Stefan Petrucha is very successful in using this personal obsession to ground the investigations of S&M, to give them more weight than they might otherwise have.
· What really happened at Neola? This issue doesn't tell us. The witnesses to the UFO crash remember being camped out and seeing the UFO come down, but by now we know that's a false memory. We get a close look through the eyes of the lunatic Kent. He remembers the entire town being gassed. If you think that's too far-fetched, go rent Berkeley in the Sixties, the highlight of which is Governor Ronald Reagan sending helicopters over the Berkeley campus with tear gas.
· One thing I really appreciate about Petrucha's stories is the fact that he takes time to dwell on themes. This entire issue has characters talking about memory. Meg White says it's alive and you can touch it. (And comes with the smell of oranges- the effect of the gas.) Scully
· says memory is a strange process of the brain: "The brain does not store images like a camcorder-- it reconstructs moments from scratch, piece-meal. These reconstructions can be faulty. Memory itself may not be real." This is a sobering thought for Mulder, because his memory of Samantha is all he has - and what do you know, we've seen two different versions of his memory of Samantha being abducted, in episodes CONDUIT and LITTLE GREEN MEN. In CONDUIT, the first episode, Mulder and Samantha are asleep when she is taken. In LITTLE GREEN MEN, they are playing a board game - Stratego - and she is lifted out the window by an eerie light. The series writers may have their own reasons for the difference.
· Chris Carter says that Mulder's memories come from regression therapy, and he may be "faulty" in reconstructing them. Petrucha, in the comics, makes the discrepancy part of the story. This will turn up again later.
·
· Some other neat memory stuff. The title of the story is Dismembrance of Things Past, a play on Proust's REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST, as usually translated. In the scene where the tv is playing, KUNG FU is on. The Master tells David Carradine (Grasshopper) that we know ourselves by our past, that roots are what enable us to grow strong. Grashopper says, "then I am a man standing on one leg-- my roots are lost to me." Now, what does "remember" mean? It means to put back together again that which has been dismembered. Our memories are the product of that reconstruction. Stefan Petrucha is cool.
·
· Here's a question. When Mulder approaches Meg White, UFO witness, after her lecture, she says he looks like a FBI agent and wonders if he's going to try to silence her. He says no. He asks a question or two, then she says she feels cramped (in a lecture hall) and she'd like to go elsewhere. So she has Mulder drive her out to the crash site- in his car. Now, I know Mulder has a puppy-dog safe face, but if you were afraid of the FBI, would you do this?
·
Things to Watch:
· Three of the witnesses, Edwards, Kent and White, are both killed with a single shot to the forehead. Scully says in her autopsy of Edwards that there is only one entry/exit wound - a single red dot of blood on the forehead. Watch this detail, it turns out to be important later in the series.
·
· The name of the woman Scully can't remember is Colleen Kent, the wife of Jonas Kent, who disappeared during the incident and who no-one can recall existing. Remember the name.
· So why did those military guys tell S&M to go to Neola, anyway? General Palmer yells, "who sent you?" Who's pulling the strings here?
Surveillance Quotes
·
· "Imagination and memory are but one thing, which for divers considerations hath divers names."
· -Thomas Hobbes, "Leviathan"
·
· "Who among us wants to believe that our grasp on reality is so provisional, that reality in fact
· is impenetrable and unfathomable because it is only what we remember, and what we remember is rarely the literal truth?"
· -Dr. Elizabeth Loftus & Katherine Ke
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Issue 3: "A Little Dream of Me"
Publication Date: March 1995
Overview
A
mysterious military figure offers Mulder a deal: commit treason and find your
lost sister.
Locations
· Washington, D.C.
Creative Team:
Writer: Stefan Petrucha
Artist: Charles Adlard
Colorists: George Freeman, Laurie Smith
Letterer:John Workman
Cover:Miran Kim
Synopsis
Mulder
has a dream. He is rummaging through shelf after shelf, deep within the
Pentagon, looking for something. Finally he finds a drawer marked SAMANTHA
MULDER. He opens it up to find the pale corpse of his sister, still a young
girl. He screams and awakens, recalling the disappearance of Samantha, and the
differing versions of that memory.
At the Watergate Hotel, someone has killed the two agents guarding General
Palmer, the retired officer who ran the Neola Project from its inception in
1947. Palmer was to be a witness in a Senate hearing. Now Palmer is talking to
the killer, Lt. Col. Dunne. Palmer wants to know why Mulder and Scully came to
Neola, who tipped them off to the project. Dunne says it was a "shift in
the wind," and not only Neola but another project, Project Vanishing
Point, are both being dismantled for some reason. In fact, Dunne says, Palmer
was supposed to lead the Senate to Dunne in the hearings- that was the plan,
but Dunne feels put-upon that he was supposed to be the sacrifice, so he would
prefer that General Palmer simply drink some poison right now. Palmer does so,
and dies.
Scully types a report. She and Mulder are still recovering from their
exposure to the mind-altering, memory-erasing gas at the hands of General
Palmer. Palmer has just turned up dead, so the Senate investigation was been
halted.
S&M go see the Lone Gunmen. Mulder relates to the Gunmen that the whole
mess started when the mysterious military officer handed them the file on
General Palmer back in Issue #1 - setting Palmer up for his fall. Byers shows
Mulder a photo taken by Frohike while staking out Palmer's hotel - naturally,
the Gunmen knew all about Palmer and the hearings, and had no problem finding
the hotel he was being "secretly" held at. However, the man Byers
points to is not the military contact Mulder described - Mulder remembers his
contact being a younger man. However, also captured in Frohike's photograph is
the shadowed face of a woman in the back seat of the unnamed red-haired man's
car. Mulder cannot place the familiar face.
At the Pentagon, the Army runs a search on the photo the Gunmen gave to
S&M and identifies the man in the photo as Lieutenant Colonel Richard
Dunne. The Army assures S&M that they will look into finding information on
Dunne, whose whereabouts are classified. Having taken the direct approach in
going straight to the Army with their request for information, S&M are
bombarded by rather obvious surveillance. When the power goes down for a moment,
Mulder gets a fax from Dunne, instructing him to meet at three in the morning
at the moon rock display in the Smithsonian.
At the meeting, Mulder reveals he knows Dunne's name, but is outdone when
Dunne says, for a price, he can deliver many things to Mulder: "the Fatima
Prophecy, pieces of an alien craft, an EBE corpse, if you like." Then he
drops the bomb: "In fact, if you're prepared to do as I say, I can even
bring Samantha back to you." Mulder attacks Dunne, who has allies in the
shadows who jump out to protect him and keep Mulder busy while Dunne runs.
Mulder pursues Dunne down a staircase and corners him, slamming him to the
ground, demanding to know what Dunne knows about his sister's whereabouts. But
Dunne's men appear at the top of the stairs, having found and captured Scully.
Now, Dunne says, perhaps Mulder will shut up and listen.
S&M go over Dunne's proposition upon their return to FBI Headquarters.
Dunne wants Mulder to break into the Pentagon and steal access codes so that
Dunne can erase his own files on the government databases. As proof that he has
the power to lead Mulder to Samantha, Dunne has faxed Mulder an array of
photos, presumably of Samantha Mulder, from eight to eighty. The computer has
analyzed these photos along with known photos of Samantha and has indicated
that Dunne's photos could all be real. Or very good fakes. Mulder wonders if
it's worth the risk to trust Dunne, a known killer.
At two a.m., Mulder has made his decision, entering the Pentagon under an
assumed name and accessing the proper files. As he does so, he recalls an
episode of his childhood. Samantha broke an intricate model he had been working
on, and he struck her viciously on the shoulder. His father took him aside and
said, whatever the case, Samantha is Fox's sister: "You should be
protecting her. Always." Mulder extracts the diskette from the computer
and heads for the roof. Cancer Man is waiting for him with his usual goon
squad. Mulder hands over the diskette.
The next day, Mulder gets a dressing-down in Skinner's office from both
Skinner and Cancer Man. Dunne, they tell Mulder, is a double agent, a traitor,
a killer, a thief, and lots more, and Mulder won't be punished for breaking
into the Pentagon if he'll lead them to Dunne. Mulder responds that Dunne
claims he's in danger because the government has set him up after years of
faithful service as part of a covert conspiracy. Cancer Man laughs: Dunne is
yanking Mulder's chain. Skinner offers that once Dunne is in custody, Mulder
can question him.
At his office, Scully tells Mulder that she's been able to trace a lot of
the "Samantha" photos to their sources, and all but one are simply
models who bear strong resemblances to Samantha Mulder, at various ages. Most
of the women even came from the same agency. Scully looks under Mulder's desk
and finds a disk taped to the underside, a copy of the diskette with access
codes that Mulder handed over to Cancer Man on the roof of the Pentagon. Having
told Mulder how weak Dunne's claims seem now that most of the photos have been
debunked, she nevertheless does not seize the diskette from Mulder. She trusts
Mulder.
Mulder meets Dunne at the Smithsonian and Dunne begins to use the access
codes in order to erase his existence. As Mulder asks Dunne about Samantha, Dunne
realizes he's been set up, and he attacks Mulder as alarms go off and FBI
agents under Mulder's command appear from the shadows. Dunne runs, shouting
that Mulder has guaranteed Samantha's death. But before he gets away, Scully
corners him. She asks him where Samantha is. Mulder comes running up behind
him. They have Dunne cornered. Dunne shoots himself in the head.
Mulder's dreams are fitful. Scully has been able to debunk almost every
claim Dunne made; there is almost no reason to believe he had any connection to
Samantha, that the loss of Dunne means any loss at all as far as finding Fox
Mulder's lost sister. But there is one photograph that Scully has not been able
to identify or trace down, a photograph of a girl who might or might not be a
slightly older Samantha. The lack of identification is evidence of absolutely
nothing. But Mulder's nightmares of failure continue.
Presentation
- Blond Scully alert! If you get a copy where this
happens, just close your eyes and imagine what The X-Files would have been
like with Tori Spelling in the role of Scully.
Story
- In the dream, before Mulder finds his sister, he finds
and shoves aside (knocking over and breaking) several of the alien embryos
seen in the episode THE ERLENMEYER FLASK.
- For a more extended discussion of the difference
between the two Samantha Mulder Abduction memories, see my commentary on
Issue #2.
- Where, oh where, do the Gunmen get their information? I
mean, by now I'm used to the idea that Mulder carries more tidbits of
informational flora and fauna than should be humanly possible- this is a
wonderful story device; it allows for at least one character to not need a
lecture each episode. But the Gunmen? Here, Byers says, "We didn't
get to be the country's best conspiracy magazine by being two steps
behind," by which he means being able to stake out the secret
whereabouts of government witnesses is par for the course for the Lone
Gunmen. These guys have got to have more resources than a few computers
and three smart guys. Who are the hidden allies of the Lone Gunmen?
- Um- recall that the name Scully couldn't remember was
Colleen Kent, nee Dunne. Coincidence? We'll see, but not this issue.
- If there's any character in the X-Files mythology who's
shifted around a great deal, it's Cancer Man. Early on, he was a silent
figure, one of the men in the room when Scully was assigned to debunk
Mulder in PILOT. In TOOMS, broadcast in April of 1994, Cancer Man broke
his silence to reveal that he, for his part, believed every word of
Mulder's fantastic accounts "of course," as if believing in them
were not the point- stifling them was. In May of that year CM showed up in
THE ERLENMEYER FLASK, at the end, to hide the alien embryo in a room about
the size of Arlington Stadium. Thus ended the second season. At the
beginning of the third, with LITTLE GREEN MEN, CM is still hanging around
in Skinner's office, and even assures Skinner that Scully will find the
lost Mulder. It is in this episode, also, that Skinner actually throws CM
out of his office. Mind you, it never was clear exactly who out-ranked
whom. But since that September 1994 episode, CM has been absent from
Skinner's side, showing up instead to play various games of skill and chance
with both Mulder and Skinner. In the November 1994 episode ONE BREATH, CM
warned Skinner to rein Mulder in, and even told Mulder that Fox had earned
a certain amount of Cancer man's respect: "You're becoming a
player." And we've seen CM even indicate that he's keeping a watchful
eye on Mulder, trying to avoid killing him. This distancing from the main
office, by the way, has allowed Skinner to emerge as a good guy. I only
give this seriously incomplete history lesson because in this issue, the
third of the comic series, which came out in March of 1995, we have the
early set-up of CM as a sort of un-identified hanger-on in Skinner's
office, a role pretty much inappropriate by the time this comic issue came
out, because CM and Skinner don't seem to be on speaking terms by that
time. Not that this sort of thing can be helped; it's really just the
problem of trying to coordinate a tied-in work with the continuity of the
tv show, which can change anything at any time. Incidentally, does Cancer
Man even have an office, or does he just wander up and down halls, running
out occasionally to buy more cigarettes?
- If you're wondering where the diskette under Mulder's
desk came from, he shoved it up his sleeve when he met Cancer Man on the
roof.
Issue 4: ""Firebird Part One: Khobka's Lament"
Publication Date: April 1995
Synopsis by Jason Henderson
Overview
Something
powerful buried itself in the Siberian wilderness in 1908, only to be set free
by scientists in 1995. Can Mulder and Scully find out the secret of Firebird
before it destroys them?
Locations
· Washington, D.C.
· Tunguska, Siberia
· Alomogordo, New Mexico
Creative Team:
Writer: Stefan Petrucha
Artist: Charles Adlard
Colorist: George Freeman
Letterer:John Workman
Cover:Miran Kim
Synopsis
In
1908, something big and fiery landed in Siberia, scattering and destroying
trees and cabins like kindling, burying itself deep in the frozen earth.
Khobka, a Siberian shaman, laments that he has come to embody the burnt sky and
the ravaged earth, and wonders why the Firebird, as he calls the fallen object,
remains locked under the ice.
Today, in 1994, a crowd of scientists in masks and environment suits gather
in the great clearing where the object fell. Above, on the snowy hill, Khobka
watches. Half his face, the right side, is burnt away, a slate of scar-tissue,
from staring at the falling Firebird. His left eye is scarred differently, with
a swirling, nebulous pattern twisting out from his right eye. Khobka tells his
young companion that the "faceless men," the scientists below, are
foolish barbarians daring to disturb the Firebird.
The scientists use a device called the Foxfire Probe, which sends a hot
drill bit snaking down into the ice, searching for something. One of the
scientists says that his father, a scientist on a prior expedition to study
whatever struck the earth here, theorized that whatever landed must have been
maneuvering as it did so, because of the odd patterns in the trees that were
burned away. Suddenly their satellite communications go down and all radiation
levels drop. A reddish shockwave moves up from the drill bit and out, sweeping
the ice.
Four months later, April 1, 1995, an unmarked military truck goes off the
road when the driver is frightened by a passing fox.
Two weeks later, at FBI headquarters, Fox Mulder has Dana Scully run a test
on a skull found in the truck. The skull carbon dates as fifteen thousand years
old, but Mulder tells her that dental records conclusively show the skull to be
that of Mikhail Florensky, a Russian scientist. Moreover, the carbon-14 in his
bones seems to have been "sucked out at an angle: the legs came in at 500
years old, the torso, 5000." Mulder tells Scully about the Tunguska Blast
of 1908, studied extensively by Kirill Florensky, the father of Mikhail. Mulder
knows Mikhail wanted to continue his father's work, and he suspects Mikhail
might have learned something about the blast, something that explains the
condition of his skull.
S&M go to New Mexico. A local tells them at the truck crash site that
such vehicles moving up and down Highway 70 is very common, with a missile
range nearby. Mulder wants to check the local radiation readings, goes for the
geiger counter in the trunk, and discovers that he and Scully have already been
"made" as FBI. In the trunk is a video someone snuck there while
S&M stopped for gas and food. The tape is labelled, "Monster."
S&M watch the tape. It is dated two days before the truck with
Florensky's bones went off the road. All it shows are a number of trucks moving
along Highway 70, as confirmed by all the locals, then a night shot, a bunch of
soldiers fighting something large and invisible, the bullets bursting on a
force-field like screen. Later, a young Native American tries to break into
Mulder's trunk again, and Mulder is waiting for him this time.
The young man's name is "Walks With Fox," and he brings S&M
out to the desert where he filmed the fight, before the thing the soldiers were
fighting "fried" his video camera. Mulder looks over the hill and
sees a crushed truck and says, whatever the creature was, it was very big. The
three watch the White Sand Missile Base, where two trucks are delivering heavy
water. Scully finds that odd, since heavy water is useful for nuclear reactors,
not missile bases. Walks With Fox says that the soldiers finally subdued the
creature by freezing it with some sort of gas.
Suddenly, a black rain begins to fall. Mulder says black rain was reported
after the 1908 blast. The rain is slightly radioactive. S&M gather some
samples and head back to town.
Back at her hotel, Scully reports that the black rain contained tritium and
helium, by-products of nuclear fusion. Mulder gets a phone call: "You've
got the pieces now, Agent Mulder. All you need now is two words."
The words are "Plasma Containment." At the missile base, Khobka,
the shaman from Siberia, walks into the room where whatever is being contained
is being monitored. He says he and Firebird wish to be free.
Later that morning, S&M have breakfast. There's evidence of cold fusion
in the atmosphere, but still no clue as to what the "monster" on the
video might be. Scully herself suggests that it might be a creature, the
natural biology of which involves cold fusion, but she's just guessing.
Suddenly the horizon behind her, out the window, lights up with a massive red
shock wave, emanating from the direction of the missile base.
After the blast, S&M try to drive out to the base but are stopped at a
military roadblock. Scully gets out to talk to the guard and Mulder drives
through the roadblock. The guards shoot him off the road and his car goes into
the aqueduct next to the highway. Scully breaks free of the guards and dives
into the water after him. They crawl out of the water untold miles down, having
been whisked along by the rushing current. There is a fox drinking from the
water, and it runs away.
The two walk over the next hill and see the missile base, which lies in
ruin. In fact, it looks
ancient, crumbling like an recently- exposed
archaeological discovery. Inside are countless ancient-looking skeletons, the
soldiers from the base. They hear crying and find Khobka, the shaman.
Mulder cannot understand Khobka's Siberian language. Khobka is not injured,
but Mulder restrains Khobka as the shaman runs towards a huge creature inside
the base, a spindly, many-tentacled being with a reddish-orange central eye.
Khobka reaches toward the creature and says, in his language, "Firebird,
my heart is full of sorrow, I was young then and did not understand."
The story is continued in Issue #5
Presentation
- What can I say? I guess the hard thing about getting a
drawn rendition of a living person to look like that person is the
tendency to veer into caricature. Think of it- the illustrations in a MAD
satire are instantly recognizable because the features of the actors are
accentuated to reinforce what we've already decided, e.g., the ski-slope
shape of Bob Hope's nose. Think of the first time you ever saw your
spouse, and try to recall what they looked like. Then think of what they
looked like once you got to know them: faces take on character only after
we learn what pieces to look for, like visual handles we grab onto when we
see someone we know.
I'm going into this because, even in issue 4,
Scully just doesn't look like Scully. Mulder looks like Mulder because, along
the way, he makes faces that seem like faces we've seen David Duchovny make on
television. But Scully is just a brunette. Pity, too, because Gillian Anderson,
as anyone can attest, has a very interesting face. Maybe it's just too hard to
make an illustration recognizable and yet not satirical, but I'd like to see
Charles Adlard, who conveys David Duchovny's expressions quite well, give us a
truer Scully. None of this, by the way, goes for the ever-reliable Miran Kim,
whose cover paintings are always perfect renditions of our heroes. They would
make swell posters, too. .
Story
- Issue #4 is the first of a three-part story, FIREBIRD,
which falls within the first year's twelve-issue arc. Petrucha's poetic
style really comes through in these three issues, especially through the
verse-like thoughts of Khobka. This issue, "Khobka's Lament,"
opens with narration in poetic form from Khobka. It is beautifully done,
and brings to mind a number of monologues in Wim Wenders' movie WINGS OF
DESIRE, especially that of Homer, the old man.
- Khobka is a wonderful creation, a resourceful but
very fragile old man whose sole purpose is his devotion to an alien creature
that crash-landed near his home when he was young, the radiation from which
scarred him severely. The devotion of Khobka echoes the devotion of Mulder, who
of course is obsessed with his search for his sister, which lies at the hart of
his search for "the truth."
- Mulder has Mikhail Florensky's skull delivered to him,
which was found in New Mexico. Mulder immediately thinks: "Ah-HA!
That Siberian Blast of 1908 must surely be involved!" Thank God the
plot has provided that he be right about this. Spooky's mind works in
wond'rous ways, I guess.
- Here's some cool dialogue:
Scully: (after they crawl out of the river) Looks like we eluded out
friends for the moment.
Mulder: Yeah. That driving-the-car-into-the-rushing-water trick works great.
Wish we'd thought of it sooner.
Things to Watch
- Foxes: Khobka, the old man, refers on page one to his
brother the fox. The truck that goes off the road, leading to Mulder's
receipt of the evidence, is run off by a fox. A fox, perhaps the same fox,
is drinking the water when S&M crawl out, and runs off- apparently
this fox was not affected by the massive shockwave that destroyed the
missile base. Finally, Mulder's new friend is named "Walks With
Fox," and he does, because Mulder's name is Fox. And the last image
of the issue is Khobka being held back from the creature, restrained in
the arms of Fox Mulder. Is the fox that wanders around a magical beast, or
a familiar? Perhaps the fox is delivering Mulder to the old man, to
become, as he will in the next two issues, Khobka's brother.
- Faceless men: Khobka refers the "silly faceless
men" at the beginning, who are digging in the ice for Firebird,
referring to the masks and goggles they wear. Later, when Firebird
unleashes the shockwave on the base, Khobka sees a man in a radiation suit
and asks, "is there no end to these faceless men?" Notice that
Khobka, of course, himself has only half a face. This is because,
apparently, when he looked on Firebird in 1908, he did something wrong.
"I saw him, and he saw me," says Khobka. He regards his scarred
facelessness as a punishment: "I was young then and did not
understand." Faces are important to true sight, apparently. But these
faceless men already have taken their faces away- they have already
labelled themselves as Khobka was labelled. They are men who can never
know the truth.
- Names: this is related, really, to the abundance of
foxes, but it's also a separate thing. Khobka says he has forgotten his
own name, because all he thinks of is the name Firebird. He chastises the
"faceless men," because they are barbarians who do not even know
the name of the creature they look for. Names are as important to Khobka
as faces are. Those with no faces do not properly know names, and cannot
see the truth. I'm not sure what to make of any of this, but I'm thinking
it'll come clearer as the three-parter develops.
- Pay attention to the swirling pattern on Khobka's face.
Issue 5: "Firebird Part Two: Crescit Eundo"
Publication Date: May 1995
Synopsis by Jason Henderson
Overview
There's
an EBE- an extraterrestrial biological entity- called the Firebird, and it's
loose in New Mexico, having escaped from the studying eyes of a secret military
organization called Aquarius. Can Mulder and Scully stay alive long enough to
keep Firebird from blowing up in everyone's face?
Locations
· Alomogordo, New Mexico
· Las Cruces, New Mexico
Creative Team:
Writer: Stefan Petrucha
Artist: Charles Adlard
Colorist: George Freeman
Letterer:John Workman
Cover:Miran Kim
[
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to X-Files Issue Guide Contents]
Synopsis
(See
Issue #4 for events immediately prior to this.) Mulder runs out of the ruined
White Sands Missile Base carrying Khobka, the Siberian shaman who is devoted to
Firebird, in his arms. He meets Scully outside and tells her to run, but Scully
instead barges back in to see what he's running from - the Firebird, a great,
many-tentacled creature with a reddish-orange eye at the center.
As she leaves, Mulder suggests it's "a deep space entity with cold
fusion biology." Scully worries that they've been irradiated, but Mulder
theorizes that the alien is charging up, sucking radiation from its
surroundings- explaining the condition of the missile base and the skeleton
found in issue #4, which was only thirty years old but carbon-dated at 15,000
years.
S&M carry the weakened Khobka a few feet before they meet about twenty
armed soldiers in radiation suits. While Khobka cries out in his language,
which no-one understands, "Do not take me from Firebird," the three
turn and run around a wall, and Mulder finds a jeep. Scully, Mulder and Khobka
drive out from behind the wall and escape the missile base.
The jeep runs out of gas somewhere in White Sands Valley. On the horizon
Scully and Mulder see clouds back over the base- the soldiers are trying to
freeze the Firebird with nitrous oxide. Khobka is sick; Mulder goes off to find
help. When the old man has a heart attack, Scully performs CPR until she
restores his heart beat.
A pair of native American youngsters are videotaping the soldiers at the new
perimeter surrounding the missile base. Press broadcasts have not been allowed,
but no-one knows the nature of the threat the army is hiding. They see Mulder
being taken prisoner as he hands himself over before a soldier walks up and
cuts the camera off.
An artist who lives in the desert spots Scully, dragging Khobka along the
ground. He helps her to the Las Cruces Medical Center. There, she finds that he
is not, as she and Mulder had thought, Native American. A linguist from a nearby
university is sent for. Around Khobka's neck is an orangish crystalline pendant
that looks like an egg.
On the desert, the Firebird passes over eight soldiers and sucks them dry of
energy, turning them to skeletons. Firebird heads for Las Cruces.
Back at some secret installation near the White Sands Missile Base, Mulder
is interrogated by a MIB (man in black) named Mister Blue. Mister Blue is
called into the hallway by another MIB, Mister Black. Mister Black says that
Scully and the old man have turned up at the hospital and yet another MIB,
College Boy, has been sent there. Mister Blue goes back into the interrogation
room and finds that Mulder has snuck into the ventilation system.
Back at the medical center, the linguist has come and he translates for
Khobka. Khobka is pleased to learn her partner's name is Fox - he says that his
totem has not forgotten him; he will be able to atone for his sin. He tells his
story: in 1908, when the Firebird fell, Khobka survived and was the first to
visit the burned-out section of the basin where the alien fell. Khobka took an
object - he felt he deserved it for having survived - he found in the snow, the
crystal he wears on his neck. The Firebird saw him take it and they have been
linked ever since.
Khobka tells Scully that Mulder is like him: Mulder needs Scully to hold him
to earth just as Firebird needs Khobka "to return to the stars." He
asks Scully to guard the egg - he is afraid some "men with no faces"
will take it. She agrees.
Mulder overhears two men watching a tape of the Firebird's attack on the
missile base. Apparently, "Aquarius" thought that Firebird could be
contained, but they have been proven wrong. Firebird, given its present
absorption-of-radiation rate, is expected to emit another massive shock wave at
11:50. A team has been sent to check out the old man and find out why he was
not killed by the Firebird. They notice the crystal Khobka wears. After the men
leave, Mulder drops out of the vent and takes the videotape.
Scully inspects the crystal and runs tests and has no idea what it is. (She
apparently does not notice its peculiar
egg shape.) She pulls down a
chart of stars and stares at the map of constellations, then goes back to ask
Khobka what the crystal is, exactly. There are MIBs there, and they want the
crystal. Scully runs.
At the installation where Mulder is being kept, Mulder slings a garbage can
lid with the videotape attached to the underside out the window so he can
retrieve it later before he is recaptured.
Back at the medical center, the MIBs explain that they only want to send the
Firebird home. It's feeding on energy all over the state, and it may blow again
soon, and this time, thousands of people in Las Cruces will die. Scully is
unimpressed; she wants to know why they brought it here in the first place.
MIBs Grey and Green prepare to shoot her and Scully jumps out, killing both.
At the installation, Black and Blue escort Mulder into a room where he stands
before a circular conference table. A high-ranking army officer stands and says,
"Congratulations, Agent Mulder. You've finally found us. Aren't you going
to say... Hello?" ...to be continued.
Presentation
- See part one, last issue.
Story
- Just as the artist has had problems giving us a
recognizable Scully, Petrucha has never been as successful presenting her
character, especially compared to his very three-dimensional Mulder. But
this issue, Petrucha gives us some welcome insights into the mind of Dana
Scully. At the start of the story, we have a monologue from her as Mulder
runs from the alien. She says that she has always been amazed that Mulder
seems to draw his conclusions first and connect them to the evidence
afterward. By contrast, she is scientific and rational. The interesting
thing is that Mulder is often right about his logical jumps, and the
question becomes, how correct is it to put one's faith in reason and
rationality, and the scientific method. In many ways, Scully is a deeply
religious character, a priestess of science. Every story challenges her
faith, even as each story strengthens Mulder's. But because this is genre
fiction, we the audience are usually very quick to believe Mulder, so we
fail to see the complexities in Dana Scully's need to see her faith
reinforced. They are like travelling priests, constantly trying to convert
one another. In this issue, Scully actually says she's growing weary of
arguing with Mulder; it would be so much easier to abandon her faith. Do
we really want to see her lose, even if it means Mulder "wins?"
Isn't that really what the X-FILES is about?
- The scene where Scully performs CPR on Khobka is
wonderful - she admits to herself that she is relieved to face something
she understands, a heart attack, right after Mulder goes running off on
foot across the desert, ostensibly to find help. She defeats the heart
attack and says "a few moments in control and my whole little world
falls back into place."
- Interesting: when Scully runs tests on Khobka's
crystal, she thinks Mulder is dead. She wonders how he would approach this
thing, and says he would guess wildly. This is true, and it's nice to hear
Scully decide that sometimes you have to break with your own usual
methods. This is when she finds the star chart and jumps to a very
Mulder-esque conclusion. Notice, though, the admission that Mulder can
guess correctly- is it possible, then, that a lot of Mulder's guesses are
rational, he's simply taking steps he's not aware of? Some studies suggest
that we actually make decisions first, before our brain even processes the
decision, and then we rationalize and insist we did things for a reason.
In other words, is Scully's faith extremely tenuous, given the possibility
that rationality doesn't exist? Just a thought.
- Mulder's character continues to be perfectly aligned
with the Mulder of the tv series, down to his sarcasm, and his sincere
lack of concern for personal risk if there's something he can learn.
- Messrs. Black, Blue, Green, Grey, and College Boy, all
MIBs, are basically, an homage to RESERVOIR DOGS. They speak in an
ultra-cool sort of corporate dialect, very dry and smooth: "It seems
we might have some blockage in the ventilation system." Incidentally,
I would be dollars to donuts that they're also patterned after Wint and
Kidd, the nifty if slightly fey assassins from DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER. Of
course, the narrative benefit of these shadow types is that Scully can
have a wonderfully human moment when she decides to shoot them, and very
little, if any, repercussions. Agents of the shadow government are
expendable - they don't exist in any verifiable way - and so Petrucha can
have Scully plug a couple, and it matters to her, but it's not like she's
gonna get fired for it, or anything.
- I suppose having your hero escape a room by crawling
into an air conditioning vent is inevitable. Thank god for those things.
They're a wonderful convention of fiction. Just once, though, I'd love to
see a character try to crawl into a vent and decide it's just too damn
hard. Mind you, I admit, I've used the trick myself. (I mean, my
characters.)
Things to Watch
- Scully goes back to Khobka's room to ask him exactly
what this crystal thing is, enabling her to run into the FBI. This is just
a nit, but why didn't she ask that when he handed it to her in the first
place and asked her to guard it carefully? Again, it's just a convention,
like characters in a sitcom never talking about what happened at the party
they just left until they walk into the living room. Stories have their
own rules. (Our faith is in fiction, I guess.)
- Aquarius shows up! Finally! Recall that in issue #1,
Aquarius was mentioned as being a powerful, mysterious group. They were
the ones who managed to take the Fatima Prophecy from Mulder's hands
before he got to read it. Now we find out that Aquarius was responsible
for capturing Firebird after it killed the scientists in Siberia and
moving the alien to New Mexico for further study, and now Mulder has
actually found himself in their hands. This is big news for Agent Mulder,
because he's finally seen an arm of the "secret, inner
government" he's always going on about.
- More Foxes: last issue, Khobka opened up by referring
to "my brother the fox." This issue we find out that the fox is
his totem, his familiar. According to THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SIGNS, OMENS,
AND SUPERSTITIONS, by "Zolar," a lone fox is a harbinger of good
luck and craftiness. This all comes together in Firebird, because the fox
in the desert ran the truck off the road that resulted in Mulder's getting
the bones that led him to the base where Khobka, the shaman, was being
kept. The same fox appears in this issue, drawing the artist's attention
to the desert, where he sees Scully, who needs to get Khobka to the
hospital. At the hospital, Khobka says that Fox Mulder is somehow
connected to the fox- which is no surprise, because names are magical.
Having a name gives one a face, and an identity. (see last issue's
commentary, recalling that Khobka himself has almost no face, his identity
having been stripped in exchange for devotion to the Firebird after he
stole the alien's egg.)
- Lastly, Khobka gives us yet another bead on the curious
relationship of Mulder and Scully. He says Scully is necessary to Mulder's
survival, she "holds him to the earth," just as the Firebird
needs Khobka's help to get home. The insinuation is that without Scully,
Mulder cannot succeed in his mission, whatever it is. This makes sense, because
he does go off a bit half-cocked - how could he know that he'd get picked
up by soldiers if he just walked across the desert? He might have starved
or died of heat stroke. This lone Fox is lucky, but he needs Scully very
much. Here's a question: does Scully need Mulder? Or does she just need to
be needed?
SURVEILLANCE QUOTES
Only one: "Crescit Eundo," the title of this issue, is the state
motto of New Mexico, meaning, "It grows as it goes." What New Mexico
is talking about, I have no idea.
Issue 6: "Firebird Part Three:
A Brief Authority"
Publication Date: June 1995
Overview
Mulder
comes face-to-face with an arm of the shadow government for which he's long
searched- but will the alien Firebird destroy New Mexico before he and Scully
can learn anything?
Locations
· Alomogordo, New Mexico
· Las Cruces, New Mexico
Creative Team:
Writer: Stefan Petrucha
Artist: Charles Adlard
Colorist: George Freeman
Letterer:John Workman
Cover:Miran Kim
Synopsis
[continued
from Issue #5: Crescit Eundo.] Mulder has been captured and brought before the
secret government cabal responsible for bringing the alien called Firebird from
its frozen home in Siberia to the sands of New Mexico, where now it has escaped
and sucked up so much energy that it now threatens to explode and kill millions
of people.
The Leader of this Cabal tells Mulder that there is no evidence they have
done anything at all. For instance, the skull that Mulder mysteriously
received, which had been drained of carbon 14 by Firebird, has been stolen from
Mulder's office and switched with a normal skull. As for the Firebird, the
creature is composed of chemicals and emits radiation, they will simply leak to
the press that chemicals were accidentally released. He tells Mulder that they
protect the people, and sometimes bending the truth is necessary. They also
suffer an occasional lapse.
Mulder asks if moving the dangerous creature form Siberia to New Mexico was
such a lapse. The Leader responds that Mulder wants to learn the same things
the Cabal does, but refuses to admit that risks must be taken. In any case, the
Cabal needs the help of Khobka, the shaman who is connected to Firebird,
because for some reason Khobka was not injured the last time the alien
"went off." Khobka won't talk to them, but he might change his mind
if Mulder helps, because Khobka feels Mulder is connected to Khobka's animal
totem, Brother Fox. If they are not able to communicate with or in some way
keep the alien from reaching critical mass and exploding, everyone will die. In
the meantime, General Shadenfreud is out with his tanks looking for the
creature - he wants to blow Firebird up.
At the Las Cruces Medical center, the MIBs (men in black) get away with
Khobka. Scully manages to shoot one of their tires as they drive off. Suddenly
Walks With Fox (!), S&M's helpful native American friend, drives up in his
jeep. "Someone," he says, "has got to keep an eye on the white
man." They chase the MIBs back toward the base but someone starts shooting
at the jeep - the MIBs have reinforcements, two black sedans. Scully takes the
wheel as they try to maneuver out of the line of fire.
Suddenly Firebird floats by and Scully gets away as Firebird destroys the
two sedans. The shockwave from the alien wings the tail of Walks With Fox'
jeep. Walk's With Fox' friend, the guy with the video camera from issue #5, is
hanging out the back and is obliterated by the alien.
General Shadenfreud's soldiers spot the Firebird and as it moves towards
them, the line of tanks opens fire. Firebird destroys them all. Back at the
installation, Mulder is told by the MIBs that Scully is probably dead, but they
have Khobka on a hospital bed. Mulder asks to see Khobka.
Khobka speaks to him through a translator box. The shaman tells Mulder that
when he was young, he wanted to touch the sky. He thought there was power in
touching the sacred. He was badly burned. Now, all he wants is to right his
wrong. He asks for and receives Mulder's understanding.
News reaches the installation that General Shadenfreud has failed and the
alien is expected to reach critical mass in five minutes. The Leader of the
Cabal says, "well, that's it, then, we'll have to nuke it." The
explosion will be blamed on a foreign government. The Leader says orders Mulder
and the old man shot as they hurry away.
Mulder looks up from Khobka's bed to see a MIB in a hat. He tells the MIB
that Khobka is very sick, and might be dying. The MIB is Scully in disguise,
and she doffs her hat and has a look at Khobka. They carry Khobka out to meet
Walks With Fox's jeep. Mulder retrieves the videotape he the out and looks up
to see the alien hovering overhead. The alien is about to blow. Mulder tells
Scully to give Khobka his crystal. Apparently, Khobka feels that Firebird needs
this crystal egg to control his energy intake.
Khobka takes the crystal and runs out into the sand, holding the crystal up.
The tentacles of the alien wrap around Khobka and the crystal. Khobka and the
alien go into the sky as the alien releases a huge amount of energy and Khobka
is destroyed, apparently becoming a part of Firebird. S&M suffer no ill
effects from exposure to any sort of radiation Firebird emitted. Mulder's
videotape turns out to have been erased. The Cabal disappears without a trace.
General Shadenfreud, which means "deriving pleasure from other's
pain," is on record nowhere. The final explosion at White Sands is
officially recorded as "a reaction between unnamed chemical
substances," and there is no proof to the contrary.
Presentation
- When Scully looks like Scully, I'll let you know.
- I should stop here and say a few words about the
general feel of the book, now that a half-year of it has accumulated. For
you super-hero comics fans, this is an unusual comic. The panels are
arranged along the lines of most modern super-hero comics, so it's strange
to be reading a story where all the characters are presented as
normal-looking humans. Put another way, think of background characters in
regular comics, like Mary Jane and J.J. Jameson in Spider-Man: even those
characters are usually drawn as fairly buff, as if living in the Marvel
Universe renders everyone muscle-toned to the point of perfection,
(unless, of course, you're the Kingpin.) So if your experience with
reading comics is chiefly in the area of super-heroes, then X-FILES will
seem different and strange.
Story
- This is the third and final part of
"Firebird," wrapping up the first six months of the Topps comic,
and Petrucha has done what I thought impossible: he's lived up to the
namesake television series. Let me say, from experience, writing a project
in someone else's universe is extremely difficult- you must please a lot
of people, you must produce a work that will be instantly familiar to the
fans, but you must also be creative enough not to bore them. There's a
double-edged sword to tie-in writing: on the one hand, fans want what they
know and like, to see the characters in familiar stories, in other words,
more of the same of whatever they love about that universe.
On the other hand, if you copy the familiar too
closely, you get a collective, "so what, this is just an episode on
paper." That pleases some people, who really just want more episodes, but
it doesn't deliver what everyone on the production and receiving end truly
desires - a story in a different medium that reflects and adds to the mythology
of the series. All of these forces play against one another.
I have no idea what Petrucha went through when he
planned his stories, but he has succeeded where a number of the novels have
been less successful. The X-FILES comic is an enjoyable narrative. It would
stand alone even if you were not a fan of the series; it is a wonderful
companion to the series if you are.
- Stefan Petrucha has a smart feel for the Kafka-esque
nature of Mulder's quest. The opening meeting with the Cabal is bizarre.
The Leader of the group holds Dr. Florensky's skull and tosses it around
as he philosophizes.
There is one glaring problem with Firebird.
Scully actually sees the alien! This is a big departure from the
television show, where Scully so far has seen nothing absolutely undeniaby
paranormal, except possibly for those little alien guys who ran by her in PAPER
CLIP, and heck, they might have just been genetically altered humans. Shouldn't
Scully seeing this EBE be proof of alien life in general? There's really no
answer to this question; it will simply remain the one hole in Petrucha's web.
Scully has to remain a skeptic in general, so I'm betting she'll forget all
about seeing Firebird, or else she'll figure it's just some weird creature from
the frosty north, anything but alien. She has to deny everything, or she
won't be Scully. Oh, well.
- Incidentally, this is the third and concluding part of
Firebird, and we still have no idea who sent that skull to Mulder in Part
One, bringing him to New Mexico in the first place.
- I was fooled! It looked as if this Cabal were Aquarius,
the powerful group referred to in Issue 1, but now, it seems this Cabal is
but a part of Aquarius. All of this is to ask: who is pulling Mulder's
strings here? Remember that since the beginning, Mulder has been used as a
tool by the secret government to expose and shut down other black
operations. This is a neat quandary for Mulder to be in, where he's been
running around enough to have become sort of a reliable house-cleaner.
Conspirator departments seem to be siccing Mulder on each other.
- Speaking of multiple conspirator departments, that's a
development that the unnamed Leader refers to in his paranoid little
nonsense speech at the beginning. He says: "Now, now, nothings's
certain. We just like to think we control the world. After all, we
could be actors, hypnotized into believing we are who we say we are. Or
just one of a dozen groups, each one believing they're in power when no
one truly is. That's the problem with conspiracies- they have a tendency
to divide, multiply, and then vanish." Yikes. Mulder operates on a
sort of assumption that all the secrets to everything from Roswell to
Samantha Mulder's disappearance are held by one group at the top of the
pyramid. What if that's not the case, and in fact no one is actually in
control?
Of
course, it's important to note that Stefan Petrucha leaks a lot of
existentialism into his work, although neither Mulder nor Scully are
existentialists. This puts the reader a bit ill at ease: Mulder and Scully have
competing views of the world, full of paradigms in which they put tremendous
store. Petrucha, time and time again, throws in the possibility that maybe
they're both wrong, that nothing can be known for sure. Scary, to think that
Mulder might never find his sister, and indeed it might not matter.
Petrucha will touch on all of this more in later
issues.
- Khobka is a wonderful character to the last. The shaman
was introduced in Issue #4, "Khobka's Lament," and speaks in
poetry, forever remembering the moment when, at a young age, he stole a
crystal from the fallen alien. The energy from Firebird burned Khobka's
face off, leaving an ugly pink mass of scar tissue. In his final moments,
when Khobka is taken aloft by Firebird, Khobka rejoices that he is
shedding the mortal coil and becoming one with the world:
"What I thought was the world was no more than
a bubble bursting on the surface of the water... I have spent a lifetime being
dead. But at this moment I am alive forever." This is great Petrucha. He
begins the issue with questions of reality in general and ends with an
expression of faith and hope. Does Khobka really see the things he sees, the
world tree, the gods? It really doesn't matter, but I would say yes. Whatever
he sees, it is cosmic, and gods are the only word for it.
- Petrucha is one of the finest writers in comics today.
He is skilled at doing things that one would think to be elementary and
yet are employed by only a few comics professionals, such as echoing. For
instance, the Leader of the Cabal refers to making omelets and breaking
eggs, something Mulder seems unwilling to do. Later, when Mulder allows
Khobka to sacrifice himself to the alien, Mulder says, "if you're
going to make a cosmic omelet, you have to break a few eggs." This is
a little thing, but it adds up. Petrucha cares about his prose in a way
that I wish every comics writer did, but few do.
- Although the crystal operates as an energy control
device, I still think it's an egg. After all, don't foxes steal
eggs from birds?
Things to Watch
- Good dialogue: Mulder: Scully! How did you find me?
Scully: Easy. I just headed in the direction everyone else was running
from.
- I think I will never see a poem lovely as a line of
tanks firing on a floating alien, only to be reduced to a bunch of slag. I
think that's why, from WAR OF THE WORLDS on, the army keeps trying, and
for our benefit, never, ever learns a thing.
SURVEILLANCE QUOTES
"A truth told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent."
- spoken by the unnamed Leader of the Cabal, not attributed.
Issue 7: "Trepanning Opera"
Publication Date: June 1995
Overview
Someone
is trepanning victims across America- drilling little holes in their foreheads.
Will Mulder and Scully solve the mystery before Scully becomes the eighteenth
hole?
Locations
· Lewiston, Maine
· Miami, Florida
· Washington, D.C
Creative Team:
Writer: Stefan Petrucha
Artist: Charles Adlard
Colorist: George Freeman
Letterer:John Workman
Cover:Miran Kim
Synopsis
The
narrator is talking to three people, "Mulder and Scully and Drake,"
telling his story "now that you are dead." He tells the tale of a boy
on a sled, sliding down a frozen snow bank in 1954. The boy has bandages on his
forehead, underneath his hood. Somehow, the boy survives a collision with a car
in the street. Since that moment, the narrator says, the boy has wondered if
all of life were simply a dream, taking place during the time it took to
collide with the car, the headlights growing ominously before him. When he
realized he could never know for certain, the narrator says, "I was
born."
In 1995, in an alley in Miami, Florida, Agent Drake of the Violent Crimes
Division of the FBI has found another victim of The Hole, a criminal he has
pursued for five years. The Hole kills people by drilling a hole in their
foreheads. All the victims are differently abled in some way - this one, a
woman, was deaf. Like all the other victims, she has a smile on her face. There
is rat poison in her blood. In five years the Hole has killed fifteen people,
without leaving a clue - until now. Drake reaches down and picks up an envelope
the Hole has left labelled "Mulder."
At the Hoover Building in Washington DC, Drake meets with Agents Fox Mulder
and Dana Scully in Assistant Director Skinner's office. Leo, Drake's boss, is
not interested in Mulder's help, but Drake tells him that Mulder performed
excellently in Violent Crimes "a few years back," and in any case,
the letter was addressed to him. Skinner points out that Mulder is an expert in
psychology, and although his theories can be wild, in this case Mulder's
reports provide a working model on how to deal with the Hole.
Mulder gives a lecture on trepanation (or, the "modern" phrase,
trephination.) It is the world's oldest surgical procedure. For millennia,
people have drilled holes in human heads for various reasons. Some mystics,
apparently, believe that drilling a hole in the skull pierces a curtain of
illusion and allows the recipient of the procedure to see more clearly. Mulder
points out that trepanation to the forehead exposes the pineal gland, which in
some reptiles and birds is light-sensitive. In the 1960s, followers of one
researcher, Dr. Bart Hughes, trepanned themselves and reported something like
"a perpetual LSD trip," and some reported psychic abilities. Mulder
thinks that the Hole must be a trepanner, probably someone who has been
trepanned, and wants to share his experience.
Agent Drake picks up the lecture, turning to the letter the Hole left for
Agent Mulder. The letter is in code, which Drake solved using the key word
"Mulder." The Hole, who believes he lives "backwards and
forwards in time," relates the story we read at the beginning of the
issue, about the boy travelling toward the oncoming car, and goes on to
describe a murder that has not happened yet. Reality is but the dream of the
boy sliding to his death. "I am here to awaken you," the Hole writes,
"from the dream, one by one by one."
The murder he describes takes place two days from the meeting, July 15. It
is 85.7 degrees at noon. The Hole kills a blind man in a crowded pharmacy, and
no one notices. The number of the building is 1586.
Two days later, the agents arrive at 1586 Pennsylvania Avenue. Only one
city-- Washington-- hit exactly 85.7 at noon. They are an hour late; the murder
has already happened. Scully says that the pineal gland does affect how humans
sense time, but refuses to believe that just because the murderer guessed the
temperature at noon, he can see the future. Agent Drake tends to agree. Mulder
picks up a note left by the killer addressed to Scully.
The nots speaks to Scully directly. It describes, correctly, how she will
spend six hours - losing track of the time, even though she will try to spend
seven hours just to prove the note wrong - on her autopsy of the dead blind
man, learning nothing, finding nothing but the strange smile this victim shares
with all the others.
Meanwhile, Mulder and a bunch of cryptographers try to crack the last
segment of the Hole's coded message. The first code word was
"Mulder," the second, "Scully." The third is still unknown.
Mulder is angry at Agent Drake because Drake, like Scully, refuses to explore
the supernatural implications here, instead wasting resources running
background checks on everybody S&M know. They go over the second segment of
the Hole's message again. This one relates a much more violent murder in the
future. The Hole will kill a man in his home, with the victim's bound family looking
on.
S&M go >>
Editor’s note: here the synopsis ends.
I have no idea what I had to say about this issue!
Issue 8: "Silent Cities of the Mind, Part One"
Publication Date: August 1995
Overview
Mulder and Scully follow a crazed cannibal genius to a secret Aztec city in Alaska. Who will bring lunch?
Locations
· Mt. St. Elias, Alaska
· Nome, Alaska
Creative Team:
Writer: Stefan Petrucha
Artist: Charles Adlard
Colorist: George Freeman
Letterer:John Workman
Cover:Miran Kim
Synopsis
An
strangely-built man named Dr. Enoch radios "Mother Base Six" from his
tent on Mt. St. Elias, in Alaska. Enoch is studying an ancient drawing of a
bird. He tells Mother Base that while his partner, Doctor Puakabalaua, thought
the bird to be a grouse, Enoch is convinced the bird is a heron, with a snake
in its mouth, and that it is essentially the same mystic bird that the Mexica
sought in order to found what became Mexico City. Enoch cannot answer any of
Mother Base's questions. He cannot tell if he has found the city they have been
looking for, because he is not sure a city is a city if all the inhabitants are
dead. He says that he and his partner disagreed over many things - whether or not
the Mexica were "one of the lost tribes," whether or not cannibalism
has "practical applications." Mother Base asks where Puakabalaua is,
and Enoch responds that it is a difficult question, answered best with a story.
Dr. Enoch tells a story of the Mexica tribe. The tribe wanted to unite by
marriage with the Toltecs, who agreed, sending the Mexica the king's daughter.
When the Toltec king appeared for the wedding, he was greeted by a Mexica
priest wearing his daughter's skin. "Was she gone?" Enoch asks, or
did the priest
become her? If all of Dr. Puakabalaua is inside Dr. Enoch
now, is he gone, or has Enoch become him? Mother Base demands to know where
Enoch is, but Enoch signs off and shoots the radio.
Five days later, Agent Fox Mulder is at a compound in Nome, Alaska talking
to the leader of a group of "fringe intellectuals" who follow the
teachings of Enoch. The leader sits across from Mulder, eating a sandwich. The
group has drawn the FBI's attention by stockpiling weapons, and they group has
asked Mulder to come and negotiate. The leader says they trust Mulder because
he knows Frohike, one of the Lone Gunmen, from the Net. Mulder asks exactly why
they're stockpiling for a standoff. The leader responds that he knows they're
bound to lose, but he wants their side of the story told. He asks Mulder a
number of trivia questions just to make sure Mulder is as well-versed in the
paranormal as he claims. Mulder passes the test. The leader says that his group
believes that all information about a person, including their knowledge, is
recorded in that person's body. If the "raw material" is ingested
properly, that information can be passed to the ingester. Enoch theorized that
this process was well known to one of the lost tribes of Israel. These tribes
travelled to Mesoamerica to become the Mexica, then the Aztecs. Six months ago,
the leader says, Enoch was asked to lead an expedition to prove his theories.
The source was high-level and top secret, and made even Enoch nervous. Enoch
left, but his followers in Nome were kept under constant surveillance. So the
group began to collect weaponry in preparation for the worst. Enoch sent them a
fax from his expedition referring to "the silent cities of the mind,"
with a photograph of a huge, Aztec-style city. That was the last they heard
from their guru.
Outside, next to an armored car hidden in the woods, Scully and Skinner wait
for the moment to attack with the rest of the team of FBI agents surrounding
the place. Scully receives a coroner's report saying bodies found around the
compound indicate cannibalism. A sniper fires into the compound, hitting a fuel
can, and a fire begins. The fax from Enoch is burned in the fire.
Two days later, Scully and Mulder fly over Mt. St. Elias. Mulder points it
out to Scully, saying that it was here that many have reported seeing a massive
metropolis, but no one has been able to actually find it. Scully says that she
understands that these sightings were a mirage caused by the lights of Bristol,
England, reflecting off the atmosphere. Mulder, however, has seen Dr. Enoch's
fax, and thinks the guru found the legendary lost city. Scully, meanwhile, has
been reading Enoch's findings, in which he and his acolytes refer to gaining
musical ability by eating pianists, etc. But, she points out, the mind is a
mysterious thing- language and music ability have simply appeared in people
many times without anybody having to be eaten. She also notes that Dr. Enoch,
in his later writings, seemed to go even more insane, and she theorizes that he
suffered from Kuru, "the laughing sickness," a neurological disease
transmitted, some believe, by eating human brains. As to the concept of
ingested knowledge, the human mind, she says, is a mysterious thing. Scully
looks out the window and sees something shocking. The plane is hit by lightning
and crashes in the snow.
Mulder awakens at a campfire, where Dr. Enoch has a gun trained on him.
Enoch wants to know if, when he eats Mulder, he will gain any special talents.
First, though, Enoch will finish eating the pilot. The guru believes that
Mulder and the pilot were the only ones on the plane, because Scully is lying
half-buried in the snow nearby, and it's dark. Enoch says that the explosion at
the compound of his followers must have been on the pilot's mind, because it
was one of the first images he got when Enoch began ingesting him.
Enoch tells the story that Dr. Puakabalaua, Enoch's partner on thee
expedition, was thinking of when Enoch killed him. Puakabalaua studied an
aborigine tribe that came in contact with American soldiers at an airbase
during World War II. The tribe saw the planes flying out and in and took them
for gods, and thought the white men were stealing the favor of the local gods.
So the aborigines actually built their own runway, with a radio tower made of
bamboo and mock airplanes made of twigs and leaves. "The airbase was
abandoned long ago, but to this day that tribe sits there in their fake airport
and waits for the gods to land." They tried to imitate something they
didn't understand. Enoch looks around and says, the people that built this city
must have seen something extraordinary. The Silent City is a huge, Aztec city
in Alaska, perfectly preserved in the cold climate of Mt. St. Elias. The Aztecs
themselves said they had come from a Northern city called Aztlan. This, for
various compelling reasons, is not Aztlan, Enoch has decided; in fact, this
city has to have been built during the time of the
last Aztec emperor.
Outside, Scully comes to and starts to wander toward Enoch's tent. She finds
the dead and partially eaten pilot. At the same time, Dr. Enoch is talking to
Mulder and trying to "digest" the thoughts he has gotten from the
pilot, and he discovers that Mulder lied; there was a third person on board. He
even gets the name: Dana Scully. Enoch and Mulder scuffle and Mulder gets
Enoch's gun away from him. Enoch bites Mulder's hand and recovers his weapon,
and leads Mulder into the city. Enoch says he has not yet figured out why the
city would have been built to look like a mirage from the air.
There is a big, heavy stone door that Enoch wants Mulder's help opening.
Mulder complies. When it opens, Mulder is struck by stones and falls down the
stairs, while revealed behind the door is the well-preserved body of one of the
builders of the city. Enoch believes this body was left as sort of a recording,
a way to pass along the history of the Silent City through the mind of the dead
man. "Why read about you," Enoch says, "when I can become
you?"
Scully goes to the plane in search of a weapon and doesn't find one, but she
radios Mother Base Six, giving them the co-ordinates for where the Silent City
is and tells Mother Base that her partner is a captive of a murder suspect.
Mother Base Six says they'll send a rescue team immediately.
Mulder climbs back up the stairs when Enoch's gun bounces out of the sealed
room. Mulder picks it up, goes to the door, and calls out, "Enoch? Did
something you eat disagree with you?" From the shadows steps a tall,
muscular Aztec in a headdress and holding a knife, crying out in the Aztec
language.
[to be continued]
Presentation
- Miran Kim's wonderful covers continue to haunt the
dreams. She is a god-send.
Story
- The compound in Nome, Alaska is run by a bunch of
cannibal militia types. I find it interesting that Mulder gets in their
good graces because of his connection to Frohike, one of the Lone Gunmen.
The compound cannibals asked for Mulder, they say, because Frohike says he
can be trusted. I can just imagine the scene we don't get to see, where
the portly, balding hippy radical is talking on the net to a bunch of
paramilitary flesh-eaters and realizes that a) they're crazy, like
dangerous crazy, even offensive to fringe-dweller Frohike crazy, and b)
they're in over their heads, and he tells them, "you guys are in some
serious trouble. Call Mulder."
- I find it satisfying that Petrucha has chosen to show
the FBI, at the beginning of this issue, involved in something it does
quite well- scaring fringe groups into getting themselves killed. Now,
these guys are cannibals, I grant. But it is fairly realistic that they
only began to stockpile weapons and talk about fighting the federal
government after the open surveillance and threatening stances from the
government began. This happens from time to time, and it usually ends as
it did here- in gunfire and conflagration.
- Someone's not playing straight, of course. It sure
looks to me like the sniper was aiming at Mulder.
- Scully gets her digs in and echoes a recurrent Petrucha
theme when she suggests that the abilities the cannibals "gain"
when they eat people are most likely abilities they already had and had
forgotten about: "Memory is a powerful, elusive thing-- and we have
no real idea of how it works. It's more comfortable to believe in magic
than to contemplate how little we know ourselves. We're always so sure the
truth is outside, we're afraid to look within."
This has already been brought up, way back in Issue
#2, when the government was experimenting with altering people's memories. In
that story, Scully and Mulder both suffered some memory alteration. This theme
will continue, because memory is so important to X-FILES. Mulder bases his
entire crusade on the memory of his sister, when his memory of her abduction is
already painfully unclear. Most of the work he does is based on his memory of
things he has witnessed and read and written down - almost every scrap of hard
evidence Mulder ever gets his hands on is destroyed.
- In George Orwell's 1984, there's a moment when a
high-ranking official tells Winston Smith, the protagonist, to delete all
references to a person who the government ants to disappear. When the
official throws the last picture of the person in the trash, Smith says
that he still remembers the picture. "I don't remember it," the
official replies. Memory is not simply powerful in the way of the truism
that recalling history is the only way to avoid repeating it. Rather,
memory can be a weapon. If the powerful control memory, they control
everything. If nothing can verify one's memory, what is there to prove the
memories to be real? Scully's exhortation basically boils down to,
"The Truth is not out there, it's in here." The scary part is
that Mulder is, for all his sundry beliefs, a true objectivist, whereas
Scully, for all her faith in science, will allow for an awful lot of
strangeness to happen simply because the mind is a mysterious thing. And
the bad guys, the ones who have realized that memory can be changed, and
with it reality changed, agree with Scully.
- Note Scully's diagnosis of Enoch's mental state while
they're still just looking at his report: she says he's probably got Kuru,
this disease that "some people believe" can be transmitted by
ingesting brains. Now, think about this. She's only reaching for this
explanation because she refuses to believe that eating flesh has made
Enoch special. It turns out she is right, Enoch does have Kuru, even
though he's also a bit psychic, it appears -- after all, he does come up
with Scully's name after eating the pilot. But I'm just drawing attention
to the fact that Scully blows off Mulder's theories, all based on stuff
he's read, and then diagnoses the same paper subject with another theory,
equally unproven. Isn't it odd that when the subject is medicine, Scully
doesn't mind going out on a limb for a loose theory?
- Sure is helpful to the Plot Gods that the plane crashed
just at the point they found the city. Otherwise, the guy Mulder &
Scully were looking for might never have found them. In fact, it's really
just coincidence that S&M end up with Dr. Enoch.
- Isn't it interesting that by now, about twenty years
after CHARIOTS OF THE GODS, we all take it for granted that,
regardless, the Aztec and Egyptian architectures sure look alien to
us?Especialy since most of the aliens in the movies seem patterned after
our own ancient civilizations. I think if friendly aliens ever visit,
they'll dress up like King Tut just to play with us.
- Birds play a big part of the story: much attention is
paid to the fact that Enoch and Puakabalaua argued over whether the
drawing was of a heron or a ptarmigan- the heron would make it more likely
that the city was built by the Aztecs. This is especially uninteresting
since Enoch's theory is that the Aztecs were so advanced because they were
inspired by aliens. Aliens, of course, are often associated with birds -
usually owls - in regression therapy.
- Another neat little detail is given by Enoch, when he
says he ate a heron that wandered by in hopes that it would have the
answers for him, but the bird "was only interested in prophecy."
What a world it must be inside Enoch's head, where you can see the
prophecies of the birds? He's sort of a hands-on Doctor Doolittle, when
you think about it.
- More Petrucha Fun With Names: Enoch, of course, is the
nearly immortal guy in the Bible who eventually was simply taken up to
heaven. Enoch is associated with a great deal of Apocrypha, legendary
writings that illustrate as much about the medieval Jewish mind as they do
about the Mysteries. Whereas Puakabalaua is anybody's guess; I haven't
found it yet.
SURVEILLANCE
QUOTES
"We are each of us a world, our bodies the
firmament, our souls the sky, our barbaric hearts held at bay by the silent
cities of the mind."
-Dr. Enoch
Issue 9: "Silent Cities of the Mind, Part Two"
Publication Date: September 1995
Overview
Dr. Enoch, an anthropologist who eats people to gain their memories, has found an ancient Aztec city in Alaska. Mulder and Scully, knowing he was funded by the secret government, have crash-landed at the site. What is the real secret that Enoch is leading them to? And will he eat them before they find out?
Locations
· Mt. St. Elias, Alaska
Creative Team:
Writer: Stefan Petrucha
Artist: Charles Adlard
Colorist: George Freeman, Laurie Smith
Letterer:John Workman
Cover:Miran Kim
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Synopsis
[continued from Issue #8, "Silent Cities of the Mind, Part One"]
A group of men in heavy white gear hike up Mt. St. Elias, headed for the
coordinates given them by the stranded Agent Dana Scully. Topping a slope, they
see the Silent City of Alaska, an ancient proto-Aztec city believed not to
exist. The men plan to destroy the city.
Scully and Mulder have crash-landed at the Silent City. Separated from his
partner, Mulder has gone inside the city with Dr. Enoch, the anthropologist who
believes that eating people bestows their memories upon the eater. Last we saw,
Mulder was standing outside the tomb of a well-preserved Mexica, one of the
builders of the Silent City. The portly Enoch had gone into the tomb and
apparently has emerged as a slender, well-muscled Mexica with a stone knife
held aloft. The Mexica shouts several phrases in Mexica, then switches to
English when he recalls that Mulder does not speak the ancient language.
Dana Scully sees the soldiers coming up the mountain and steps out of the
cave in which she has taken shelter. She waves to get their attention. She is
recognized by the leader of the men, General Shadenfreud, who orders his
sharpshooter to take Scully out. Scully realizes she is being shot at and runs
back into the cave. Suddenly, the Mexica runs past Scully from the back of the
cave, which leads back to the Silent City, and out towards Shadenfreud. Mulder
comes up behind Scully and greets her. She asks how it is that Enoch did not
eat him, and Mulder responds that he was about to, but Enoch seems to have been
more attracted by the soldiers for some reason. Mulder tells Scully to follow
him back into the City; he wants to find something called the
Ilbal. He finds the spot on a wall where,
according to Enoch, there should be a switch. Scully says that nothing Enoch
says should be listened to - after all, the man ate an entire mummy, he should
be suffering from Kuru, a maddening disease acquired by eating brains. Mulder
tends to agree, until he gets the switch to work, and a door begins to open.
Shadenfreud's men are setting up dynamite charges on the surrounding slopes.
Enoch the Mexica watches from behind a rock, listening to the men commenting on
how they intend to use Enoch, who was supposed to deliver the Ilbal.
Back in the city, Mulder and Scully find the Ilbal, a crystal helmet. As
Enoch attacks General Shadenfreud outside, Mulder tells the artifact's story.
Moctezuma II, the Aztec emperor, had great faith in signs of the future. He
dreamt of the visit from some half-men, half-deer who would portend the end of
the world. Moctezuma became so certain the end was near that he decided to flee
the world he knew and take refuge with the gods. According to the tradition of
the Aztecs, who borrowed most of their culture from the older Mayans, man
originally could communicate with the gods, but in his corruption, the power
was taken away. But a tool called an Ilbal could be built that would allow one
to communicate with the gods once again.
Moctezuma sent a team to Aztlan to find an copy the Ilbal. However, all they
knew was that the City was far north. They got lost, and were about to turn
back when they had a dream. The team all shared the same dream that they were
turned to herons and flew to Aztlan, where they were greeted by large- eyed
people who gave them the secret of the Ilbal. Mulder says this sounds like a
classic abduction. Awaking, the team followed the instructions and built the
Ilbal, which was shaped like a helmet. One of them tested it, and went to see
Huemac, the Lord of the Dead. Huemac told the priests that Moctezuma's plans
would fail; a mortal, even a mortal king, could not go to live with the gods.
The emperor was intended to suffer on earth for his greatness. The priests
built the Silent City to hide the Ilbal. When they went home and said they had
failed to find the Ilbal, Moctezuma slew them. A few years later, the end of
the worlds did come for the Aztecs, when the Europeans arrived on horseback,
looking just like half-men, half-deer.
Outside, Enoch has grabbed General Shadenfreud and dodged the sharpshooters,
although he has been wounded. Mulder and Scully wonder why the Army would want
an artifact like the Ilbal. Mulder says he thinks that the Ilbal might work.
The Aztec stories are mixtures of myth and history, but it is possible the
crystal helmet is actually a way to contact the aliens. Suddenly, General Shadenfreud
gives off a blood-curdling scream. Mulder and Scully follow the sound of
chewing to find Enoch, plump again, wounded from the sniper fire, on the ground
next to the half-eaten General.
The soldiers show up. They demand the Ilbal, and Mulder gives it to them, on
the condition that he and Scully can leave. He tells Scully it was a calculated
risk; he plans to get information from Enoch before the anthropologist finally
succumbs.
Enoch is babbling from advanced Kuru and loss of blood. Scully insists that
the whole theory about absorbing memories was unsound, anyway. Mulder, however,
says it could be one of two ways: either Enoch can eat knowledge, or Enoch's
eating has unlocked what was already in his subconscious, which Scully herself
said was a mysterious thing. So he listens to Enoch.
Enoch says that Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, was built on a swamp on the
orders of a god, the best to resemble the god's home. It was always peaceful
until the return of the sorcerers who went to find the Ilbal and
"failed." The lagoon lit up, a flaming wheel coming from the water.
The flaming wheel circled the city twice and disappeared. The people took it as
a sign of doom. They were right, Enoch says, and they were wiser for knowing
the end was near. The Aztecs craved a true home, which they would never have,
because everything of theirs was borrowed. Their old home was a distant memory.
This was why Huemac said that no mortal could live there - no one can live in a
memory. The Silent City was built as a reflection of that old home, but it was
not the City, but the mirage of the city. The image is what people long to
return to, because the image is the lost home of dreams.
S&M and Enoch find their way to a state park. Enoch will be tried
posthumously for his crimes, because his Kuru is expected to kill him within
the month. The soldiers destroy the entrance of the city, taking the Ilbal back
to Aquarius. Mulder spends his days by Enoch's side, trying to learn as much as
he can before the man dies.
Presentation
- Here's a quibble that might not be all that fair. I can
believe that Enoch can eat people's brains and see what was in their mind.
I can believe, even, that Enoch could eat a heron and see what was on its
mind, as he did in Issue #8. But I do not believe that Enoch, who
resembles the Kingpin, could eat an Aztec and suddenly shed a hundred or
so pounds and look like Robert Shaw in FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, only with
more scars. I mean, where did all that mass go? And the skin fits
perfectly, too, as if he has actually become the Aztec. And how
come when Enoch the Mexica eats General Shadenfreud, he gets tubby again?
- The thing is, that's not how Enoch's power, as such,
works, and it undermines an otherwise finely told story. There's been no
reason so far to suggest that Enoch's body reshapes to mimic the last
person he ate. This strange business distracts from the story, I'm afraid,
which is too bad, Petrucha had a really solid idea - the Aztecs, according
to Enoch, believed that if you ate someone, you could become them.
In Issue #8, Enoch even told a wonderfully gruesome story about an Aztec
priest wearing the skin of the bride in an emperor's wedding. But that was
a human attempt symbolizing the becoming that resulted from ingestation.
The priest in the story does not grow breasts and female reproductive
organs; he wore the bride's skin- what the ingester looks like is
not so important as what happens in his mind, just as the act of a shaman becoming
a totem animal is affected by the change in dance, the donning of a mask,
and the faith of the believers- it is simply unnecessary that the shaman
grow wolf- ears and a tail. But that's just my opinion.
Story
- General Shadenfreud is back! Readers may recall that
Shadenfreud was the general who went out in the desert with a line of
tanks to destroy the alien called Firebird in Issue 6. He gave the alien
everything he had and then, apparently, was vaporized. Here we learn that
Shadenfreud, whose name means "deriving pleasure from others'
pain" is very much alive, albeit with some pretty gnarly scars on his
face from the high-energy bursts Firebird was capable of producing. Of
course, he also dies here, apparently, since Enoch seems to have eaten
him. (Well, we know he gets eaten, we really don't know he's dead. But
most likely he's dead, since Enoch seems to start with the brains.)
- There's a neat moment when Scully ducks into the cave.
She has just seen a bunch of soldiers she thought were her rescuers,
waved, "Over here," and been immediately fired upon. When she
retreats, she says, "Every now and then I have to wonder if when I
was asked if I wanted to be assigned to the X-Files, I should have said
"no."
- I'm amused that Mulder doesn't have a lot of sympathy
for the monstrous General Shadenfreud. When the sadistic general screams,
being eaten by Enoch, Mulder simply looks towards the noise and says,
"Well, that didn't sound good."
- Petrucha has had great fun mixing Aztecs and aliens.
Let's see if we can sort this out. We have the Aztecs, who built
Tenochtitlan in Mexico under order of the gods, on a swamp. They wandered
from somewhere up north, where they had once been called the Mexica. Where
this place was, no-one knows. It was gone - "a memory"- by the
time the team of sorcerers sent by Moctezuma looked for it. Apparently,
though, the old Mexica of Aztlan were either aliens or deeply touched by
aliens. The aliens continued to monitor the Aztecs until they died off.
- It's interesting what Petrucha can do with memory. In
this story, memory is very much like a place. Enoch talks about how the
sorcerers were trying to travel to a memory, and the gods laughed, because
humans can't do that. So they built the Silent City as an homage to memory.
But of course, it's a warped reflection. Petrucha carefully gives us the
story of the Aztecs seeing horseback riders for the first time- not having
any frame of reference for this, they thought they were seeing a new
creature, half-man, half-deer (there were no horses in America.) Scully
keeps talking about the unreliability of memory, and this is an example of
that. Our brains process what we see and re-translate those things into
digestible forms. The answer we cannot have, but will always keep us wondering:
what did the Aztecs see?
- Of course, today the real Tenochtitlan is Mexico City.
Tenochtitlan was founded by the Aztecs in 1325, pretty much as Petrucha
describes it. Their god had told them to build where they saw an eagle
with a serpent in its mouth, and this they found in a marsh. The symbol of
the eagle and serpent is on the Mexican Flag today.
- The Aztecs had a highly advanced system of trade
and urbanization, all of which particularly impressed the Spanish when they
arrived. If you are interested in learning more about the Aztecs who made their
capital in the marsh of Tenochtitlan, there are numerous sources on the
internet, but I suggest starting at
http://mexico-travel.com/states/s09/5zz11.htm, the National History Museum of
Mexico City. .
