This January, to prepare for the release of the new six-part season of The X-Files, we’re wrapping up our coverage of the show, particularly handling the various odds and ends between the show’s last episode and the launch of the revival.
In some respects, comic books represent the perfect medium for The X-Files.
After all, mainstream American superhero comic books seem to exist in a perpetual “now”, a present tense that stretches out indefinitely. Peter Parker might be more than fifty years old, but he will always be a young adult immune to the ravages of time. What little material growth the character had came early in his publication history; he graduated high school just over two years into the run of The Amazing Spider-Man, the rest of his life unfolding at a much slower pace. Batman and Superman are spared the ravages of age.
THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE
So it is with Wildstorm’s adaptation of The X-Files, a comic book that seems to operate on the same “sliding” time scale as the major superhero universes, where it seems like the characters (and their general status quo) are immune to the passage of the years. Here, it feels like the fifth season has continued indefinitely, to the point that Frank Spotnitz’s second X-Files comic book is very much a sequel to the events of Redux II. The comic picks up from the threads left hanging by that season premiere more than a decade earlier.
This is an approach that seems perfectly suited to The X-Files. Comic book stories are notorious for their long-form (albeit haphazard) serialisation, the fiction that the entirety (or even the bulk) of a fictional character’s history can be condensed down into a single story published over forty years by different creative teams under different creative circumstances. This an elaborate fiction, of course. Attempting to argue that the Marvel or DC universes are a single unified storyline requires some distortion of the truth.
BELIEVE THE LIE
In truth, these universes frequently feel like a backdrop against which individual writers can tell their own stories; a status quo from which a creative team might begin and to which they may return. Batman’s rich decades-long history is perfect fodder for Grant Morrison’s take on the character; Daredevil provides a template against which Frank Miller may define himself; Brian Michael Bendis can use the rich history of the Avengers as a springboard for his own story. These stories frequently contrast and critique, using the background as a jumping off point.
In a way, the same is true of The X-Files. Although there was definite narrative progression to the mythology, with a few major exceptions (Patient X, The Red and the Black, Two Fathers, One Son), the mythology often felt like a backdrop that could be used to tell interesting and unique stories. The X-Files receives (and deserves) a lot of credit for re-popularising serialisation in mainstream genre entertainment, but perhaps the mythology is best examined as a springboard for storytelling rather than a story of itself.
Not alone…
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