Review by Frank Plowright
In writing The X-Files Stefan Petrucha either dived long and deep into Fortean ephemera or the assignment was tailored to his specialist subject. Every one of the stories here is peppered with tales of the inexplicable covering a broad selection of topics, some of them curiosities, others with more gruesome applications. Over one two-page sequence we learn about how the memories of others can be assumed as our own, and about a belief that consuming someone transfers their memories and skills.
That subject is explored over the two parts of ‘The Silent Cities of the Mind’ as practiced by a renegade scientific researcher, yet Petrucha also manages to instil a Lovecraftian atmosphere via the inclusion of a vast disappearing city. It’s preceded by a more conventional police investigation where a killer has been drilling holes in their victim’s foreheads. Nasty as that sounds, it may also seem a little too convention for an X-Files investigation, but Petrucha drops in matters more suited to Mulder and Scully’s time.
Charlie Adlard is becoming a better artist, finding more interesting ways to tell a story, and, as seen on the sample art, to accommodate the long conversations sometimes necessary in emulating the TV show. If you insist any TV or film connected comics feature exact cast likenesses, you’re not going to like Adlard’s anonymous version of Gillian Anderson’s Scully, but she can be distinguished every time.
The title story pulls together various threads from Petrucha’s earlier material, both beforehand in this collection and from Firebird (or X-Files Collection Volume 1 in the Topps edition). This involves some mystifying moments if you’ve not read the previous volume, such as Scully suddenly remembering a name, but opens up into the official conspiracy Mulder has believed in since the series started. It’s clever in both suggesting the world might be stranger than we imagine and also suggesting much unexplained phenomena could just be excess activity in the brain’s temporal lobe. There’s a surprising perpetrator and a well considered explanation involving the events of previous stories. All in all, very satisfying.
Petrucha and Adlard achieve an excellent approximation of the TV show. With the earlier reprints fetching high prices, you might want to consider the merits of The X-Files Classics Volume One and Volume Two, hardcovers over which this content is spread.
The Topps editions ceased with this volume, but Petrucha and Adlard’s work is picked up in The X-Files Volume 1 from Checker Books. In this UK format the series continues with The Haunting.
