Written by: Joe Harris
Art by: Matthew Dow Smith and Jordie Bellaire (colours)
Published by: IDW
I think the fact that I wrote the Facebook excerpt of this review (X-Files Season 11 #1 sure is X-Files Season 11 #1) before even beginning this review says a lot. I read season ten as graphic novels, as it was already halfway finished by the time I knew of its existence. I really push that everyone read season eleven in that manner too because plot development is slow for the most part. The majority of the issue is spent showing Mulder and Scully dealing with the mess cooked up at the end of season ten. For fear of spoiling season ten, I’m going to try to be a bit vague on some details.
Scully is still in the FBI and is facing a debriefing over the events at season ten’s finale and its consequences. It’s here that we see the majority of future plot threads being hinted at such as the existence of CANTUS and what this means for the X-Files unit. Scully also has a kind of cool confrontation with the now Big-Bad of the series and the back and forth dialogue between the two was pretty remarkable. The villain also has that whole ‘I am powerful and therefore the best ever!’ shtick, a la Dr. Doom, that I love.
There is a big problem in this scene though, in that Scully didn’t act like Scully. There’s crazy magic psychic powers flying around and does she try to rationalize it and explain it away in order to stay calm? No, she just accepts it and acts. Now, admittedly she was more than a bit concerned over a missing Mulder, but truck-loads of sarcasm and an unfaltering belief that everything can be explained by science is what defines Scully. Neither of these were shown in this book.
More of the book is felt on Mulder than Scully as he is off unwillingly doing odds and ends for the Big-Bad. Here we see characters that I hope come back later in the season (too much characterization was devoted to them not to) and Mulder’s character definitely reads better than Scully’s, with cheesy references and light-hearted humour to mask serious undertones running rampant across the pages. I couldn’t help but shake the feeling that so much of the issue is spent getting fans up to speed again. It seems to reiterate the same points umpteen times in the exact same way, like a teacher afraid to move on to a new topic until they’re absolutely sure that everyone understood the last two topics covered. This is the book’s main downfall, where the second half had me saying “yeah I get that but what happens next?”
The art of the book is good, and it moves the story along. Unfortunatley it doesn’t really bring life to the pages. But if you compare it against that in the annual, it’s amazing. So I’m happy with what I can get now that I’ve seen what it could have been. Motion is not a thing that Matthew Dow Smith’s art brings credence to and during Scully’s confrontation I had to constantly reread two panels to figure out what happened between them.
The shading throughout is very aggressive and this lends itself well to Scully’s scenario, which is in a dimly lit office building. But looks terrible with Mulder who’s out in direct sunlight. The aggressive shading in Mulder’s scenes makes people’s faces hard to make out, or weirdly lumpy. It also looks like it changes from panel to panel due to the way the light hits them.
I would describe the premiere of season eleven as luke-warm maybe even flaccid. After such a long wait, great expectations were built, but unfortunately these have yet to be met. It feels as though the issue was approached as though it were the first episode of a new season in a long running TV show. But the problem is a single issue doesn’t have the real-estate an episode of the show did and so the recapping and explanations feel forced. You can almost see what had to be cut out to fit them in. I think that the first trade paperback will probably succeed in having all the plot and character development the first two to three episodes of the show might have had and should be the point people jump in. As for the single issue my opinion is much the same as for the annual, if you just can’t wait get it, you can reread season 10 and wait for the TPB.
