REVIEW: X-Files: Deviations

3.40/5.0 Stars 
Rating if the Book Were a Movie: PG/PG-13

Creative Team:

Writer: Amy Chu
Artist: John Van Fleet, Elena Casagrande, Taylor Esposito, Sean Scoffield
Colors: Arianne Florean
Letters: Robbie Robbins
Cover:  Cat Staggs
Editor: Denton J. Tipton
Publisher: IDW Publishing 

Ratings:

Story: 3.3 Stars
Artwork: 3.4 Stars
Cover Artwork: 3.3 Stars
Dialogue: 3.4 Stars
Mechanics: 3.5 Stars
Editing: 3.5 Stars 

About the Book:

The premise of The X-Files was that there was an F.B.I. agent, Fox Mulder, who was an expert in the occult and other unexplained phenomena. Fox was fixated on this topic because he saw his sister get abducted by aliens as a child. Dana Scully is an F.B.I. agent that is also a medical doctor. She’s paired with Agent Mulder to observe his practices and report back to her superiors.

In X-Files: Deviations we get a plot twist. In this story Fox Mulder is abducted as a young child. His sister, Samantha, saw it happen and has focused her life on finding her brother.

Reviewer’s Notes:

The X-Files was a television series that captured a lot of attention from geeks across the land during most of the 1990’s. While everyone was watching Ross and Rachel on Friends or the exploits of Dr. Ross on E.R. We were saying, “The truth is out there”. The fact that this issue came out more than ten years after the original run of The X-Files ended speaks to how well liked the show was.

I liked the premise behind Deviations for a lot of IDW’s titles. It reminds me of the geeky conversations my friends and I had as well as some of the stories we got from What If…

The creative team hit the nail on the head with this one. Fox may have better chemistry with Scully than Samantha. That’s the only notable difference between Samantha and her brother. They are both very good agents that are determined to find their siblings.

Pairing Samantha with Dana brings other things to light. The way the two ladies were treated when traveling by themselves is much different than if a man were in the vehicle as well. I find myself stuck between thinking “that’s not right” and “men are pigs” when it comes to that topic. Either way, we need to be better as a society.

I liked the artwork on this cover. It looks ominous and gloomy. It makes Mulder look sinister. In fact my first thought was that in this universe Mulder was the  “Cigarette Smoking Man”.

From cover to cover the artwork on the interior pages is sold. We get good detail. The coloring is spot on. I loved the pencils in the ceiling when we first see Samantha as an F.B.I. agent.

As a geek on a budget I believe this is a good read for any X-Files fan. If you’re not familiar with the franchise, look elsewhere first. I suspect that it would be counterintuitive to begin exploring it with a title that is set in an alternative universe.