The X-Files: Deviations is part of a series of five one-shots that IDW is putting out for various licensed properties. The others are GI Joe, Ghostbusters, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Transformers. They are What If/Elseworlds stories.
OK, so:
The X-Files: Deviations "Time and Being"
Written by Amy Chu
Art by Elena Casagrande and Silvia Califano.
This story asks the question: What if Fox Mulder had been abducted as a child instead of his sister Samantha?
This story starts off by closely paralleling the first episode of the TV series. We see Agent Scully being assigned to work with Agent Mulder, and being sent to the same basement office that we have seen before, only to get the big reveal - It's Agent Samantha Mulder! Not that big of a reveal, since we know that's the whole premise of the book. Samantha drags Scully along to visit several houses from which children were abducted, ending with the house form which her brother was abducted, years before. We get a flashback, showing young Fox intervening in his sister's abduction, and ending up being taken himself. While Samantha and Scully investigate the house, they surprise an intruder, who eludes them. We (but not they) see that this intruder is Fox, who is seen getting into a car with the Cigarette-Smoking Man.
The Good: The art is quite good. The characters look like who they're supposed to look like, and the overall affect of the art is atmospheric and evocative of the feeling of the show. Likewise, the way the characters are written is consistent with how they were portrayed on the show.
The Bad: Samantha is shown to have lived pretty much the same life that Fox lived in "our" timeline. She even decorates her office the same way he did - even having the same "I want to believe" poster, and the same pencils stuck in the ceiling. To me, this betrays a certain lack of imagination, as though brother and sister were interchangeable pegs to be switched in and out of the same hole. While I can certainly understand that Samantha might very well be just as eager to find out what happened to Fox as Fox was to find her. I think it might have been more interesting to show Samantha adopting a different approach to the problem than doing exactly what her brother did. Perhaps she could have become an independent paranormal researcher, or something like that.
Overall: This was not bad but not great. I feel as though they could have done more with this than they did.
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