The return of Mr. X; illustrated by Jaime Hernandez.

Mr. X #1.1-4

by Dean Motter

When Radiant City, the city designed to be the perfect habitat for mankind, becomes a futuristic nightmare, Mr. X must try to undo the damage

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels, Fiction, Graphic Novels Comics

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Dean R. Motter is an illustrator, designer and writer who worked for many years in Toronto, Canada, New York City, and Atlanta. Motter is best known as the creator and designer of Mister X, one of the most influential "new-wave" comics of the 1980s.

Dean then took up the Creative Services Art Director's post at Time Warner/DC Comics, where he oversaw the corporate and licensing designs of America’s most beloved comic book characters such as Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. In his off-hours he went on to create and design the highly acclaimed, retro-futuristic comic book series, Terminal City-- and its sequels, Aerial Graffiti. and Electropolis.

Reviews

[Lightwhisper · Rating 3 out of 5]

The drawings a little 60’s, and a story hard to get it, but it was good.

[Nickolas · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s not an overly deep GN compared to what I’ve been reading, which isn’t a bad thing. I like the concept of “psychetecture” and see now the influence this story had on movies such as Dark City which I had watched just a week before unintentionally stumbling onto this book. The characters are not as cliché as I’d expect and there was something slightly tantalizing about their very subtle break of the usual programming that we see in most predictable Hollywood style character development. Perhaps you can attribute this to 1980’s Canada in which the book was written in. I didn’t love the art style and wish they would have gone with the more angular architectural style that they had in the story boards that appeared at the back of the version of the book that I read. They decided instead to go with a more 1980’s style Bauhaus which was more popular at the time which leaves the book feeling dated. I’m also curious if the show ‘The X Files’ got its name from this book being that it appeared in the concept art in the back. I did some Google research but couldn’t find anything. Not important. A good book to read for a student or fan of comics and comicology.

[D.M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

It would be easy, given the title, to assume that this book is a sequel to something. It is not. This collects the first four issues of the Vortex series 'Mr. X,' created by Dean Motter but largely scripted by Gilbert Hernández and with art by Los Bros Hernandez. The titular return regards the character's return to the ubertropolis of Radiant City (openly modelled after Fritz Lang's Metropolis), a city of which he has dubbed himself protector and in the creation of which he had some hand.
As is often the case with Motter's output, the book is pretty derivative but with occasional flashes of ingenuity. The sleepless character of Mr. X (who has several names given by several characters and whose true identity only gets murkier later in the series) is as featureless as his name, while the bustling city around him is massively characterised (albeit via other sources) and populated with the kind of characters one would expect from the animated Batman series from around the same time.
The story is reasonably tight, but is obviously only the beginning of what turned out to be a long-running series (for independent comics of the time). Really the biggest draw here for most readers will be the beautiful full-colour Hernandez (mainly Jaime) artwork, drawn when they were at the height of their powers.
This edition includes introductory comments from Motter and Mark Askwith, as well as several pages of supplemental/developmental art by Motter, Hernandez and co-creator Paul Rivoche.

[Drew Canole · Rating 1 out of 5]

An unfair comparison perhaps, but the whole time I just wished I was reading Love and Rockets instead. The Hernandez bro's are let down by a weak concept and poor plotting. The book reeks of 80s indie alt superhero.

[Wiley June · Rating 4 out of 5]

perfect ideas on every level. so much to do and so little time to do it

[Mza · Rating 4 out of 5]

... Jaime Hernandez's only non-Love & Rockets book from the 1980s? I'm all over this beaut. Its plot is as sleek as its Art Deco setting: Mr X, an architect fueled by a drug that allows him never to sleep, returns to Radiant City, the city he designed with fellow architect Simon Myers, who is now dead after a mysterious suicide. Mr X is the world's foremost practitioner of "psychetecture" -- architecture conceived to enhance its inhabitants' mental well-being; but something went wrong during the construction of Radiant City, and now, says Mr X, all of its citizens are in danger of going mad. Only he can reverse this fuck-up.

Dean Motter, Gilbert Hernandez, and Mario Hernandez co-wrote the book, and I wonder if the team approach partly accounts for the way the story is pulled toward several different genres and moods simultaneously. It's a tense film noir on one page, a sci-fi cautionary tale on another, and then, suddenly, a romantic comedy. Then again, Gilbert often pulls off this sort of mix all by himself in Love & Rockets. There's an element to the Mr X character, though, that makes him unlike most L&R characters: he's a Randian hero, a man of extraordinary skills whose extreme individualism and drive cause ordinary people (those less morally advanced, Rand might say) to misunderstand him. "So much to do, and so little time to do it," he says repeatedly. It's his mantra and his justification for self-administering the anti-sleep drug.

That we never do see much evidence of the harmful effects of psychetecture gone awry could be telling. At least in this volume -- collecting the first four issues of Mister X -- we have to take Mr X's word for it. (Motter would continue writing Mister X for 10 issues after the Hernandez brothers quit.) Is he a paranoid neurotic? Is his apparent compassion for the citizens of Radiant City just a side effect of his obsession with perfecting urban reality?

I'm just in it for Jaime's usual flawless art, so I'll never know the answer. It's incredible how durable his style has been in the 26 years since Mister X first appeared. Jaime in 1984 is not as great a cartoonist as 2010 Jaime, but the draftsmanship and humour and grace and illusion (?) of effortlessness are all there. It's like a fucking shitting magick.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's the Hernandez brothers, so of course it has flashes of brilliance and Jaime's drawings look wonderful in color, but the story never really goes anywhere and the brothers seem limited by having to fit their distinctive sensibilities to another person's concepts, character and milieu.

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

There was some great artwork yet the writing was awful. The story shows potential but since it is part of a series I don't know how it begins or ends.

[Ron Sadowski · Rating 3 out of 5]

08/05/2012