Comic Review (X-Files) Millennium #5- Sleepwalking Into a New Dark Age

Writer: Joe Harris
Artist: Colin Lorimer
Colourist: Joana Lafuente
Publisher: IDW Publishing
Released: 3rd June 2015



This X-Files cross-over book has now come to it’s dramatic conclusion, the series is over, put up your feet and stick the kettle on. So let’s scratch our noggins and ask the question, was it worth it?

For the nostalgia, art and beautiful colouring, yes. For the story and any deeper meaning that I could salvage from it, not really.

It did give me one thing though, that being a reminder of the times in which I am now living. A time when old (middle-aged really) men are portrayed as the sad, dying past and young girls are presented as the shining new, hope filled future.

It’s a lie of course, as everything connected to the corporate whore mainstream media is, that kind of goes without saying, though I do like to repeat it, less we forget.

I did however find Millennium #5 to be useful, as it’s narrative conclusion is a mirror that points at the norms of contemporary comic book culture. I can now take that mirror and shine it back onto itself, and explore what is happening within mainstream comic book, and corporate media programming.

The useful mainstream/corporate sponsored narrative 'liberal' lie of our age goes thus: The ‘mistakes’ of the past, the ‘mistakes’ that have made the world so unfair today, were caused by racist, sexist, homophobic white men. What we need now is a new age of strong independent young, multi-racial women with purple hair, nose rings and blurred sexual identities to see us into the promised land of butterflies, tolerance and free lollypops for everyone.

The implication here of course is that there is nothing wrong with the system itself, it's the people within the system that need to be changed, then everything will work out just fine.

Funny, isn’t it? You have to laugh, if you don’t then it’s crying time, and what’s the point in getting all depressed about the mainstream media anyway? It’s dying, it’s message is discredited, the lies are catching up with it, and whatever it portrays is well known to be fraudulent, manipulative bs coming direct from PR firm’s press releases, regurgitated onto newspapers and television screens by career journalists who couldn’t give a damn about the truth and what is going on in the world.

The mainstream media might be dying, but it still has the power to set the agenda. When that agenda is neo-feminism, lots of young girls are going to buy into it, not because they want to make the world a better place, but because the system is now opening doors where young women can have successful careers working for the corrupt system of human enslavement.

It might not be a very moral thing to do, to join a cartel of human slave owners, but the pay will be good, and the feminist guff gives it the illusion of ‘progress’ as well.

Lots of young men will go along with this nonsense as well, not because it benefits them, but because they want to impress young girls and show how politically correct their attitudes are, even if that means them facing a lifetime of low paid work or unemployment. They’ll understand later on, but by then it will be too late for them to do anything about it.

The new slave handlers, or management class of humanity, will be women, with careers and money thrown at them to keep them onboard. Not all women, of course, it will be a rat race for those controller jobs and those who do get them will actually feel like they have accomplished something, when all they are doing is helping the neo-liberal slavery system to continue business as usual.

Writer Joe Harris (of Millennium) is not part of some great ‘conspiracy,’ where he is subtly influencing the minds of his young readers. The conspiracy doesn’t work like that. What he is doing in this book, by having a young woman defeat evil, reject the help and advice of her father and leave to join a cool and sexy secret group (Hello CIA) is to play into the agenda as being set by the dying mainstream media.

All of the old men in this book are useless bystanders. They represent yesterday’s way of thinking. They represent a failed generation, used up, worn out and no longer needed. The female protagonist has the power of options now, and she doesn’t need old men in her life anymore.

She wants to join something cool, something fresh, something sexy, and something that will really upset her mean old Daddy. What does he know anyway? He’s just an old man, and he failed. She will choose to be used by the system, the system wants her, they can feed off each other, parasitic and diseased, they can rot the collective soul of humanity together. She can even kid herself that she is keeping evil under wraps, when she herself is the very embodiment of it.

Harris is working on a subconscious level here, and is producing a story that is allowable, that will shift a few units, comply with the PC dictates of the time, and not upset anybody. To this end he has succeeded.

Old fans of the X-Files and a couple of new fans will read the book. They will enjoy the art, and it will be mostly forgotten. What will remain, however, is the idea that the new age is a female age, that males are no longer necessary, that the system is fine, it just needs a personnel change, and that experience doesn’t bring wisdom, it brings obsolescence.

I don’t mind having women in positions of authority, but changing the gender of the person holding the whip is not genuine change, it’s Obama change, it’s fraudulent, and we need to call it out for what it is. Placing women in positions that used to be held by men is not the way to change a corrupt system. The system will easily adapt, and women thinking of themselves as survival of the fittest Darwinian alpha-females will be used as pawns and puppets against humanity, just as the men have been used before.

The cries of sexism, racism and homophobia will herald the dawn of the new world order, and as the lucky chosen few, purple hair and nose rings amongst them, take their positions as cattle controllers, for the vast majority, it’s more of the same.

There will be a new, friendlier feminine voice barking out the orders, as opposed to the old and out of date masculine version, but nothing else of any substance will change for the slaves on the corporate plantation. That is the vision of the future that is being presented in so many mainstream media narratives, and also in this fabulously coloured and drawn, but woefully entrapped in the mainstream matrix X-Files cross-over comic book. You boys have had your fun, but it's all about the girls now.

I loved how it looked, but the more I think about the story, the more depressed it makes me feel about the state of the world as it is, and also what is going to come next for the entire human race as a whole. But will I let it get me down? No way, the future is not set in stone, and slave masters don’t always get what they want, especially when the slaves get wind of what they are up to.



Rating: 5/10: The art and colouring by Colin Lorimer & Joana Lafuente worked so well together, creating something that I enjoyed looking at, even if the story itself ultimately didn’t offer me that much except confirmation of the agenda that I’m already (vote Hillary) aware of.