I Want To Believe Who You’re Going To Call: The X-Files / Ghostbusters: Conspiracy #1 Review

On Wednesday I mentioned that I was as sick as an animal, and that under the influence of three types of antihistamine and some form of Polish pig virus, the new The X-Files / Ghostbusters: Conspiracy crossover sounded like just about my level of fun given my reduced cognitive capacity.

On paper, this kind of crossover is a gimme for big fun. You’ve got Scully the skeptic and Mulder the believer in the supernatural hiding in the shadows, both serious as a bowel prolapse on taco night, confronted face-to-face with big technicolor slime-spitting ghosts and four guys who treat the whole thing like an irritating plumbing problem with a wicked, ironic sense of humor about the experience. Sure, the thing could never be canon – if Mulder and Scully really met Dr. Venkman and company, they’d be able to wave 1080p scan video in Skinner’s face every time he tried to rein him in… or more likely, Smoking Man would have Peter, Ray, Winston and Egon quietly shot in the back of the head in a New York alleyway.

Well, The X-Files / Ghostbusters: Conspiracy #1 doesn’t give us that meeting. It gives us The Lone Gunmen meeting the Ghostbusters – which is a smart way to go in its own way, as it puts comic relief alongside just plain comedy – as the Gunmen investigate the guys as probably frauds and charlatans. And while the Gunmen wind up spending most of the issue as bystanders – what’s Frohike gonna do against a Class Five Full-Roaming Vapor, grump it into submission? – there’s still a reasonable amount of fun to be had in this one-and-done…

Except this issue is part of a great, IDW-wide crossover. Which means a there’s some exposition here that will only matter to you if you intend to follow the remainder of Conspiracy. And considering the next part crosses over with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, well, your mileage may vary.

The Lone Gunmen are in New York to investigate a bunch of charlatans who have not only been claiming the abilities to capture ghosts, but had the temerity to flood the city with a few tons of melted marshmallows to back up their con. When they arrive at Ghostbusters headquarters, the guys are out, but Janine allows them to go upstairs to the main lab use the bathroom, where they dismiss Slimer in a containment tube as a “parlor trick,” and press the release button on a trap clearly marked “DO NOT TOUCH.” This is a mistake, as it releases a modified Class Five Roamer with sharp claws and several mouths. And while that might appeal to a certain niche fetish demographic, it doesn’t impress the Gunmen, who dismiss it as a hologram (despite the fact that it dropped the temperature by about 15 degrees) until it chucks some stuff at them. Enter the Ghostbusters, who split up with the Gunmen to try to recapture the ghost. Which they take care of in a couple of pages, and when they stop to talk, the Gunmen learn that they have a fan in Ray Stantz, who was a subscriber to their newsletter (of course he was). Then there is some exposition, and then the Gunmen are on their way, chasing that exposition to meet some mutated turtles somewhere.

So there is a bunch of fun to be had in this issue. It is kinda cool to see some characters who on one hand are willing to believe that aliens are exerting control over our political system, but on the other think that ghosts must be the purview of scumbag con men out to make a buck. And the way that writer Erik Burnham has the Ghostbusters react to the Gunmen felt right and consistent with the characters from the movie; here are yet more skeptics out to prove that they’re frauds, and yet they know what they’re dealing with, and regardless, someone needs to roll up their sleeves and capture this irritating little fucker floating around. And I loved the little touch that Ray subscribed to the Gunmen’s newsletter; that just felt right. Of course Ray would be scouring the fringes of the paranoid to do research. It made a lot of sense, and it was pretty funny.

And the characterizations, such as they were, all seemed pretty authentic to the original portrayals in their original incarnations. The Gunmen never seem particularly phased by the sight of the ghost, which makes sense considering they’ve been dealing with hunting aliens and being misled by convincing fakes in their past – even Frohike gets his expected moment of half-commie working class hero here.  And the Ghostbusters all met my expectations: Venkman was rude and ironic, Egon was impenetrable and haughty, and you could almost hear Ray talking in that Ackroyd mile-a-minute psuedo-science gibberish that made Dan Ackroyd a million dollars in the 80s and made him sound like a lunatic today.

But when I talk about the characterizations “such as they are,” I mean that there just isn’t enough of them. This is a 22-page one-and-done featuring an intriguing meeting between eight characters, which means there is minimal time to spend on anyone in particular. Of anyone, Janine gets the most treatment – almost a full page of her being deadpan sarcastic on the phone with a dissatisfied customer in a very funny, movie reminiscent sequence, which the Gunmen wait to get her attention. And while Burnham does a decent job in splitting people up to keep the disparate groups interacting and allowing small moments between smaller groups of characters, the fact of the matter is that a single issue just isn’t enough to give full attention to this many characters.

But the fact of the matter is that this is a single issue in a greater crossover across multiple titles. And this not only means that one issue of the Gunmen and the Ghostbusters is all we get, but it means that there is plot service for the greater storyline that needs to happen. And in this issue, that happens across two text-heavy pages toward the end of the issue, and it brings the thing to a screeching halt. All of a sudden, most of the fun stops, and we get walls of word balloons describing some theory about sending message back through time using ghosts that I’m sure feed into the greater Conspiracy crossover storyline, but for someone who idly bought this book thinking, “X-Files and Ghostbusters? Cool idea!”, it popped me right out of the story.

Salvador Navarro’s art was a pretty good match for a book that needed to mix the dark, moody world of The Lone Gunmen and the big, bright, cartoony (having read a few issues of IDW’s Ghostbusters ongoing, often The Real Ghostbusters-level cartoony) of the Ghostbusters. Navarro nails the depictions of the original Lone Gunmen actors extremely well, while still giving us big, bright ghosts that change shape, and the weird technology that the Ghostbusters use, without anything looking particularly out of place from anything else. Navarro walks the line of depicting the cartoony stuff without making it too unrealistic in the face of the the almost photo-realism of the Gunmen’s faces (note to those actors: demand more money for the likeness rights in your contracts, guys. That’s why Bill Murray doesn’t have to worry about whether or not Peter Venkman looks fat in comic books). It’s pretty good looking stuff for this kind of story.

All in all, I had fun with this issue, but it is flawed. And it is flawed mostly in the sense that I want to see more of The X-Files and Ghostbusters. There is gold in this idea, IDW Publishing Editor-In-Chief Chris Ryall: two miniseries. The X-Files And Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters And The X-Files. One focuses on Mulder and Scully investigating potential con men in New York claiming to be able to catch ghosts while avoiding any and all government oversight. The other focuses on the Ghostbusters trying to get work done while yet another pair of irritating, humorless federales sniffs around, trying to make life harder for some hard-working entrepreneurs. Same story, two differing viewpoints to cater to fans of each franchise. I would read that. I would read the hell out of that.

But in the meantime, if the idea of characters from The X-Files meeting the Ghostbusters sounds like the genius it seemed like when I found the issue, this is a decent little taste of what might be. Is it enough to make me want to check out The Lone Gunmen meeting the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the next part of Conspiracy? Honestly, probably not. Again: that wall of expository text to tie this into that crossover all but stopped me dead rather than intriguing me.

But it is enough for me to repeat: Chris Ryall: I would read a real X-Files / Ghostbusters crossover like it was loaded with blue meth.