Thanks in large part to Dark Horse's extraordinary commitment in recent years, Mister X is finally starting to get some recognition. Yeah, it only took three decades...
But Dean Motter is approaching the character exactly the same as he always has: that same mysterious insomniac obsessed with navigating a city he helped create, one corrupt to the very core, having apparently been designed to wreak havoc on the psyche.
Motter's vision has turned out to be a criticism of the modern urban landscape. At times he's focused on what we used to think the future would look like (what he calls retrofuturism), but in truth Motter has a distinctly pulp perspective, one he's shared with Frank Miller all along.
Where Miller has tended toward a more primal approach, Motter prefers an oblique one. Where they distinctly merge is in storytelling like the page I included, which you can also find in Miller's Dark Knight Returns. This is a portrait of the whole city. Mister X is most often a bogeyman, how Tim Burton envisioned the Dark Knight in Batman, which was much more like Miller's vision than anything that had been seen in comics or television to that date. Miller's creative vision is best-known from his Sin City comics and the resulting films co-directed by Robert Rodriguez, who's good friends with Quentin Tarantino, who of course made Pulp Fiction. Motter's storytelling is kind of like what happens in a Tarantino film when there isn't blood involved. Everyone's very self-absorbed, and they don't notice what's happening around them. Which is exactly what Motter's villains are always counting on. When they aren't pulling off a sensational act like making a building disappear.
But more on that next issue!
So it isn't about Homer Simpson?
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