Recently, Amazon’s Audible announced that they would be producing an audio drama based on The X-Files — and specifically on Joe Harris’s The X-Files Season 10.
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The production will feature members of FOX’s The X-Files cast reprising their roles in characters from the long-running TV, film, and comics series. Dirk Maggs, the producer of popular and acclaimed audio dramas like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Superman: Doomsday and Beyond, will produce the project, titled The X-Files: Cold Cases.
The irony there is that Season 10, when it was first released from IDW Publishing, was a big deal as the first comic book series to be officially canon in the world of The X-Files. A couple of years later, though, FOX decided to make an actual tenth season on television — and much of what happened there conflicted with the story in The X-Files: Season 10. The series, then on Season 11, was retitled simply The X-Files and stopped being official canon (although it was still overseen and signed-off on by creator Chris Carter’s staff).
As Harris wraps up his run on The X-Files with the current storyline, titled “Resistance,” ComicBook.com spoke with the writer about the series, including what he thought about the Audible drama, which is due out in July.
“I’m awfully happy that the Audible news broke when it did, too,” Harris admitted. “I didn’t think that was going to come out until July, so I’m kind of happy that the breaks before the news of the end of the [comic book] series and my last issue.”
As far as the decision to adapt his work, Harris is glad — even if it’s got the potential to create some confusion for readers.
“It’s gratifying; it also opens up a can of worms for people who wonder ‘How exactly will this tie into the television series?’” Harris said. “There are incompatible turns of character and plot, and the simple answer is, it really doesn’t. They really just straight adapted my comics in ways that, if you’re looking for it to perfectly line up as canon, you’re going to be disappointed I would say, but it needs to be thought of that way.”
You can check out the full synopsis for The X-Files: Cold Cases, provided by Audible, below.
The series that had a generation looking to the sky gets a breathtaking audio reprise in an original full-cast dramatization featuring actors David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson returning to voice FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully.
Based upon the graphic novels by Joe Harris – with creative direction from series creator Chris Carter – and adapted specifically for the audio format by aural auteur Dirk Maggs (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Alien: Out of the Shadows), Cold Cases marks yet another thrilling addition to the pantheon of X-Files stories. Featuring a mind-blowing and otherworldly soundscape of liquefying aliens, hissing creatures, and humming spacecraft, listeners get to experience the duo’s investigations like never before.
Set after the events of The X-Files: I Want to Believe and providing additional backstory to the incidents that pulled Mulder and Scully out of reclusion prior to 2016’s miniseries revival, a database breach at FBI headquarters allows an unknown group to access and capitalize on those investigations left unsolved – dubbed cold cases – by the secret department once known as The X-Files. As friends and foes of the agency long thought gone begin to inexplicably reappear, former agents Mulder and Scully come out of anonymity to face a growing conspiracy that involves not only their former department but the US government and forces not of this world.
Here, fans are treated once again to Mulder and Scully’s irreplicable chemistry as only the series’ leads could deliver, Duchovny’s deadpan and cynical aloofness finding its natural counterpoint in Anderson’s unwavering intelligence and rigidity. Appearances from series regulars and the actors who made them fan favorites round out this must-listen arc: the gruff, no-BS righteousness of Walter Skinner (Mitch Pileggi); the distinctive click-puff of the Cigarette Smoking Man (William B. Davis); and the stooge-like hijinks of three beloved conspiracy theorists called the Lone Gunmen (Tom Braidwood, Dean Haglund, and Bruce Harwood).
Whether you’re a believer or a skeptic, find your “I Want to Believe” poster. Break out that makeshift alien stiletto. Grab a pack of Morley cigarettes.
The truth is out there. You just have to listen.
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