Saving the City: The Unending Mission of Mister X

by Gary Phillips

He dressed just like you figured a man appropriating the name of Mister X would: black pants, black shoes, black socks, black trench coat, white shirt, black tie, round black sunglasses fronting a clean-shaven sweating head. Wraith-like, he would slip in and out of highrise apartments and offices. He utilized secret passageways and tunnels he knew about hidden behind bookcases and walls that silently swung open on hydraulic hinges like in a 1940s B mystery.

The first issue of Mister X appeared from the now long defunct indie Vortex Comics in Canada. Significantly the year was 1984. Created by graphic designer Dean Motter, that first issue was produced by Los Bros Hernandez, who would go on to Love and Rockets fame. We first encounter our man X in the retro-futuristically designed Radiant City.

The look of the city was inspired from the images in films: Fritz Lang's 1927 Metropolis and 1936's Things to Come by William Cameron Menzies (from the novel the Shape of Things to Come by H.G. Wells). And while like the pulps' the Shadow or the Phantom Detective, Mister X was on a mission to save the city. The twist was it wasn't from some masked villain bent on domination or getting rich by murdering and blackmailing plutocrats. No. It was clear from that debut issue when we see Mister X stealing into the swank digs of Arnold Zamora, a Radiant City gangster, this was something different. X wasn't there to swipe jewels or burglar the safe for incriminating evidence, he was there for blueprints—the original blueprints of Radiant City that he stuffs into his satchel.

Mister X, in the lineage of The Fountainhead's stiff prick Howard Roark, was the first comic book with an architect as hero. Mister X was the Batman for the bowtie wearin', protractor lovin', pencil-neck geek crowd. Gaunt and driven, looking not unlike a graphic version of Pritzker Prize-winning architect Philip Johnson, Mister X claims to be the architect who designed Radiant City. He utilized a technique he called psychetecture, where, it would seem, that how we think about the spaces we occupy affect the physical nature of the city and vice versa.

In Motter's words, "Radiant City was built to be the Dream City, a vast and beautiful Metropolis, designed to fulfill the grandest aesthetic, and architectural ideals, it now moulders in dilapidation. Its citizens are afflicted with sleep disorders, opium addiction, and a surfeit of perversions. It is a place as corrupt as the decadent upper class that rules it, and the human parasites that prey upon them."

Mister X had returned then to redo what he had done, and save the citizenry from the decay and madness the city was causing them. Because his task is all-consuming, X stays awake on a kind of meth called insomnalin, and, nerves shot and jittery, haunts 24 hour diners for grub.

Reflecting its post-modernist leanings, Mister X is called by various names by various characters. Mercedes, a waitress in Zamora's club, and who will become his love interest, calls him Santos. Another woman claims he's her ex-husband, Walter Eichmann. At one point in the series (Mister X was sporadically published for a total of 32 issues by two publishers and written mostly by the Hernandez brothers, Motter and Jeffrey Morgan) a man hires X as a private eye believing him to be his long-lost brother, and in one episode he's in a night spot called the Grindhouse and introduced as Viscount Cheznie.

Yet Mister X's own past was murky to himself. Was it from sleep deprivation? The amount of drugs he was taking to stay awake? Had the deterioration that had engulfed Radiant City finally done him in too? Maybe X wasn't the master urban planner but only fantasized that he was. That like the memory-addled protagonist of the film Memento, he had to create a narrative of redemption to give his life purpose.

As the series progressed, the continuity and the plots went awry. This was due apparently to personal matters Motter was going through at the time. Like his creation, he set out to do this one grand thing, but his actions put in motion the means of his derailment.

What then of Radiant City? Can it be reclaimed to be the utopian as intended for its denizens? Some of that answer is found in the initial Mister X issues that have been collected in two volumes published by ibooks. And on Dean Motter's website, he says that Mister X is slated to return via Dark Horse Comics. I'm popping my insomnalin awaiting his return.

more Mister X images