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Millennium #4
Released by: IDW Publishing
Released on: April 15th, 2015.
Written By: Joe Harris
Illustrated by: Colin Lorimer
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The first three issues of this series from IDW Publishing saw Frank Black split from an investigation he was helping Agent Mulder with involving a serial killer in hopes of reuniting with his daughter back in Seattle. He arrives and then finds that she too has ties to the Millennium Group. When this fourth issue begins, we flashback to a college party at Washington State circa 2011. A drunken male student gets a little too heavy with a coed and it ends poorly for him. He winds up talking to a woman who appears dressed in a strange cloak. He figures he's going to get lucky after all, until she speaks to him in Latin and pulls a knife on him. She cuts her own hand as he jumps out the window and after he crashes to the ground, she lets the blood from her open wound drip down from above onto his lifeless body below. A man comes up behind her and congratulates her.
In present day Seattle, Frank is confronting his daughter Jordan. He's chastising her for her newfound affiliation with the Millennium Group and she's telling him that he doesn't understand. It's a typical father-daughter argument about a very atypical issue. This ends poorly and after things get way too heated, Jordan's 'associate' Quentin shows up. He speaks to Frank, telling him that she still suffers for her psychic abilities, explaining to him how The Millennium Group looked after her in his absence - not at all what Frank wants to hear.
Quentin escorts Jordan and Frank into a dark room inhabited by mysterious, shadowy mean congregated around a table with The Millennium Group's logo on it. Frank makes it very clear that he's leaving as soon as he can convince Jordan to do the same, he wants nothing to do with these men ever again. Jordan, however, sees things differently - Frank has been brought back because they want his help combating what Jordan describes as 'a mutual threat.' Meanwhile, Mulder is still trying to find out where exactly Frank went and why.
Without spoiling the big reveal that takes place on the last few pages of this fourth issue, writer Joe Harris does a very fine job of tying the events of the three issues into one interesting core plot here. Loose ends are starting to get tied up as Frank gets pulled deeper and deeper into the world he fought so hard to escape from. With no realistic way of getting out save for leaving his only daughter in the company of The Millennium Group, he's stuck and he knows it. And when that big reveal is made? It's hard to imagine him not needing to see this through not for the sake of the Group but for the sake of his own piece of mind and his own conscience. Frank Black's guilty conscience is one of the aspects that makes him an interesting character and Harris dutifully exploits that characteristic here as the ghosts of Frank's past come back to haunt him in more ways than one.
Once again the art team of illustrator Colin Lorimer and colorist Joanna Lafuente do fine work bringing Harris words to life. This issue is, stylistically speaking, just as dark as the three prior, but if it ain't broke don't fix it. Lorimer does some interesting things with facial close ups in this issue worth paying attention to, particularly when specific panels close in on Frank's eyes. These panels do a fine job of hammering home the impact of certain revelations that take place, and it's little details like that which make a good comic even more interesting than it would be otherwise.
