Michael's Long Box: Secret Files (Angel Entertainment, 1996)
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Have you ever thought to yourself, "What if Tomb Raider, but also The X-Files"?
If so, then you were probably playing the Area 51 levels of Tomb Raider III on your PC or PlayStation around 1998. But if that wasn't the case, chances are you were standing inside a storage unit owned by Conquest Comics, located in beautiful majestic cold-as-Satan's-taint New Jersey, while shop owner and thrice-reformed pervert @blewitt agreed he'd let you just have the entire goddamn stack of bad girl books so long as you agreed to put the trench coat back on and never cosplay as Sean Connery from Zardoz on the premises again.
Man, sometimes you threaten a guy with a good time and he just wants to dial 911. People, am I right?
Anyway, after all that and to show there are no hard feelings, you probably put money into the Funko claw machine and pulled out this bad boy right here:
...then returned home to your humble abode in Indiana to hide Uncle Si, your Zardoz costume, and your fresh stack of not-technically-porn Bad Girl comics from your wife. But not all in the same place--you've made that mistake before. Fortunately she's on her third re-watch of Breaking Bad so she didn't even notice you come in, and that means you can break out the goodies. What did your trade at Conquest Comics get you? Well, don't just stand there like some slack-jawed yokel! Open the ol' goodie bag, and find...!
WHAT?!
Hang on a--
Okay, there we go. Whew. I was afraid for a minute there you all would mistake me for a nerd with taste. Unlikely, but you can never be too careful.
In any case, those are twin sisters Susannah (tanned) and Sabrina (blonde) Sorenson, who together make up "S and S Investigations", a sort of globe-trotting, conspiracy-investigating PI agency. When they aren't investigating the mundane and the arcane, they kick butt, even if it's gray, radioactive, or divided into threes. That's not me trying to use my awesome powers of foreshadowing or metaphor or anything, it's literally how they're described on the first page of Issue #0:
See, kids, back in the 90s, comic companies were obsessed with putting numbers that were less than 1 on their covers, so instead of this being issue 1, it's issue 0. Obviously these were best read with an ice cold Crystal Pepsi on your desk, but that ship has sailed.
Now, I'm going to be honest with you here... I've read The Secret Files three-issue mini-series twice now, and I'm still not sure what is actually going on. But when you've got famed Gen13 and DV8 artist Al Rio penciling a comic about two women kicking ass and taking names, the story's kind of the last thing on my mind, if you know what I'm saying. There are aliens, and conspiracies, and shadowy government agencies, then-president of the United States Bill Clinton, a UFO that blows up an Egyptian pyramid, and a whole lot of absolutely unnecessary wardrobe malfunctions and panels of women lounging in lingerie or taking showers. It, uh, really is a good thing I got them away from @blewitt before he did something with them he'd regret even more than giving them to me.
Especially when the story include puns like this:
Secret Files issue #2 (which, remember, is actually the third issue in 90s numbers) closes without resolving much of anything, but with a promise the story will continue in the Secret Files: Invasion Day mini-series. Looks like I'll be taking another trek to the frozen hellscape of New Jersey to acquire these at some point. I'm keeping my Zardoz costume warm, that's all I'm saying.
Secret Files is a comic that really could have only come into existence in the 1990s, at the height of the North American pop culture obsession with aliens, government cover-ups, and government cover-ups involving aliens. What's really interesting though is that publisher Angel Entertainment employed a man by the name of Robert Gordon Howard as both a member of their writing team and their staff UFOlogist. Howard claimed to have witnessed (and photographed) an Unidentified Flying Object on the night of June 13, 1974 in the vicinity of Shaw Butte in Arizona, and indeed, issue 0 prints two of these pictures. Alas, being comic books, the quality is less than stellar, so it's hard to see anything beyond a few obviously bright lights, but regardless, Howard very clearly saw something. Amusingly, he was told by other members of the saucer watch organization he was a part of that he had screwed up by actually witnessing an alleged UFO: investigators, they said, should not experience what it is that they're investigating. Which... I mean, that's rather like telling a detective they shouldn't actually view a crime scene, so that's a bit suspect, innit?
In any case, Secret Files ran for a couple of mini-series and a few one-shot entries before Angel Entertainment went under in 1997. A dalliance with producing straight-up pornographic titles like Girl on Girl: Ticklish and Hot Young Sluts: Wild in the Streets was seemingly unable to stave off the inevitable.
Like most books spawned from the black-and-white Bad Girl craze, Secret Files isn't anything special, but I've seen far worse in my times in the trenches. Is it cheesecake? Absolutely. Did they know their target market? Also, yes. And hey, any excuse to enjoy some Al Rio artwork I haven't seen before is a good use of a trench coat, a giant red diaper/swimsuit combination, and the time it takes to visit New Jersey to harass my favorite Husky-loving funny book hustler. Your mileage may vary on that last one, so if you want to just use eBay, I totally get it.
Now, what the hell am I going to do with another Uncle Si?
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