Smoking Gun Interactive and Douglas Rushkoff debut X, an on-line graphic novel

It’s finally begun.

Vancouver’s Smoking Gun Interactive studio, established in 2007 by former Relic Entertainment employees, has been quietly working away on a multimedia, multiplatform project.

The first element of what looks to be a complex, sprawling, conspiracy tale has been released in the form of X, an on-line graphic novel being delivered in installments over the next four weeks. Written by Douglas Rushkoff and illustrated by Cheoljoo Lee and Younger Yang, X gives us a glimpse at the universe created for Smoking Gun’s franchise.

First announced in May, Smoking Gun is looking to Rushkoff “to develop story narratives across a range of media formats that can feed off one another and exist concurrently”.

The first chapter of the graphic novel, released this week, sets the stage for what’s to come, and sows many seeds.

In 1995, an ancient temple in Malta has been disturbed by an earthquake. One of the members of the U.S. military team sent to investigate is a linguist, and he experiences something very strange while deep in the temple.

Six years later, his daughter is studying linguistics at university in Boulder, Colorado. She’s invited to join a study group led by a cryptic new professor.

At the same time, the U.S. military is conducting tests on a mysterious artifact.

In a press release issued earlier this week when X was released, Smoking Gun CEO and creative director John Johnson said: “One of our main goals as a studio is to constantly innovate in how we tell our stories. Our perspective is, if you can interact with it, then it can be part of the experience we deliver. And if you cannot interact with it, then we will evolve it to the point where it can be part of our universe. There are no boundaries to where we can go or what we can accomplish.”

In addition to the comic and a video game, a novel set in the same universe is scheduled for release next year.

As expected with a project this ambitious, the introduction to it asks more questions than anything. But there are clues to be found in the first chapter of X: references to the Knights of Malta, resonant transformers, and Noam Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar.

Perhaps the most intriguing lead to unraveling the mystery being introduced is found on page 13 of the comic, which opens the door to yet another dimension of the X project: an alternate-reality game.

The ARG begins with this homage to old-school text-based adventure games: “You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.”

Lots to explore, it seems. The only thing I’ve been able to figure out at this point is that exoriare, which is in the domain name for X and the ARG, is Latin for “to rise”. The rest is up to you. Use the comments section to let us know what you discover.