The Exterminators (comics)

The main character of The Exterminators is Henry James. Fresh out of jail, he starts working for his stepfather Nils Peterson's extermination company Bug-Bee-Gone. Henry lives in an apartment with his girlfriend Laura, a high level employee of Ocran Industries, manufacturers of chemical products. One of these products is Draxx, a new poisonous gel for exterminating cockroaches. Draxx has some serious side effects which have been discovered by Dr. Saloth Sar, the in house scientist of Bug-Bee-Gone. (Saloth Sar is also the birth name of the infamous Cambodian leader Pol Pot.)

Henry is training with his partner, AJ, under Bug-Be-Gone, an extermination company run by Henry's father, Nils. Henry is out of prison, and after AJ overdoses on Draxx, the insect-killing gel that Bug-Be-Gone uses, the police try to solve a break-in at the extermination company.

Sal, the head scientist at Bug-Be-Gone, discovers that insects mutate after prolonged exposure to Draxx, skipping their evolution up several generations. After Henry and his new partner clean out a run-down apartment complex and a swarm of mutant cockroaches attack them, Henry breaks up with his girlfriend who is working at the company that produces Draxx and plans to market it as a street drug to wipe out poorer neighborhoods.

One of the apartment's mutated cockroaches finds the resurrected AJ, now calling himself CJ, who is actually a reborn Egyptian pharaoh who worships insects. CJ murders one of the employees of Bug-Be-Gone to prove himself to the mutant roach leaders, as fruit from Madagascar infested with Hisser cockroaches is shipped to America. The hissers eat the Draxx, and evolve into Mayan hissers, responsible for that civilization's destruction. Henry's ex-girlfriend, now the head of the Draxx producing company, is herself removed from the board after the hissers paralyze her, and Henry moves on to a new girlfriend.

CJ, now recognized as the resurrected pharaoh, attacks the city with the hissers as Henry and the other exterminators destroy them. In the final battle Henry loses an eye, and he marries his new girlfriend.

The box in question is of unknown origins, though it carries a distinct Egyptian motif. Henry James found it in AJ's truck just before AJ died, and the subsequent flashback sequence indicates that the box was found during AJ's stint in the Marine Corps, in the Gulf War. The box appears to be made of stone, and has an elaborately carved scarab on one side. On another are four keyholes and a swastika. It is entirely possible that the box is Egyptian, as it may have been carried by Roman soldiers into Iraq, and then rediscovered sometime before AJ's military service.

The box's significance is elaborated on in issue 25.