“Not Brand X” – All-New X-Factor #1-6
The top ten hits for All-New X-Factor on Amazon UK:
- The first trade paperback of this series, listed top.
- One Direction: Forever Young – Our X-Factor Story.
- The X Factor Party Box Karaoke Machine
- A USB battery charger.
- Rhydian’s self-titled album from 2008.
- The official Harry Styles A5 writing pad.
- A pair of leg warmers.
- Dare to Dream: Life as One Direction (100% Official).
- A wallet case for a Samsung Galaxy.
- An Alexandra Burke car tax disc holder. (Only £4.98, “top quality PVC”.)
Of these ten options, the trade paperback is your best bet.
Marvel has developed a tendency of late to whack a #1 on the cover of anything, even if it’s just starting a new storyline. When the writer is sticking around, that’s usually a good indication that nothing much has changed. But this X-Factor genuinely is a completely different title, with only Polaris carrying over from the book’s previous incarnation. And it’s not as if she was central to that.
(I intend to politely turn a blind eye to the All-New, presumably the latest in a series of adjectives that Marvel have come to believe holds magical power.)
The new X-Factor are a corporate-sponsored superhero team, backed by Serval Industries, a conglomerate who supposedly “specialise in helping people”. There’s a passing mention of them owning a major search engine, and the allusions to Google are not subtle. They bought the rights to the name from Jamie Madrox. And the first six issues are basically an extended recruitment drive.
Instead of a single “gathering of the team” story, it’s a collection of stories in which, for the most part, the group come across a new potential candidate and offer them a job. Of course, everyone knows the way this story normally works, and most of the cast are appropriately sceptical about their new employers. Polaris seems to be properly on board with the new bosses, but then she’s not completely stable. Gambit and Quicksilver are both sticking around largely out of concern for her; Quicksilver is secretly reporting back to an equally concerned Havok. Danger, Cypher and Warlock end up filling the remainder of the ranks.
Naturally enough, it seems pretty clear by the end of the six issues that Serval is indeed thoroughly untrustworthy – though there’s room for argument about whether they actually have an evil agenda, or are simply very relaxed about the end justifying the means. And the evidence of that is largely kept from the main characters, who get to remain merely sceptical without looking like idiots.
The book has two things in common with the previous version of X-Factor. First, it’s by Peter David, and like the earlier book, you suspect it exists mainly because they figure there’s a gap in the line for a Peter David comic, preferably one semi-detached from the other X-books so that it can go its own way. Second, the cast is a bit of a collection of underused misfits that David can take and polish up – admittedly bolstered with the relative star power of Gambit, though he’s hardly been a focal point in X-Men stories for some years.
You know what you’re getting with a Peter David team book – snappy dialogue, well defined characters, a load of plot threads all kept in the air. And this offers pretty much what you’d expect; actually, I prefer it to the previous run, which had got rather bogged down in some mystic storylines that never really appealed to me. It’s also got Carmine Di Giandomenico on art, which feels like good casting – he’s a solid storyteller, but with a nicely angular, clean line that works for the hi-tech corporate environment.
What we don’t really have, at this stage, is the sort of clever new take on a character, similar to what David did with Madrox. Polaris’ instability gives her something new to do, and Gambit’s fish out of water role freshens him up a bit; I’m less sure about playing Danger as a bit of a comic relief figure who takes people too literally. Still, everyone’s got something to do, which is more than you can say for most Marvel team books, and makes a pleasant change.
It’s fundamentally a trad superhero team book, but enjoyably done; it’s what the X-books’ Peter David comic should be.
I know I mentioned this before, but “Serval” is a name used in French translaions of Wolverine comics. Wolverines being squat, angry North American weaseloids, where servals are sleek sub-Equatorial wild cats.
(Thanks, Wikipedia!)
I don’t know if it means anything (I guess what complicates things is that Wolverine the bloke hangs about with wolves like he’s ashamed or ignorant of his emblematic animal) but it makes me smile.
The number 1 here is probably going to get me to try out the first batch of issues when they come down to 69p on the ‘Ology. I’m saving my Full-Price PAD Money for the Spidey 2099 series, bien sur. I like Di Giandomenico’s art. He was good on that Battling Jack Murdock mini.
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Corporation buys rights to superhero team name…wasn’t that the premise of the Milligan/Allred X-FORCE? And one of the DOOM PATROl reboots…?
Sadly I dropped All-New X-Factor after 3 issues as it seemed to be taking a while to get to the advertised status quo of the book and Peter David was not hooking me in like he had done before with the Madrox led X-Factor. I wasn’t impressed with his take on Danger while Quicksilver seemed like he was barely in the book.
I was not taken with Di Giandomenico’s art as well. It seemed to be overly busy when it could be clearer in presenting story beats. The coloring was quite murky too. So much yellow.
I’d be game for checking the book out later once they get to the premise but $24 is a steep price of admission just to get to what the early solicitations promised.
I thoroughly enjoyed these issues. It’s weird seeing Gambit as the straight man, but David pulls it off. I’m keeping this on my pull list.
@I Grok Spock
I had this same problem when I picked up Issue #1 all the characters were pretty fun but it was taking its sweet time getting to the point of the series which meant there wasn’t really much of a hook to keep me going.
I just feel that while the series is decent superhero fare, it hasn’t yet found the spark that early issues of the previous Peter David X-Factor volume had.
I also think Lorna is being portrayed as pretty incompetent.
The odd-numbered issues have been better than the even ones, for my money.
Agree with everything you said, Paul, and I’ll add that the covers are gorgeous.
I haven’t gotten to read this yet, but will when it catches up to Marvel Comics Unlimited — from the art that I’ve seen of my costumes, though, wouldn’t the leg warmers sort of work too?
Once, just once, I’d love to be surprised by a comics writer presenting a non-Wayne/Stark* corporation as not “Gasp! In it just for the TehEvilz!” Especially from one employed long-term BY the Big Two corporate comic companies. It all becomes terrible predictable to the point of Paint-By-Number as soon as the word ‘corporation’ appears in a book’s solicitation.
(*Wayne or Stark corporate entities just as likely to be secretly corrupt under the busy-with-crimefighting noses of Batman/Iron Man depending on conspiratorial notions of specific anti-business writers)
That all said, though, I have to wonder what David has to really *say* with this book, besides moving a bunch of new characters (Polaris being an 80’s X-FACTOR character with a short stint at the end of the later book, memorable only for the parentage clarification issue) to a new location. The previous volume jumped around with the *idea* of the detective agency but never really did any real investigation, then swung headlong into a whole other magic plotline leftover from other books, but was really just a Peter David sitcom with the Peter David version of characters (compare it to the Bendis version — there’s more range, but there’s nevertheless a “change the characters to suit the writer’s need”). It worked well as a periphery book holding up on its own legacy and a sort of BWAHA-HA sense, but can that same sense work in MARVEL NOW, given how these new volumes tend to lose numbers and the publisher is even quicker to cancel and restart perceived failures?
I don’t have an answer, but I’m only asking since I haven’t seen Peter David describe WHY this book exists except that he had gone as far as he felt he could with the other characters and retired them (will he sequester these ones away and work them into a place where other writers can’t end up using them when he’s done too?), and now is starting up another volume for legacy’s sake. By way of comparison, he’s given the new SPIDER-MAN 2099 series a clear mandate within the Marvel Universe and Spider-Man storyline, so it’s not an issue of the writer himself, but seemingly something of this property as a title.
The use of X-FACTOR thus as a home for perceived damaged characters is thus apparently apropos, although the danger is that it seems that few are actually rehabilitated for use elsewhere in the Marvel Universe; rather the title seems a final stop on the way to limbo… 😉
I think that this is a Peter David X-book and that because of his steady, loyal following, he is allowed to form the team at his own pace.
It’s not perfect, but I’ll follow this series. David at his best more than compensates for the mistakes he makes.
@Brian — Polaris joined X-Factor in issue #71 in 1991, and stayed until the end of that run, in #149; more than half of the entire series, lasting seven years. Not really a “short stint.” The “parentage clarification issue” did not appear in X-Factor, but in Uncanny #430, years later.
What was memorable about Polaris’ first X-Factor run was the redefinition of her as (a) insecure and somewhat unstable, and (b) somewhat resentful of her codependence on Havok. She was nothing much in Claremont’s hands; he did very little with her outside of (a) Havok’s girlfriend, (b) puppet of the Shadow King, and (c) normal, graduate student who doesn’t want to be a superhero. That X-Factor run is arguably her defining arc as a superhero.
In fact, Polaris is the second-longest serving member of X-Factor, in any iteration:
Madrox — #71-100, #111-135 in v. 1, #1-50 v. 3, #200-258 = 160 (though not really a team member for some of those issues).
Polaris — #71-149 in v. 1, #230-258, and #1-6 = 113
Scott, Jean, Hank, Bobby and Warren — 70 issues.
short stint and parentage clarification were in reference to the last volume.
@errant — Ah. I misunderstood. Yes, the tail end of v.3 was pretty unmemorable in general.
As errant clarified, I was indeed referring to Polaris’s return in the latter volume.
And I perfectly recognize the value of a “Peter David X-Book” as something with a consistent fanbase, I just wonder if it’s something that can survive with a consistent-ENOUGH fanbase given how Marvel has seemed to tweak its allowance on long runs with the MARVEL NOW “season” model (and wondering how the change of cast and venue for the new volume might effect it as a jumping-on vs a jumping-off point). David’s work with the X-Factor characters always seemed on the far side of the Claremont model, not in terms of verbosity or such, but in terms of stressing long plotting & soap opera relations in lieu of traditional super hero adventuring. That’s certainly a method perhaps even MORE acceptable to comics’ diverse readership nowadays, but the question is can Marvel market it to the readers who would be interested in such a vehicle, instead of letting it languish as what appears to be a third-tier X-book alongside X-FORCE and a few DEADPOOL spinoffs?
Although the proper marketing of ancillary titles that branch outside of the usual wheelhouse is a longstanding question for the Big Two…
If you haven’t picked up on Serval being somehow related to Apocalypse, I don’t know what to tell you.
M4 – I like colour by numbers books, so care to elaborate on the connections to Apocalypse?
@Niall,
I have no idea what m4 is hinting at. My best guess is that both Apocalypse and the serval are from North Africa (though different parts). Apparently you and I are too dumb to understand to oh-too-obvious hints, and he can’t dumb it down anymore so that we can.
Someone else pointed out to me that both Polaris and Gambit have been horsemen of Apocalypse. I suppose that’s another connection. And, of course, Apocalypse was X-Factor’s original arch-nemesis (after Louise Simonson decided not to use the Owl).
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