X-Factor #5 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-FACTOR vol 5 #5
“Prisoners of the Fun Room”
Writer: Mark Russell
Artist: Bob Quinn
Colour artist: Jesus Aburtov
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Editor: Darren Shan
X-FACTOR:
Despite their underwhelming performance so far in the series, Havok, Pyro and Frenzy all draw the line at being asked to support the new Mutant Surveillaince Act (supposedly prompted by X-Term). They also object to having their phones searched in an attempt to find the X-Term informant, though to be honest, given their jobs, it seems pretty remarkable that this is only coming up now.
At any rate, Pyro is so annoyed at this treatment that he unilaterally declares that the team are going to walk out, and threatens to fight the military. Havok tries to calm the situation, but moments later X-Term attack anyway.
Frenzy also turns out to have leaked the team’s location, presumably because she doesn’t trust these people either.
Wintergeist appears as a member of the team again; he and Cecilia Reyes have been joyously reconciled after the previous issue. Unfortunately for him, Wintergeist is summarily killed by X-Term for betraying them by throwing him out of a helicopter. This seems an odd way of trying to kill a teleporter, but he’s barely conscious at the time, and we do see a body.
Granny Smite and Xyber don’t come to Nevermor with the rest of the team, apparently because they’ve already been checked out and confirmed not to be the X-Term mole that General Mills has been worrying about. For plot purposes, that also serves to insulate them from what looks to be X-Factor either breaking with the government or coming very close to it – and also means that the version of X-Factor in this issue is heavily skewed to the more experienced and competent X-characters, not that it does them that much good.
SUPPORTING CAST:
Rodger Broderick shows up for a briefing in this issue, but General Mills gets more of the spotlight for once. It turns out she wasn’t lying about the X-Term mole, but she’s also not as competent as she thinks she is, since her entire operation has failed to spot a rudimentary security flaw. She does at least acknowledge that she’s at fault here.
Mills wants X-Factor to support a “Mutant Surveillance Act”, supposedly prompted by X-Term and intended to monitor extremist groups.
Polaris is tipped off by Frenzy about X-Factor’s whereabouts, and shows up to rescue them from X-Term. Bruin from issue #2 is with her. When we last saw them, they were being held back by the Mutant Ungerground militia, but there’s no sign of those guys here. Polaris mentions having saved Bruin’s life. She’s also unsure about forgiving Havok’s lapse of judgment in going anywhere near this version of X-Factor.
VILLAINS:
Darkstar continues to serve as the leader of X-Term, despite being traditionally a hero. She puts out an announcement that the group will retaliate for the attack on their base in issue #1, which is covered in the news as a threat to the public (not unreasonably).
In fact, though X-Term just want to raid the secret US military base Nevermor and rescue McCloud. McCloud is the mutant we saw living in government custody in issue #1, seemingly quite happily. He turns out to have been the X-Term mole, having been in touch with them by email via the smart fridge in his room. McCloud seems genuinely surprised to be rescued. He seems to have a body made of knock-out gas which only dissipates when he’s asleep, meaning that he has to take sleeping pills to deliberately knock people out.
Wintergeist suspects that McCloud’s rescue is actually an excuse to kill him in revenge for his betrayal, and he might well be right.
Most of the X-Term members are generic uniformed soldiers, though one gets named as Phantasm; he seems to invisible or at least translucent, and able to phase through walls (though his clothes are left behind).
MISCELLANEOUS:
Page 4 panel 2: “Your imperialist attack on Kunashir Island”. Issue #1.
Page 4 panel 2: Fartech is the company responsible for the moon base in issue #3, and Paperclip was their AI system from that issue. It went rather badly wrong.
Page 9 panel 5: “I got the world’s greatest face tattoo removed for you lot!” Pyro’s skull tattoo was removed between issues #3-4.
Page 15: “The door marked Top Secret.” Previously seen in issue #1.
“He seems to have a body made of knock-out gas which only dissipates when he’s asleep, meaning that he has to take sleeping pills to deliberately knock people out.”
I think the way McCloud’s powers work is that his gaseous form takes on the properties of whatever he consumes. If he takes sleeping pills, he becomes sleeping gas. If he drinks poison, he becomes poison gas.
It does make you wonder though- was McCloud a hardened criminal before this? Or was he just a normal dude that was imprisoned by the government for so long that he was willing to do anything Darkstar asked to get free? He WAS largely responsible for Rusty’s death. so the Original Five might want revenge against him.
Note that Darkstar has X-Factor wrapped up in what appear to be normal wires. How did she expect that to hold them once they regained consciousness? It’s possible she disabled Pyro’s flamethrower but the others? Frenzy could easily break free. Cecilia can make spikes with her force field. Alex can blast his way free.
Darkstar continues to be written horribly out of character. Not only does this issue make it clear that everything Wintergeist told us about her last issue was true but she kills Wintergeist in front of his girlfriend just because he left her service when she asked him to kill a kid.
it makes sense that Frenzy was the one communicating with Lorna. Lorna was helping Magneto on Genosha and Frenzy was one of Magneto’s Acolytes at the time.
This issue shows how Mark Russell is incapable of writing good superhero fights. Lorna controls one of the fundamental forces of the universe. Darkstar manipulates the Darkforce, which the elder vampire Varnae once used to defeat Thor. With a halfway decent writer writing it, a clash between the two of them should be epic. But instead, Russell just has Lorna bring down the helicopter Darkstar is traveling in.
“what looks to be X-Factor either breaking with the government or coming very close to it”
I think the point of this issue is to get the members of X-Factor to a point where Doom looks like an improvement over Broderick and Mills.
Is Wintergeist the single lamest “one will die!!!!” payoff ever? If not, then who?
A big problem with this book is that it’s trying to do comedy and consistently failing. This character is General Mills, like the cereal company. This character is Granny Smite, like a variety of apple. The evil AI is named Paperclip, like Clippy. Cecilia is being unprofessional and making out with her boyfriend. Etc.
These aren’t jokes. Those are just joke-shaped ideas. Look at, say, Catch-22. It’s not inherently funny that a character is named Major Major. It’s funny that he was promoted to Major by an IBM, and now Major
Major is completely out of his depths. Do more with these ideas, Russell.
Something about this book continues to leave me cold – can’t quite put my finger on it. It feels like Russell’s trying to invoke X-Statix without actually committing to any of the bits that made X-Statix work: the body count isn’t being treated dismissively (for characters who don’t matter) or tragically (for characters like Edie); any critique he may be making of, say, the military-industrial complex falls flat because X-Term *are* shown to be dangerous and aggressive; and the team’s internal dynamic is practically nonexistent.
I’m giving it another issue or two because I want to see what happens when/if Warren comes back, but this is one of the FtA books I’m closest to dropping.
Naming a character General Mills is exactly what I expect from Russell’s writing: a complete non sequitur of a pun that adds absolutely nothing to the character, and serves no purpose in the story except to ostensibly amuse Russell himself.
“A big problem with this book is that it’s trying to do comedy and consistently failing. This character is General Mills, like the cereal company. This character is Granny Smite, like a variety of apple. The evil AI is named Paperclip, like Clippy.”
It just occurred to me that Russell definitely thinks Fartech (Fart Tech) is hilarious.
I buy that there might be reference to Clippy, but given that issue #3 was literally titled “Project Paperclip,” a real life operation that saw the US bring Nazi scientists to work for the US (as Chris V pointed out at the time), I have to assume Russell has some argument about government hypocrisy and blowback buried in their somewhere.
Project Paperclip is referencing the “paperclip maximizer”, which is a gray goo-type AI doomsday scenario.
Really? Nobody?
This is easily my least favorite issue of the series (and I seem to be in the minority with this as one of my top From the Ashes titles). I like the reveal of the invasive technology running through the prison being the “traitor”, but it didn’t play as clever as some of Russell’s other satirical takes on AI and media. Cecilia’s intensely short romance made me laugh. Post-Krakoa, I do find the way this book kills lesser used or brand new characters off to be hilarious. Bob Quinn’s art remains a good fit for the book but I need them to go somewhere besides X-Term soon or I’ll have to drop it.
Omar Karindu immediately pointed out that the issue in question was probably a reference to the thought experiment warning that a sufficiently advanced AI given an order to maximize production of paperclips would follow this order by using all available energy and resources to create an unlimited amount of paperclips from everything in existence.
It’s a triple reference by Russell. Project Paperclip is the literal name of the US intelligence agency program to bring Nazis into the US after the war. Then, there’s the Clippy reference.
You can read these comics on so many levels. heh
I see Russell’s X-Factor, at one level, as being a cynical and ridiculous statement about the cyclical nature of the state of mutantkind. It bears some similarities to (the non-pessimistic) NYX, but I’d argue that in the same way as an issue of NYX featured Ms. Marvel in a role from Ghostbusters II, X-Factor doesn’t always work at that level.
All the mutants were united on Krakoa. As soon as Krakoa fell, the mutants have found themselves quickly returning to the same old divisive roles they had fallen into for years before Krakoa. Some of the mutants in this series sold out to work for the government. There are the same struggles against the other mutants who have taken up the role of “evil mutants”. There’s a third faction, the “Mutant Underground”, taking a middle ground in opposition to both sides, but they fail to bring any new ideas or be able to accomplish anything either.
I think it is a problem that each comic has its own shadowy organisations, which didn’t exist a few months ago. There’s X-Term and Morlocks and Hellion’s thing and two X-Mens and Graymalkin and Factor 3 and I’m sure even more that I can’t think of off the top of my head. It would be interesting if there was commentary on the fractal splintering of the mutant community, or some allusion to something like the rise of feudal powers in Europe after the western Roman empire collapsed or something, but as far as I have seen, there’s not. It’s just all these new groups just existing, some duplicating others, and none of them seem to talk to each other, let alone share resources (except Banshee). I very much doubt there’s any coordination among editors. It almost makes one yearn for Hickman’s micromanaged and monolithic plot.
I’m so glad Al Ewing is doing thr Metamorpho with Steve Lieber and not Russell.
As others have pointed out, this comic isn’t working because it’s neither fish nor fowl. The satire isn’t sharp enough, and it isn’t a great super-hero comic, either. It’s trying to do too much, and not succeeding. The Milligan/ Allred X-Force/X-Statix worked because the super-hero plots didn’t get in the way of the satire and dark humor. I hope X-Factor gets that balance right, or I’m dropping it.