X-Factor #10 annotations
X-FACTOR vol 5 #10
“Survivors Guild”
Writer: Mark Russell
Artist: Bob Quinn
Colour artist: Jesus Aburtov
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Editor: Darren Shan
This is the final issue of X-Factor, which has been cancelled. So as you’d expect, it’s a cut-to-the-chase wrap-up issue.
Although the solicitations always had the cover art showing Havok laying flowers on X-Factor’s grave, the solicitation text bears little resemblance to the story as published: “General Mills gives X-Factor one final test of loyalty! How will Angel, Pyro and the others complete their mission without selling out their people? Can Havok still make a difference? And what final secret is X-Factor hiding?”
X-FACTOR
Angel. The subplot about his out-of-character behaviour is completely dropped, assuming that it actually was a subplot (after all, Darkstar’s been wildly out of character for the whole series). But since Angel’s behaviour is basically back to normal in this issue, it looks like someone just made a call that there wasn’t time to resolve the plot and it was best to brush it under the carpet.
Angel is upset about the backlash from the mutant community after his capture of Polaris in the previous issue (more accurately, immediately after it). This makes him realise that the only people who he’s pleasing are people he doesn’t like. He switches sides when the rest of the team turn on the military.
Granny Smite. She’s exuberant about plunging from an exploding aircraft, yelling that “This might be the day I die!” She doesn’t seem terribly bothered about anyone else’s fate, but maybe she’s just looking on the bright side.
Xyber. He gets to use his powers to destroy the technology in General Mills’ prison complex, allowing everyone to escape. He’s still terrified that he’ll kill himself in the process.
Pyro. His current novel in progress is called The Lusty Woodsman. He doesn’t actively stand up to the military, but sensibly leaves with the rest of the group once everything has collapsed.
Cecilia Reyes is also there, but doesn’t get anything much to do.
SUPPORTING CHARACTERS
Havok. He takes charge of saving everyone from the poison gas attack in a fairly effective way. He feels guilty about being distracted from helping Polaris last issue, though as I said before, this doesn’t entirely make sense. We’re apparently meant to accept that Mills went to the trouble of sending him on a detour mission to stop him from interfering in the arrest of Polaris, but he couldn’t have interfered anyway – he didn’t know where she was, or that anyone was coming after her.
In his narration, he talks about regarding himself as a failure who drags other people down with him, making him feel guilty for imposing himself on the likes of Polaris. This is by way of explanation for his past behaviour; he and Lorna are happily reunited at the end. She still doesn’t want to be with him, but they part on good terms, and Alex is happy to have turned a corner.
Frenzy. Doesn’t get to say much, but she’s there.
McCloud. He shows up to rescue X-Factor after their plane plunges into the sea. He still has the “Golf Daddy”, the yacht that he stole in issue #6. This really does seem to be pure coincidence on the page, but you could argue that someone in the Mutant Underground was able to sense what was happening and tip him off, if you like.
Polaris. She’s unbothered by being in prison because the Mutant Underground is a movement rather than an organised group. The discovery that Jovius has betrayed them bothers her a lot more. She’s much happier with Alex now that he’s come to recognise that working for the government was a mistake.
Jovius. Mills claims that he’s been giving them information about the whereabouts of safe houses and “every high-value mutant on the planet” from the beginning – though it’s far from obvious that Mills has demonstrated an ability to locate much more than D-listers. She does credit him in this issue with locating Polaris’s safehouse. Quite how being the Krakoan record keeper allows him to locate a post-Krakoan safehouse is not obvious. Maybe it’s a safehouse that dates from the Krakoan era?
His back story was previously covered in a flashback in issue #6, narrated by Bruin. In that version, Jovius was responsible for the Krakoan records centre, and sacrificed his life to prevent Orchis from getting hold of the information. (The flashback is, shall we say, difficult to reconcile with the details of what actually happened in X-Men: Hellfire Gala, since the mutants ought to be marching blankly through gates rather than resisting Orchis, but… okay.) Bruin was inspired by this noble sacrifice and, presumably, launched the Jovius-themed Mutant Underground.
According to Jovius, Bruin was telling the truth about what he saw. However, Jovius survived being gunned down because of his mutant physiology and extra organs. Orchis took him prisoner to find out why he wasn’t dead, and initially planned to sell him as spare organs. General Mills bought him from Orchis and offered him freedom if he spent five years helping the military. In his account, he accepted this deal because of misguided gratitude to Mills for rescuing him from Orchis.
Despite having the opportunity to escape, the mentally broken Jovius locks himself back into his cell at the end, so the US government still have access to his information. If it’s as useful as all that, you’d think that Polaris might give the Alaskan team a call and suggest that Magik teleport the guy out, whether he likes it or not.
VILLAINS
General Mills. Belatedly, she figures out that she can’t beat the Mutant Underground “the old-fashioned way”, and that the sensible thing to do is to break their faith in Jovius. She now regards X-Factor as a “major mistake” and orders her soldiers to try and kill them – to be fair, only after they’ve not just turned on her but literally attacked her base.
Black Wolf (Ordo, Trident and Strych9). Strych9’s decision to release his poison gas and kill everyone aboard, including his own teammates, results in him killing his own teammates while X-Factor escape. (All three are unconscious at the start of the issue.) All we saw last issue was Strych9 breaking his own containment helmet, which was presumably for other people’s benefit, so it’s not obvious why he seems to be out cold at the start of this issue. That said, presumably he was expecting to kill everyone else on the plane and then die in a plane crash. Nobody makes any effort to rescue him or his teammates, but to be fair, there isn’t really much opportunity.
Rodger Broderick. Characteristically enthusiastic about the level of engagement from Angel’s capture of Polaris in the previous issue, and brushes off the backlash. He tries to offer Angel more money to stay.
Darkstar. She continues to yell, scream and generally swear vengeance. Her portrayal throughout this series has been completely out of character – she’s not even a villain normally – so chances are it’ll all be quietly forgotten the next time she shows up.
This series committed the worst crime of wasting some interesting characters and being… Just boring. Frenzy and Cecilia and Pyro, what was even the point?
No memorable scenes, dialogue, art or action. A series destined to be forgotten!
I think the best way to handwave this series away is to reveal it was all part of some Beyond Corporation scheme, and everyone involved basically got the Nextwave treatment (brainwashing, gaslighting, various kinds of manipulation). Maybe it was a knockoff program devised by Broderick which is why it wasn’t nearly as effective or surreal.
That way, anyone involved can indeed show up later and go “Yeah, that was a really weird couple of months, I’m better now.”
And then Rusty and Feral show up, alive and well, and just shrug. They got better also.
There’s just not much from this run which I feel is worth keeping; better by far to just wave it off.
Now, if Alex and the others chose to continue as a proper team on their own… that might be okay, but they’d need a good writer and more importantly a real reason to continue operating. Maybe there’s room for a publicity-friendly, media-forward, mutant team out there doing heroic stuff, since out of the three X-Men teams, Scott’s is the only one acting -as- a heroic team and they’re not faring too well in the public eye.
Farewell, this version of X-Factor. Your time among us was not short enough.
Forget-Me-Not disappears between last issue and this issue without any explanation. Yes. I know that his power is being forgotten but still…
As Si pointed out earlier, non-ferrous metals seem to work against Magneto and Lorna like the color yellow works against
Green Lantern. Warren as able to capture Lorna because his wings were non-ferrous but this issue Lorna has no trouble levitating soldiers that don’t seem to be carrying anything metal.
” Quite how being the Krakoan record keeper allows him to locate a post-Krakoan safehouse is not obvious. Maybe it’s a safehouse that dates from the Krakoan era?”
I think the fact that Jovius was able to tell Lorna was at the safehouse shows he’s not just a record keeper. Even if it was a Krakoan-era safehouse, how would he know that Lorna was there, as opposed to the Factory or Haven? Unless Lorna and Alex had a pre-existing agreement on Krakoa that Lorna would go to that safehouse if Cecilia’s boyfriend was killed and Jovius knew about it, he would have to have some other way of locating Jovius.
I think that Jovius is a mutant like Caliban with the power to locate other mutants. Not that it matters since he’s probably never going to be seen again.
Cecilia should have been able to protect X-Factor from Mills’s soldiers using her force field powers. It seemed like she was only unable to do that because the plot required Angel to redeem himself by protecting them.
“She continues to yell, scream and generally swear vengeance.”
The implication is she kills Mills and Broderick right after this issue ends.
Two things worked for me in this issue: Alex trying to make things right and being written as competent and Jovius’s arc. You could draw a parallel between Jovius justifying his actions in helping to oppress his fellow mutants and Angel realizing how wrong he’s been, but the latter plot was poorly done and not worth considering.
I liked Bob Quinn’s expressive characters and clear storytelling. I’d like to see him work on another series, preferably a comedy book that’s actually funny.
Using the cover logo for the grave looks awful. At least it’s only a Greg Land cover being ruined.
Overall, this volume of X-Factor wasn’t very good and I won’t miss it.
If Forget Me Not being forgotten and getting no wrap up is intentional it’s the first funny thing of the whole series
I think this series did a better job with the final wrap-up than X-Force or NYX (despite being a worse series). Sure, we didn’t resolve the Angel plot, but they pretty neatly put everything away.
That’s probably because nothing here really tried to matter or have any weight, or maybe it’s just that they expected the cancellation.
I do expect us to get another X-Factor soon, but playing it straight or at least limiting the comedy to where it was in the first Peter David era. The idea of a government-sponsored team of mutant heroes sorta requires a government that’s not cartoonishly evil, but I expect that’s where we’ll end up at the end of the From the Ashes era anyway with the inevitable reboot of the school.
The no prize explanation for magnetic powers is that they can use Lorentz force to affect any conductive material. But as that requires multiple more powerful fields (relative to a field affecting a ferromagnetic material) they can’t always pull it off.
I asked Mark Russell on Twitter if the lack of Forget-Me-Not was a meta joke, his reply:
“What are you talking about? Half the issue was about him.”
Magneto and Lorna have always been able to levitate people by controlling the iron in the blood.
I think an official mutant team can work but as said this version was just obviously in the wrong. I would have had Val turn up at the end to offer to do X-factor properly.
I was cautiously optimistic when this X-Factor was announced. X-Factor as a workplace comedy under the US government? Not only could that work, it already did in the 90s version.
And then the book started coming out and it wasn’t funny and didn’t have anything to say about the government. And on top of that was at exactly the wrong angle to the existing continuity to rub me the wrong way – what with all the characters written out of character, having Alex and Lorna together again with no regards to what their status actually was for the past… um… many years*, the stuff with the fall of Krakoa, the weird off-hand mention of mutant registration in one issue, that whole Gigosha thing…
Weirdly, it might be the only book that actually came off better in the X-Manhunt crossover.
I will always remember fondly the 10 issues of Krakoan X-Factor. I will probably forget these 10 issues in a year or two.
*- wasn’t the tail end of X-Factor Investigations the last time Havok and Polaris were actually together? Havok got pulled to Uncanny Avengers where he had a fling (and a now-nonexistent child) with Wasp, then he was inverted by Axis, and that sort of lasted up to Krakoa, where he was pining after Madelyne.
Yeah, I think that’s right. The last time Havok was with Polaris before this series was around 2012.
I’m anxiously awaiting the return of Granny Smite.
(Honestly, I always got a chuckle from her.)
Honestly if Sinister got his hands on Granny Smite’s DNA it would be game over, imagine the chimeras he could make.
Looks like I’ll be the only one to miss this series. It was one of my favorites of the new era and I always looked forward to it’s weird energy. Russell’s sense of humor is on my wavelength and I always enjoy books about mutant losers. I think this had some great satire and hopefully it finds an audience someday.
Does McCloud accompany Havok et al when they attack Nevermor? Or does he just give them his yacht? What would his incentive be for either, especially the first possibility, which would be personally risky for him?
There’s an unexpected fog right before the attack, so I guess McCloud has to be there, somewhere? But we never see him again in the issue after the mid-ocean pickup.
@Pseu42- Remember, Mills and Broderick were holding McCloud against his will, so he has reason to want to get back at them. But it’s odd how he just disappears in the middle of the book.
Justice for Cecilia Reyes. Meaning, please just stop using the character altogether: this is embarrassingly bad.