X-Factor #10 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-FACTOR vol 4 #10
“Finale”
by Leah Williams, David Baldeon, David Messina, Lucas Werneck & Israel Silva
COVER / PAGE 1. X-Factor dance at the Hellfire Gala.
This is the final issue of the series, and it’s a Hellfire Gala tie-in. So there’s an awful lot of racing to tie up loose ends here.
PAGES 2-4. X-Factor prepare for the Gala.
Jean-Paul and Kyle are discussing the Five’s practice of removing traumatic memories when resurrecting mutants – at least in those cases where they understand that it was requested. The most obvious case of that happening was with Domino in X-Force, though in that case Colossus lied about Domino’s wishes.
Rachel and Daken are talking about Daken’s relationship with Aurora, which has evidently just become common knowledge (at least within the team). Off to the side is the new Rockslide, resurrected in “X of Swords”, whose plot never really got a chance to go anywhere.
Rachel says that she misses the “old Mojoverse programming”. Presumably she’s referring to the programmes that Aurora was watching earlier in the series, rather than the films Mojo was making when she was a prisoner there in the run-up to Excalibur vol 1. The Mojoverse was overthrown last issue, with Sofia Mantega being installed to run the place.
Prodigy has received a package from himself, but we’ll get to that.
Polaris and Aurora. Polaris is presumably nervous because she’s planning to put herself forward for election to the X-Men. As we’ve already seen in X-Men #21, she gets in.
Eye-Boy is wandering around looking harmless and picking up everything that’s going on.
The Five show up to leave as a group. They presumably work more closely with X-Factor than any other Krakoan group, given X-Factor’s death-investigation remit.
PAGE 5-6. X-Factor arrive at the Gala.
Carmen. This is very interesting. The nervous girl that Eye-Boy strikes up a conversation with is Carmen Cruz – Gimmick from the Young X-Men, over in Children of the Atom. But the Young X-Men aren’t mutants and the whole premise of their series is that they can’t get to Krakoa. Given her nervousness – and the absence of any of her teammates – this surely isn’t a mistake, but foreshadowing for something yet to happen in her home title. (Children didn’t have a Hellfire Gala tie-in issue – their issue this month takes place on the day when the Gala is publicly announced, and so it hasn’t actually reached the Gala itself yet.)
“Laura … while you were gone.” Laura Kinney, the second Wolverine, and Daken’s sister. She’s been “gone” due to the Children of the Vault arc over in X-Men, where she spent a (very) extended period of time locked in the Vault, but doesn’t remember any of it due to resurrection. Gabby is Scout, their younger sister – she’ll be found dead later in the evening, as seen in New Mutants #19.
Jubilee from Excalibur is the woman encouraging Kyle and Jean-Paul to start a family.
PAGE 7. Recap and credits, in the Hellfire Gala modified format.
PAGE 8. Prodigy visits Club Pepper.
This scene relates to the subplot about Prodigy investigating how he actually died, before his previous resurrection. We established in issue #8 that he had left himself a hidden message embedded in a photograph of himself at this LA nightclub. The staff at the nightclub are pleasantly surprised to see him because they apparently knew or suspected that the guy he left with was a serial killer – understandably, if he’s the first regular to return after departing with the man in question.
PAGES 9-10. Shatterstar arrives at the Gala.
Prestige is dancing with Kate Pryde, her former teammate from the X-Men and the original Excalibur.
Shatterstar‘s quest to save Siryn from the Morrigan was very hastily rushed through at the tail end of the previous issue. If you hadn’t guessed that this was to do with the book’s cancellation, Rachel helpfully points out that “it should have taken him months.”
We’ve already seen Shatterstar’s return in Excalibur #21. His reunion with ex-parter Rictor goes badly, but showing that here would screw up the sense of closure. This storyline is presumably going to be continued in Excalibur, where Rictor is a regular character.
PAGES 11-12. Prodigy confronts the serial killer.
We’re not really told the details of how he found the guy, but there just isn’t time, nor does it really matter. Buck Thatcher is a new character; since he’s a millionaire film producer, I assume this was going to be a story about the predatory elite committing sexual violence with impunity. There’s timing for you.
PAGE 13. The X-Men election.
Kyle. Somebody finally asks the obvious question of what he’s doing on Krakoa (and we’ve seen in other books that they won’t even accept human refugees onto the island, after all), but it’s the final issue so it gets brushed off as a running gag.
Polaris is leaving the team on being elected to the X-Men, as we already saw in X-Men #21. She apologises for not giving advance warning; Northstar wishes her well.
PAGE 14. Aurora and Northstar.
The first panel is a repeat from Hellions #12 – Wild Child is making a clumsy attempt to rekindle his relationship with Aurora, and has flown into a rage on realising that she’s with Daken. His teammate Greycrow is subduing him.
Daken finally takes a moment to explain the circumstances of Aurora’s death back in issue #1 – she killed the bad guy, and tried to cover it up by suicide. (“I know that you killed Eddie. And that you tried to cover it up by dying.”) What actually happened in issue #1, according to X-Factor’s investigation, was that Aurora hit Eddie Avidan with a car and both plunged over a bridge; the car had had its brake lines cut. At the time, X-Factor assumed that this was sabotage by an anti-mutant activist and that the unexplained question was what Aurora had been doing there in the first place. Daken’s theory – confirmed by Aurora’s reaction – seems to be that she sabotaged the car herself in order to provide deniability when she killed Avidan.
This, of course, is a violation of the rule against killing humans. Daken says that he went back and killed Avidan’s gang, so that they’re both in it together. I’m fairly sure that’s new information.
PAGES 15-19. X-Factor gather to help Prodigy.
This is the explanation for Prodigy’s mystery death. The basic idea is that (during the Krakoan era) Prodigy became aware of this potential serial killer, and went with him as part of an investigation, knowing that he’d be resurrected on Krakoa in the end. He says that he deliberately timed this between his Cerebro backups, so that if he was killed, he wouldn’t have any memories of it on resurrection – he calls this “plausible deniability”, but I don’t really understand what he would need to deny.
I confess that I don’t really follow the mechanics of all this. In issue #7, Prodigy claimed that he believed he had died “during the same O.N.E. attack on Xavier’s Institute that wiped out a bunch of other kids”. Whatever he was referring to there, he apparently had no memories of being on Krakoa before his current resurrection… which doesn’t really fit with him timing the incident to take place between Krakoan-era backups. He wouldn’t know about the backups before he was on Krakoa. And if he wanted to leave a message for his future self, why did he go about it in such an incredibly arcane and roundabout fashion? Perhaps these would have been explained if the story had played out in its full length.
Eye-Boy has a Krakoan word that appears on his chest (or perhaps floats in the air next to his hands) when he’s making the hand shapes. It changes from panel to panel. It reads AUM – VAM – RAM – and finally ANG when he gets the power to work. (Was it meant to say BANG?) This is evidently a hint of where the sub-plot about Eye-Boy gaining new powers would have gone, though how it’s an outgrowth of his existing abilities is less than obvious.
PAGES 20-22. The Scarlet Witch is found.
Prodigy is reunited with Speed to round off the series. But we end the book with Speed discovering the corpse of the Scarlet Witch, who was dancing contentedly with Magneto when we last saw her in S.W.O.R.D. #6. Speed is her reincarnated son. This presumably gets us into the vexed question of whether the Scarlet Witch is in any sense a mutant, or just an experiment of the High Evolutionary who was successfully passed off as a mutant for many years – or indeed whether that’s close enough for Cerebro anyway. After all, it seems to have some records of Tier, who isn’t a true mutant either. That said, if there’s going to be a trial, presumably she’s staying dead… for now, anyway.
PAGES 23-24. Farewell messages from the creative team.
PAGE 25. Trailers. The line “The Party Is Over” refers not just to the end of this series, but also to the fact that this is the final Hellfire Gala issue – Cable #11 is not a tie-in.
The Krakoan reads NEXT: TRIAL OF MAGNETO.
PAGE 26. The X-Men inspect the body.
Wolverine, in his X-Force security gear, immediately identifies Magneto as the top suspect.
I don’t even know if my point came across.
First, I made the Jack Kirby mistake. Now, I don’t know if my point is clear.
I think I’m tired.
Let me explain myself, if my point isn’t clear…James Baldwin was a Black queer man, Samuel R. Delaney is a Black queer man.
Both of them didn’t seem to have problems getting books published, and much earlier than the ‘70s.
I’m not saying they didn’t face prejudice.
Interesting factoid: Denny O’Neil got Samuel Delaney to take over writing Wonder Woman for him, but Delaney’s run ended after two issues due to DC taking drastic actions due to the “powerless” WW direction’s sales being low.
However, I’m not sure the reason why Marvel Comics never had any Black queer writers.
Was Marvel prejudiced in this instance?
Was Marvel concerned about public sentiment, while book publishers were not?
Was it simply a case that no Black queer writers were interested in writing for Marvel?
You really think a lot of the parents of the kids reading comics would have been happy with a Jewish name on the cover?
I very much do not.
That’s probably why they never put writer credits on the covers until the late-‘90s!
OK, so Stanley Leiber is a more obvious case.
“Samuel R. Delaney”…he could be white, black, straight, gay.
Even if you are right, that doesn’t really explain the fact that Marvel hired many Jewish men, but not any African-American or queer writers.
Oh I didn’t mean to explain it all away, I’m just saying.
They didn’t hire diverse people because they didn’t want to and if it got around they had a gay writer they would have taken a huge hit.
I just don’t think you can exactly get mad about it.
Funny books aren’t any worse about it than anyone else was at the time.
James Baldwin was writing overtly queer literature during the 1950s. Not the ‘70s, but the ‘50s.
Giovanni’s Room was a very high-profile novel.
The book publisher was perfectly fine.
I’m not saying Baldwin was the first either, I was just using his name as an example due to his being African-American. Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar is even earlier, as another example.
A comic writer would avoid overt gay themes in their fiction, so there’s probably little chance Marvel had to worry if they had hired a gay man.
I wasn’t mad at Marvel about it.
I was, in fact, giving them the benefit of the doubt. I thought that maybe Black queer people who were reading comics never pursued writing comic books.
Samuel Delaney did briefly, but because his friend Denny O’Neil asked him. I don’t think Delaney wanted to give up his science fiction career to write comics full time.
It’s not expected that Goodman or Lee should go out in the streets and try to find a Black gay person to (please) write some of their comics.
“I do think the idea that mutants should solely exist as a metaphor, therefore all mutants being white and straight is perfectly acceptable is problematic.”
I never said that at all. I think this book could have done more with Northstar and his husband, in terms of the Krakoan attitude towards non-mutants who live on the island.
The fact that I have to point out here that I can accept there are or should be gay characters who get to have stories while they are gay is…I don’t really know what it is, but it’s not good.
I also never said it was right or fair that all the creators of old were straight white males, did I?
Of course I totally take the point that there’s a long history of topical stories. As a kid they didn’t bother me, but as an adult I find them tiresome, generally.
And I take the point that there are both topical and identity focused stories, but in recent years there’s a greater occurrence of stories that are both.
The fact that writer’s face of sexuality of anything gets brought up so much is not a good thing for me, as I was brought up in the time when those things were ideally supposed to not matter – perhaps the key difference between 20th century ideas of equality and current identity politics, which I believe to be much more divisive than it is helpful to anybody.
*writers’ race or sexuality or anything
Dave-I think we mostly agree on these issues.
I’m not saying that a writer’s race or sexuality or anything else does matter.
I have always been of the opinion that art matters, not the artist.
I don’t care what Comic Writer A did in their personal life. If they are excellent writers, then I am concerned with their work, not them on a personal level.
I was mostly just joining in the conversation others were having.
I am a fan of Chris Claremont, so I read facts about him on the internet. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have known (or cared) that he is Jewish. If I like a writer, I will probably read about their personal life, just to understand them better, not to judge them.
Sometimes, I’d rather not know, because someone is a real asshole. I will still enjoy their work, but I kind of wish I wouldn’t have known.
This isn’t about Claremont, by the way, who seems like a good person.
I do not think it is WRONG for, say, a white guy to write an African-American character (or vice-versa).
I do think, though, that if I’m writing about Australia and have never lived in Australia, to get a more authentic story, it would probably be best to have a story written by an Australian writer.
Now, again, sometimes an Australian writer isn’t available. So, I’m not saying the American guy who has only ever read about Australia on Wikipedia should not write this story. Just, it may not be authentic.
I think intent is far more important.
I think the idea of equality does figure in though, as equality means equal opportunity.
Therefore, if Marvel solely hires straight, white males…Is the reason innocent, no African-American women (for example) wanted the job or were qualified? Or, is it that Marvel would rather not hire them?
That’s when the issue could come up.
I disagree that the idea of “identity politics” is a recent phenomenon.
The 1970s Marvel Comics were filled with relevant stories written by liberal writers who wanted to share their views in their fictional stories.
As far as the issue of gay representation (or anything else), I say I’d like to see this not because I want to see stories that are going to preach.
I more want to see this inclusion in stories about mutants to show how a mutant society could look different than the society we live in now.
There’s no reason to make a big deal about it, but that no one really cares about things like race or sexuality in a mutant society.
I think identity politics are, for the most part, divisive as well.
Unfortunately, when you have a society which IS divided, it is easy to play up those divisions for the sake of politics.
My own politics are MYOB. It’d be better if that were the case for society, but that’s not the world we live in.
Someone is transgender? OK. This effects you how? MYOB!
Someone posted something you don’t like online? OK. Does it really matter? MYOB!
One more thing about “identity politics”, I don’t think it’s right to give anyone rights or benefits that others do not share.
So, if someone is concerned about African-American people facing poverty, the same types of issues can be applied to white people facing poverty.
This is a type of politics which can unite people, instead of divide.
I think that is important.
I think that has been lost on many who’d like to divide and argue.
There are far more things that can bring us all together, but it is in the interests of an elite few (across the political spectrum) to try to keep us divided.
“I was brought up in the time when those things were ideally supposed to not matter”
Which time would that be?
I thought of one more point…I find it funny when you say that a “gay person can’t have other stories while they are gay” and then complain about how comics have changed.
I remember making a point at one point where I said that Don McGregor really stood out at Marvel in the 1970s because he wrote stories about Black people where they were written as fully autonomous humans. It seemed like every other writer at Marvel in the 1970s had to use black characters to make a point.
Also, (I wish there was an edit button) I think you are in agreement with the majority of people who complained about this story.
It seems like instead of using a Black queer man to tell a story about a gay serial murderer, they wanted to see Prodigy used better…as in “used as part of a story”.
So, in that regard, I think most of us agree.
The only point where I broke with that is to say that if that is the story Williams wants to write, that is her decision as she is the writer hired by Marvel…not me, not you.
I just don’t agree with those who want to burn Williams at the stake for daring to write this story.
Not anyone on this web-site. I find almost all of the discussion on this subject here to be very mature and reasoned.
I’m just of the opinion, “It’s a comic story. No one will remember it in a couple of months!”.
That’s not to say that we cannot discuss it with maturity on the internet (which we are)…just there’s no reason to hate Williams for writing a poor story.
Personally, I don’t care who writes the books, I just want to be entertained.
The Prodigy storyline didn’t work for me more because of it’s execution than anything else. I felt it needed a few more issues to flesh it out further and better. And it isn’t like Eye-boy came and saved the day, Prodigy had already taken down his killer.
Overall, I liked this series. Not as much as I am enjoying Hellions or Marauders or X-force, but it was enjoyable, even if I didn’t like the art work much. Certainly enjoying it more than Excalibur or X-Corps or Cable.
What exactly do you mean by “identity politics” and how, exactly, is it different from Black Power in the 60s or the post-Stonewall LGBT movement.
As far as I can tell, people who complain about “identity politics” are cisgendered white people annoyed that an increasing number of minority groups are actively campaigning for their issues to be taken seriously.
It’s not “identity politics” when I, as a gender-queer person wants to highlight that people like me often face discrimination. It’s not divisive that we’re now included as part of the broader LGBT+ movement – unless you’ve got a problem with us expressing our lived experience through politics fighting prejudice and hostility.