{"id":10515,"date":"2024-11-09T17:41:48","date_gmt":"2024-11-09T17:41:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10515"},"modified":"2024-11-09T17:41:48","modified_gmt":"2024-11-09T17:41:48","slug":"x-factor-4-annotations-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10515","title":{"rendered":"X-Factor #4 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>X-FACTOR vol 5 #4<\/strong>
\n“The Nematode”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Mark Russell<\/strong>
\nArtist: Bob Quinn<\/strong>
\nColour artist: Jesus Aburtov<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Joe Caramagna<\/strong>
\nEditor: Darren Shan<\/strong><\/p>\n

X-FACTOR<\/strong><\/p>\n

Havok<\/strong> actually seems fairly competent in this issue, if you overlook his willingness to be on this weird team in the first place.<\/p>\n

Cecilia Reyes <\/strong>is being pressurised to adopt a codename for marketing purposes. She says that she joined X-Factor to get over her relationship with Oskar \/ Wintergeist (of whom more below) – she also mentioned this in passing in issue #2, and we saw them texting last issue. Once she gets his explanation for his disappearance, she does take him back.<\/p>\n

Pyro<\/strong> has either been talked or pressurised into having his facial tattoo removed – it’s not clear how he was persuaded to do this, since he’s clearly not happy about it, or why X-Factor’s superiors waited until after his public debut. He claims that he joined X-Factor in order to promote his romance novels.<\/p>\n

Frenzy<\/strong> joins the mission but doesn’t do much of importance.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Granny Smite <\/strong>is left behind. Havok insists on her sitting out the mission in case she gets trapped underground and buried alive. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to her before that a failed attempt at suicide could have that sort of result.<\/p>\n

Xyber <\/strong>doesn’t appear in this issue; Havok says that he’s “going to be out for a while”. His spacesuit was damaged during the moon mission last issue, but it didn’t look as if he’d suffered any particularly serious injuries.<\/p>\n

SUPPORTING CAST:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Wintergeist<\/strong> is Cecilia’s ex-boyfriend Oskar, who makes his on-panel debut here and doesn’t get a full name. I’m not counting him as a regular cast member (at least yet), since he’s explicitly just filling in for Xyber – though he does claim that he’s trying to join the team. He’s a teleporter.<\/p>\n

Oskar disappeared from Cecilia’s life without warning, but claims here that this is because he had fallen in with X-Term, and quit after being asked to kill children. According to him, X-Term killed his parents in a revenge attack, and he cut off ties with Cecilia before they could find out about her. All this seems a little questionable – how was he maintaining a relationship with her at the same time as serving in X-Term? And how thoroughly can he have cut off ties, when he was texting her last issue?<\/p>\n

At any rate, he claims that he’s come to X-Factor in order to “start over” with Cecilia, though if he’s telling the truth about X-Term being after him, you might figure that he’s also just looking for some allies.<\/p>\n

Wintergeist gets injured in what seems a genuine attempt to sacrifice himself to the giant spiders in order to protect Cecilia.<\/p>\n

VILLAINS:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Darkstar<\/strong> appears in flashback, giving Wintergeist a similar recruitment speech to the one she gave to Havok in issue #1. That flashback was also listed as “months earlier”, so apparently all of this is at around the same time. She claims that her X-Term<\/strong> group are acting as merceneries in human conflicts in order to insinuate themselves into human conflicts and give them an opportunity to influence the outcome. Havok was sceptical of this. Wintergeist also seems unconvinced but signs up anyway.<\/p>\n

There are giant spiders<\/strong> in the underground caves, but they seem to be nothing more than standard Subterranean monsters.<\/p>\n

OTHER REFERENCES:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Page 7 panel 1: The Alamagordo superbore <\/strong>is, obviously, not a real thing. The X-books’ main connection with Alamagordo is that the parents of Professor X (and the Juggernaut) worked there; the original idea in the Silver Age was to reference its role as a nuclear test site, but thanks to the sliding timeline it’s become a genetic research facility. All this may be entirely coincidental.<\/p>\n

Page 7 panel 2: The Ori <\/strong>is the name of the lost science vessel. The significance isn’t immediately obvious – it means “head” in Yoruba, if that helps, though it also has a sense which seems to be more akin to “soul”.<\/p>\n

Page 7 panel 3: “The Earth’s mantle is not completely solid…” <\/strong>Dr Grieves is presumably referencing the Marvel Universe’s well established Subterranea realms.<\/p>\n

Page 7 panel 4: Nematode.<\/strong> A nematode is a roundworm; they can be found virtually everywhere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition. X-FACTOR vol 5 #4 “The Nematode” Writer: Mark Russell Artist: Bob Quinn Colour artist: Jesus Aburtov Letterer: Joe Caramagna Editor: Darren Shan X-FACTOR Havok actually seems fairly competent in this issue, if you overlook his willingness to be on this weird […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10515"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10515\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10517,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10515\/revisions\/10517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}