Writer: Peter David
\nPencillers: Valentine DeLandro and Marco Santucci
\nInkers: Pat Davidson, Valentine DeLandro, Marco Santucci, Patrick Piazzalunga, and Craig Yeung
\nLetterer: Cory Petit
\nColourists: Jeromy Cox, Nathan Fairbairn and Andy Troy
\nEditors: John Barber and Jody Leheup<\/p>\n
It’s been a long while since I reviewed an X-Factor<\/em> storyline… but then, it’s been a long while since one finished.\u00a0 I think.\u00a0 For some odd reason, three of these issues have titles (#40, #41 and #43).\u00a0 The rest don’t.\u00a0 Nor do the latter two issues make sense as break points.\u00a0 It seems to be more or less random.\u00a0 So, I’m going to take #40-50 as one big storyline – which is certainly how they read – and pick the last of the three titles, simply because it seems the most appropriate.<\/p>\n Peter David has said before that he wants to boost X-Factor<\/em>‘s sales, which is always a tough job for any title.\u00a0 Part of his strategy, around the time this storyline started, was a series of shock cliffhangers, such as the pay-off to Siryn’s pregnancy, and the return of Layla as an adult.\u00a0 As an attention-grabbing scheme, this kind of made sense.\u00a0 But for most of the last year, the book has been tied up in a highly involved (and highly convolved) time-travel storyline which was making some of us increasingly impatient.<\/p>\n Please note, it’s not the length of the storyline as such.\u00a0 Long-term planning is a great thing, at least in a book that can be confident enough of its long-term existence to generate the pay-off.\u00a0 Stretching out a story over a number of years is great, if it’s strong enough to justify it.\u00a0 The difficulty with this story is that it takes an awfully long time to get anywhere – not so much because of a slow pace or “decompressed” storytelling, but because the plot has so many threads and goes in such circuitous directions that it fills a whole load of pages without really getting to the point.<\/p>\n You’ll notice from the credits list above that this book got through a ton of artists.\u00a0 But it does manage to keep a fairly consistent look, perhaps because there are no outright fill-in artists – Valentine De Landro and Pat Davidson are there for at least part of every issue.\u00a0 And the art is pretty successful.\u00a0 The future Dr Doom is suitably delapidated, and most of the big dramatic moments come off well.\u00a0 While the art never seems quite comfortable with the giant robots, it’s good with the people.<\/p>\n Cutting through assorted mysteries, the plot goes something like this.\u00a0 Madrox is taken into the future by Layla Miller, who we left in one of those dystopian Sentinel-controlled futures at the end of “Messiah Complex.”\u00a0 Now she’s an adult, and hooked up with the Summers Rebellion.\u00a0 She seems to have brought Madrox there simply to ensure that things turn out as planned.\u00a0 Meanwhile, the authorities are trying to stop the Rebellion by sending a brainwashed Madrox duplicate, Cortex, back in time to the present with a “Doomlock” device that lets him alter history, so that he can try and kill off the Rebellion’s ancestors.\u00a0 This he does by possessing a bunch of people and sending them to assassinate, among other people, one of X-Factor’s clients.\u00a0 Oh, and one of the people he possesses is Shatterstar, who thereby joins the cast.\u00a0 Meanwhile, in the future, the Rebellion have noticed that people are blinking out of existence, and Madrox is investigating.\u00a0 He meets up with Dr Doom, who’s already expecting them thanks to yet another time-travelling visit from an even-further-future Layla, and finds out about the Doomlock stuff.\u00a0 There’s also a subplot in here about the guy in charge of the Sentinels nearly getting kicked out by the government, but again, that’s not really important.\u00a0 So in the future, the Sentinels make their last big attack on the Rebellion, while in the present, X-Factor fight Cortex.\u00a0 Finally Cortex is yanked back to the future where Dr Doom tries to use him as a weapon to kill the Rebellion, but he’s beaten there too.\u00a0 The big Sentinel is defeated, and Madrox is sent back to the present.\u00a0 Layla goes even further into the past where she relates all of her memories to her own younger self, thus explaining how she “knows stuff”; her real power, it turns out, is actually to bring people back from the dead.<\/p>\n Complicated, isn’t it?\u00a0 And the way it’s told, the book ends up juggling a multitude of plot threads: Siryn sulking in the office, M and Darwin protecting Cortex’s target, Rictor and Guido being reunited with Shatterstar, Layla and Madrox in the future, and the guy in charge of the Sentinels politicking with other baddies.\u00a0 It seems to be the challenge of juggling so many threads in a 23-page comic that leads the story to grind to a halt.\u00a0 Issues #43-46 end up alternating the present-day subplots, so that cliffhangers aren’t picked up until two issues later.\u00a0 In the future, Madrox and Layla arrive for their first conversation with Doom in issue #43, and don’t conclude it until issue #47.\u00a0 This is slow by any standards.\u00a0<\/p>\n It also means that to follow Peter David’s elaborate design, you have to be keeping track of plot elements that haven’t been mentioned for a couple of months.\u00a0 This is where readers start getting confused – and when the recap page tells them that Cortex was trying to kill the ancestor of a minor character, they wonder what they were missing.\u00a0 (Nothing, really.\u00a0 His target is<\/em> actually explained in passing in the story itself, but it doesn’t actually matter; the point is simply that Cortex is trying to alter history by killing the rebels’ ancestors.)<\/p>\n Naturally, it’s vastly improved by reading it in a single sitting, where the length isn’t a problem, and the overall scheme becomes clearer.\u00a0 But that still leaves the big question: what was all this about?\u00a0 At first glance, it seems to be an extremely clever story full of time loops and such like, but one which isn’t actually saying anything in particular.<\/p>\n Reading more closely, the point seems<\/em> to be that what at first appears to be a web of unrelated stories resolves over the course of a year into something intricately constructed.\u00a0 And all this seems to be calculated to support Layla’s worldview: that everything is pre-ordained, and that free will is just an illusion.\u00a0 The plot includes some seemingly random coincidences to strengthen that point.\u00a0 Doom’s suite is in the same hotel where Lenore is holed up in the present day; and on both occasions when Trevor Fitzroy opens a random time portal, it dumps a Sentinel to precisely the place where it needs to be to complete the plot.\u00a0 Layla has given up trying to change history and simply goes with the flow, intervening here and there to ensure that things turn out as she remembered it.\u00a0 Her reward, if you can\u00a0call it that, is to complete\u00a0her memory loop and finally move on to events that she doesn’t know about in advance.\u00a0 Cortex is<\/em> trying to change history, but he’s the bad guy, and events seem to conspire against him to prevent it.<\/p>\n By pairing Layla with Madrox, Peter David seems to be writing about free will versus determinism.\u00a0 Layla’s world is\u00a0entirely deterministic – it’s on rails, and\u00a0so it’s meant to be.\u00a0 (Whether this fits with the traditional Marvel Universe take on divergent timelines is\u00a0beside the point.)\u00a0 Madrox, on the other hand, is a one-man\u00a0embodiment of alternate realities, since his duplicates allow him to explore both options whenever he’s faced with a choice.\u00a0 As we’ve seen throughout this series, though, that’s no better: a world where every choice is taken ends up being a world where no<\/em> choices are really taken at all.\u00a0 There’s no free will on that model either.<\/p>\n Since David clearly isn’t finished yet, I assume this is ultimately heading towards some sort of synthesis of Madrox and Layla’s worldviews.\u00a0\u00a0One way of doing that is to\u00a0pursue Madrox’s problem\u00a0to its logical conclusion and\u00a0argue that\u00a0a single timeline\u00a0doesn’t contradict free will, but rather reflects the fact that choices were actually made.\u00a0 The other is to legitimate the grand design as something reassuring in itself – in other words, to wheel\u00a0on God.\u00a0\u00a0And it may be no coincidence that the only well-adjusted Madrox duplicate\u00a0we’ve seen is a priest.\u00a0<\/p>\n All very interesting, then, but that still leaves us with the niggling problem that we’ve just had a year-long time travel story to reach the intermediate stage of a multi-year exploration of free will.\u00a0 And while there are plenty of interesting ideas in here, it’s not altogether satisfying as a piece of drama, because it drags on a bit, and because it’s so keen to stress the idea that everything is on rails.\u00a0 As a result, it feels at times like an overelaborate exercise in clever plotting, and one whose strengths were always likely to be lost on a monthly schedule.\u00a0 That said, it works much better when you read it as a whole – and the more I think about it, the more it’s growing on me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “Timely Events” Writer: Peter David Pencillers: Valentine DeLandro and Marco Santucci Inkers: Pat Davidson, Valentine DeLandro, Marco Santucci, Patrick Piazzalunga, and Craig Yeung Letterer: Cory Petit Colourists: Jeromy Cox, Nathan Fairbairn and Andy Troy Editors: John Barber and Jody Leheup It’s been a long while since I reviewed an X-Factor storyline… but then, it’s been 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