{"id":2630,"date":"2014-08-24T22:34:19","date_gmt":"2014-08-24T21:34:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2630"},"modified":"2014-08-25T13:02:34","modified_gmt":"2014-08-25T12:02:34","slug":"all-new-x-factor-vol-2-change-of-decay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=2630","title":{"rendered":"All-New X-Factor vol 2 – “Change of Decay”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Most of the stories we’ve looked at lately have been reasonably self-contained, even if lengthy. \u00a0All-New X-Factor\u00a0<\/em>operates rather differently. \u00a0Peter David\u00a0works\u00a0more in the soap opera style of team book that dominated the 80s and 90s, where\u00a0the focus isn’t on having a single overall plot, so much as on getting a whole bunch of plates spinning, and then checking in on them from time to time.<\/p>\n

And thus far, David has been largely devoting his time to getting the plates spinning. \u00a0Where volume 1 gathered the team, volume 2 spends most of its six issues\u00a0on introducing\u00a0Georgia Dakei and her family, as well as setting up a few plot points to be returned to in future, before finally unveiling the corporate X-Factor to the public in a press conference in issue #12.<\/p>\n

Georgia’s arc is\u00a0a complete story to a degree –\u00a0it makes a natural break point for the collections, and the immediate\u00a0problem\u00a0get resolves – but it’s still meant to work mainly on the level of\u00a0setting up the character for future use. \u00a0And so a lot turns\u00a0on how much faith you have in the character panning out;\u00a0depending on your answer to that, this is either a story that sets up plenty of future paths for exploration, or a bit of\u00a0an unfocussed mess.<\/p>\n

When Georgia is first introduced, she’s the daughter of novelist Scott Dakei, a\u00a0rabid anti-mutant zealot\u00a0who lives in a fortified bunker but whose novels are apparently completely inoffensive adventure fare. \u00a0In other words, he’s a transparently obvious stand-in for Orson Scott Card, and at first glance the story seems to be heading in the direction of discussing how\u00a0far his opinions should be seen as contaminating his work. \u00a0Georgia is being kept in the compound\u00a0and has posted a video to the internet suggesting that she’d like out, so the team decide to go get her, a decision which is strongly implied to be motivated more by their distaste for her father than by any particular feeling that her circumstances really call for their intervention. \u00a0Again, this seems like interesting stuff, but the story seems to meander off in another direction.<\/p>\n

Georgia, it seems, doesn’t really want to escape at all – she wants to be allowed out<\/em>, not to run away, which\u00a0is a perfectly understandable distinction. \u00a0She also\u00a0turns out to be a mutant, which leads to assorted confusion before the team’s corporate sponsor Harrison Snow shows up to have a quiet conversation with her\u00a0father\u00a0that leads to him handing her over, for reasons explicitly left mysterious.<\/p>\n

From there, we rapidly discover that Georgia is actually adopted, and\u00a0when the team track down her biological mother, this draws the attention of her\u00a0biological father – a super villain calling himself\u00a0Memento Mori, who tries to claim her as an heir-cum-henchman. \u00a0More squabbling again ensues before the mother returns, revealing that she’s a\u00a0mystic who’s actually responsible for\u00a0the father’s powers, and\u00a0both parents then get blown up in an explosion.<\/p>\n

This is\u2026 a bit all over the place. \u00a0It’s the sort of thing that could well end up being drawn together quite well in a couple of years time, but as of right now, it rambles. \u00a0In the short term, the major problem is that there are some major glitches in\u00a0Georgia’s set-up which, even if they’re deliberate, make her a difficult character to get a handle on, and thus to care about. \u00a0The issue #7 cliffhanger is Georgia using her powers to nearly kill Cypher, and being completely blas\u00e9 about it as if she’s either a sociopath or simply doesn’t appreciate what she’s done. \u00a0This thread is then dropped like a stone about five pages into issue #8, after which the emphasis shifts to Georgia having been kept in the dark about the nature of the outside world. \u00a0This doesn’t really work either – she has access to post videos to the internet but she can’t read the news? \u00a0And the videos she’s been posting didn’t betray her\u00a0fundamentally warped understanding of the outside world? \u00a0But nor does it offer any explanation for Georgia’s odd behaviour\u00a0in the cliffhanger, which is simply never mentioned again.<\/p>\n

So we have five issues devoted to\u00a0the introduction of a character\u00a0who winds up as a cipher with no agency, and this is hardly the most promising\u00a0of focal points. \u00a0Broadly, the theme here seems to be unpleasant\u00a0father figures, with Georgia having two thoroughly unhelpful patriarchs to deal with, and\u00a0a suggestion that Quicksilver in particular\u00a0identifies with her because he sees parallels with his own relationship with Magneto. \u00a0Issue #12 follows this up\u00a0by flipping his role from father to son,\u00a0as he reconciles with Luna after publicly accepting responsibility from some\u00a0old stories that he’d previously attempted to\u00a0retcon away. \u00a0But none of this seems to add up to any\u00a0very clear angle on the subject.<\/p>\n

You may wonder, also, what any of this has to do with the “corporate super-team” theme. \u00a0That\u00a0certainly hasn’t been forgotten about. \u00a0Harrison Snow gets plenty of space to play the role of the untrustworthy funder,\u00a0and to develop an odd subplot\u00a0about his marriage, a relationship\u00a0which seems to be along the lines of\u00a0The New Statesman<\/em>. \u00a0And of course he does something\u00a0vaguely ominous\u00a0with\u00a0Georgia’s father. \u00a0The corporate theme also gets paralleled with Memento Mori, whose operation is shown to be\u00a0corporate\u00a0literally to the point of absurdity (his henchmen\u00a0aren’t costumed thugs, but regular-looking\u00a0security guards on Segways).<\/p>\n

This side of the book\u00a0is more successful, which makes it a bit\u00a0disappointing that it\u00a0plays second fiddle to the Georgia plot in these issues. \u00a0Rightly recognising that everyone will assume that Serval is an evil\u00a0corporation, because they always are these days,\u00a0David is instead slowly building the tension around what it is that makes them evil. \u00a0The art – which is largely solid, but a bit choppy panel to panel – consistently shows Serval headquarters surrounded by weirdly coloured clouds. \u00a0But at\u00a0the same time, Snow has hired a bunch of actual superheroes and given them reasonably free rein. \u00a0A possible reading of all this is that Snow doesn’t actually have an evil plan as such; he just has such\u00a0a horrendously mis-firing moral compass that he\u00a0doesn’t realise he’s the bad guy, or is outright in denial about the sort of person he is. \u00a0I\u00a0rather hope that’s where we’re going, since it’s a more interesting route than “Serval wants to conquer the world”, and a more intriguing commentary on the internet giants on which\u00a0Serval is obviously modelled.<\/p>\n

As for the rest of the team\u2026 well, Quicksilver\u00a0has\u00a0multiple angles going on, Polaris\u00a0has her “competent and in command – or is she?” deal, and Gambit gets drawn into the Snows’ marriage\u00a0story. \u00a0I’m less convinced by the direction for\u00a0Danger, Cypher and Warlock;\u00a0we’re evidently doing a romance between the\u00a0robots, but\u00a0they’re both variations on “slightly at cross purposes with the world around them”, and I’m not convinced\u00a0there’s space\u00a0in the book for two characters like that. \u00a0And poor Cypher is already starting to run out of things to do.<\/p>\n

So we have here a rather unfocussed six issues that don’t quite manage to pull together in the way\u00a0that was presumably intended. \u00a0Nothing here necessarily causes problems for the book going forward, and\u00a0with David\u00a0clearly playing the long game, it’s entirely possible that we’ll look back on much of this in a couple of years time as patient set-up for a better story to come (though that still doesn’t explain why everyone forgets about Georgia’s fleeting lunacy in the issue #7 cliffhanger). \u00a0But at this stage,\u00a0it’s not quite there.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Most of the stories we’ve looked at lately have been reasonably self-contained, even if lengthy. \u00a0All-New X-Factor\u00a0operates rather differently. \u00a0Peter David\u00a0works\u00a0more in the soap opera style of team book that dominated the 80s and 90s, where\u00a0the focus isn’t on having a single overall plot, so much as on getting a whole bunch of plates spinning, […]<\/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":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2630","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2630","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=2630"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2630\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2706,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2630\/revisions\/2706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}