{"id":6206,"date":"2021-01-24T21:09:18","date_gmt":"2021-01-24T21:09:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=6206"},"modified":"2021-01-24T21:09:18","modified_gmt":"2021-01-24T21:09:18","slug":"x-factor-1-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=6206","title":{"rendered":"X-Factor #1-5"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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X-FACTOR vol 4 #1-5<\/strong>
by Leah Williams, David Baldeon & Israel Silva<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The thing about bringing back X-Factor<\/em> is that the X-Factor<\/em> name has been attached to a whole bunch of unrelated concepts over the years. It’s been the original X-Men’s reunion; it’s been the US government mutant team; it’s been a detective agency; it’s been a corporate team. There’s not much common thread beyond some recurring characters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the Krakoan era, we’ve only really got Polaris as an established team member. And we’re calling back to the well-received detective run, by making the new X-Factor Investigations into the people who investigate missing persons on Krakoa. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Krakoa needs a missing persons squad so that it can decide whether it’s safe to resurrect someone. X-Factor’s job isn’t exactly to rescue anyone, but to prove that they’re dead – which is happy news, since then they can be rebooted. And so X-Factor<\/em> winds up foregrounding the strange attitude to death that pervades the Krakoan era, where people would obviously prefer<\/em> not to die, for the same reason they’d prefer not to break their arm… but it’s not that big a deal if they do. And that results in an interesting tension with the darkness of some of the material.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

X-Factor<\/em> is a dense book. There’s a lot going on with the characters, a lot of details to come back to later. Six or seven panel pages are common, which is pretty heavy these days. But it remains very clear, thanks both to Leah Williams’ clear handle on the characters, and David Baldeon’s impressive juggling of packed pages. The cartooning side of his art really helps to get the personalities across. His design work on the Boneyard is impressive too – it feels organic and distinctive without resorting to just covering a monument in vines. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The roster is… a bit weird. Polaris seems to be torn between making a contribution and not putting herself front and centre. Daken appears to be here simply because it’s something to do, though he appears to be genuinely on side with everything that’s happening. It’s Daken, though – do we really trust that he doesn’t have an ulterior motive? Rachel seems to have drifted into this as well. And Eye-Boy and Prodigy are on board more because they have well-suited powers for it. Northstar is the one who signed on because he was passionate about the job; but he was passionate specifically about Aurora<\/em>, and now the two of them have drifted into the wider orbit as well. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Krakoan era rather lends itself to these unusual cast lists, though, since it seems to generate a lot of teams where people have been chosen for their suitable powers and the team dynamic works back from there. After all, the mutant-centric nature of Krakoan society necessarily puts powers front and centre. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have reservations about the book’s use of Northstar’s husband Kyle, who seems anomalous on Krakoa. The ground rules of Krakoa in every other book are No Humanz Allowed. There’s no apparent reason for Kyle to be the only exception. Of course, I get why you don’t want to break up the couple. But you can avoid that by having Northstar commute to work through the gates, or by having a small human minority population. (Which feels like it could be interesting.) Is Northstar the only<\/em> mutant who’s married to a human? Nobody else had a dependent relative they wouldn’t leave behind? Really? It doesn’t make sense, and it really does call for an explanation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The initial issue with Aurora is very much about introducing the cast and establishing the premise, as well as setting up a subplot that we’ll come back to. After that, the book veers off for an arc with the Mojoverse, which is a bold move at such an early stage. I think it works – it’s true to the official premise of the book, but also makes clear that we’re not just going to get a world-tour police procedural.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More to the point, it successfully retools the Mojoverse, which was starting to look very dated. When Mojo was first created, in the Longshot<\/em> miniseries, the media-mogul angle of the character was more incidental. He did make films, but the Mojoverse wasn’t quite so media-centric. That came to the fore under Chris Claremont, who started using Mojo to parody Marvel itself (owned at the time by New World Pictures). And from there, Mojo drifted into a cable TV parody.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it’s 2021 and it’s way past time to have a Mojoverse for the social media age, which is what we get here. The Mojoverse audience has always been off panel and invisible, which made the place feel a bit abstract – but we did know that Mojo was obsessed with ratings and was presumably giving them what he believed they wanted. Their preferences haven’t really changed in the streaming era, but they feel more complicit in the madness of what they’re watching, and it’s an improvement. It broadens the satire while bringing it up to date.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book successfully walks a tricky line in terms of some of it’s horrific implications. A story in which Sofia Mantega deliberately gets herself killed in the Mojoverse makes sense in the logic of the X-books, where she would stand to get her powers back upon resurrection. But the fact that she’s been letting the Mojoverse public vote on how she died, and dressing up in her old ballerina costume for the purpose, is grim. The book doesn’t shy away from that, but balances it out with humour and absurdism – it never feels like it’s trying too hard, or that it’s mired in bleakness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I could live without the “X of Swords” tie-in issue, which only really contributes to the bigger picture by including the failed resurrection of Rockslide. That’s something that seems to be continuing in X-Factor <\/em>going forward. It tries <\/em>to do something with Lorna’s character as well, playing up the way she’s torn between playing her destined role and wanting to fade into the background – but it’s really a diversion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, this is a strong debut arc from a book that’s quickly found its niche.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-FACTOR vol 4 #1-5by Leah Williams, David Baldeon & Israel Silva The thing about bringing back X-Factor is that the X-Factor name has been attached to a whole bunch of unrelated concepts over the years. It’s been the original X-Men’s reunion; it’s been the US government mutant team; it’s been a detective agency; it’s been […]<\/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,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6206","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=6206"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6206\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6208,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6206\/revisions\/6208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}