Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of Peter David’s “X-Factor.” I remember loving this series, but I haven’t read it since it came out. Up until now there’s been a lot to like, but it wasn’t as explosive as I remembered it being. That all changes this week. The series goes for some huge swings. There are a few misses, but the hits are all home runs, and the misses are exciting and ambitious. This is the part where “X-Factor” gets really really fun.
‘Time and a Half’ “X-Factor” #29-45
Written by Peter David
Illustrated by Valentine de Landro, and Marco Santucci
Inked by Pat Davidson, Valentine De Landro, Patrick Piazzalunga, Craig S. Yeung, and Marco Santucci
Colored by Jeromy N. Cox, Nathan Fairbairn, Andy Troy
Lettered by Cory Petit
“X-Factor” #39 is one of the darkest comic issues I have ever read. I’ve long maintained that death is cheap in comics. The most memorable tragedies are the weird ones that use the heightened reality of superhero stories to sell their tragedies. And this one is a doozy, both because it is so tragic and so weird. It’s the kind of thing that you can sort of wrap your head around in the safety that this isn’t a thing that could ever possibly happen. Multiple Man accidentally kills his own kid.
He reabsorbs his son, who it turns out is a dupe. Theresa got pregnant with a dupe’s kid and the child of a dupe isn’t, well, real. That’s messed up, upsetting to read, and totally unforgettable. It’s a ballsy writing move on Peter David’s part, to go to such a dark place so weirdly. And I’m of two minds about it. On the one hand, he treats the arc with the serious weight it deserves. But on the other hand, David is limited by his perspective, and his being a dude makes the story a little more salacious than it ought to be.
This is most egregious in the conversation Jamie has with Pastor John, his rogue man of the cloth Dupe. The conversation they have is interesting, but doesn’t feel as gritty and honest as David seems to think it does. Two dudes (well, two of the same dude) talk about “hysterical pregnancies” and how Monet didn’t get pregnant because “her mind’s stronger.” They also use the phrase “a psychic miscarriage.” Between that and a dramatic but ultimately hollow discussion of suicide, the story isn’t nearly as important as it is so clearly going for.
But as a soap opera? Damn, this is the good stuff. It’s so strange and pulpy and uncomfortable. The character stuff just reeks of sweaty dramatic desperation. It’s the kind of thing you might describe as a guilty pleasure, but really its because you’re embarrassed to be getting so much entertainment out of something that is fundamentally crass. Or maybe that’s just me?
So let’s dive into some of the soap opera stuff. It rules! Ruuuuuuuuuuuuuules! At his lowest moment, an adult Layla Miller comes back in time to whisk Jamie into the future. There they meet Ruby Summers, who makes Cable look like X-Man. She’s awesome is what I’m trying to say, easily the best alternate universe Summers kid. She’s the daughter of Scott and Emma so instead of turning into diamond, she turns into ruby quartz and shoots lasers. Incredible. The future action doesn’t disappoint, full of mutants fighting sentinels, and elderly Cyclops, and an emaciated geriatric Dr. Doom!
There’s also a major development between Jamie and Layla. They totally do the nasty. This has been a major squick factor for a lot of people, and one I was curious to come back to. Jamie new Layla when she was a little kid. Now they’re boning. Is it gross? It is- but I buy it from Jamie’s perspective. He just lost his kid, is at the lowest point of his life, and now this hot future lady is dragging him through time? He’s at the moment where your weirdness meter goes to max, inches past the top number, and then the needle just snaps off. He’s feeling low, and finds himself in a surreal situation. They talk about the weirdness for a second, and then sort of brush it away. It’s something that deserves to be seriously explored, and shares a similar problem of perspective with the other issues in this arc. But as a soap opera? It’s a twist that totally shocks.
Continued belowThe B and C stories are also great. Siryn, Monet, Longshot, and Darwin find themselves working on a strange new case. And Rictor and Strong Guy seek out Pastor John to get some answers as to what happened to Jamie when they are accosted by Shatterstar! Both cases are tied to Cortex, a villain who seems involved in the future conflict as well.
I spent a good amount of time talking about the flaws in this story, but I actually think that without those flaws, this arc wouldn’t be nearly as good as it is. It takes itself way too seriously, but it couldn’t exist without that earnestness. Think about flawed but enjoyable movies like Alita Battle Angel or any Fast and the Furious. Those movies work in a way that say, a Sharknado doesn’t, because they take themselves entirely seriously, and that gives us permission to take them seriously. This story about infant mortality, time travel, and hooking up with the kid you used to babysit for could not function under a layer of irony. Because of its flaws and not despite them, this is the best arc of “X-Factor” yet.
Oh, and Shatterstar kissed Rictor! We will be talking all about that in the next arc.
‘Overtime’ “X-Factor” #46-50
Written by Peter David
Illustrated by Valentine de Landro, and Andrew Hennesy
Inked by Pat Davidson, Andrew Hennessy, and Craig S. Yeung
Colored by Jeromy N. Cox
Lettered by Cory Petit
After the huge turning point of ‘Time and a Half’, it’s hard to know what to expect. But ‘Overtime’ is largely more of the same, which ends up being a very good thing. Jamie and Layla are still allied with the Summers Rebellion in the future. The rest of the team is battling something called Cortex in the present. And ultimately, those two problems are the same problem- the sentinel program of Earth-1191.
Potential apocalyptic timelines are rarely explored in quite this much detail in Marvel. With a few exceptions, these timelines usually feature in one prominent story, and then we get diminishing returns with the sequels. What’s cool here is that David is using Earth-1191 as a setting rather than the story, and does good shared universe work with it.
Before now, Earth-1191 was simply the home timeline of Bishop, Shard, Fitzroy, and the XSE. This future is defined by the oppressive presence of the sentinels, and we see here that the sentinel program is connected to some old X-Factor enemies- mainly, the immortal Tryp. I’d normally roll my eyes at adding a real mastermind behind the other mastermind, but instead of making the world feel too small, it actually does a lot to make Tryp into a worthy villain. An immortal dude who’s centuries old plan involves starting a detective agency getting foiled by one bomb? Pretty pathetic. An immortal dude who helped orchestrate one of the most frightening and oppressive futures in the Marvel multiverse? That’s a dude to fear.
And by the end of the arc, everything has come together, making this sort of the definitive Earth-1191 story. It turns out Tryp groomed a young boy named Falcone to becoming the sadistic genius behind the world’s sentinel program. He used the dupe Jamie sent into the future of Earth-811 to create Cortex, a pretty rad and scary sentinel villain who can possess people with like, nanites or whatever. It all ends in a cross-time battle with Tryp, Cortex, the Sentinels, and rogue elements that range from Ruby Summers to Doctor Doom. It’s a good way to spend issue #50.
Rictor and Shatterstar tease out the beginnings of their relationship, and it’s rocky but sweet. Guido gets to play audience surrogate, if the audience was vaguely homophobic. He asks a lot of questions and uses a lot of casually homophobic reasoning that we’ve mostly retired from culture (“I’m not mad that you’re gay, I’m mad that you kept it from me!”). It’s sort of crude, but it’s also weirdly refreshing? Guido’s ignorance isn’t something that’s gone from the Earth, but depictions of homophobia are usually a lot more villainous in today’s media. Guido is portrayed as mostly clueless, but he swerves a bit into unintentional cruelty. A better version of this story would spend more time calling Guido out for his dickishness, but as it stands, his reaction seems both true to his character and to real life.
Continued belowAlso, Shatterstar immediately kisses Val Cooper, so apparently he just likes kissing folks. But he does talk about his special connection to Rictor, which is really quite sweet.
The biggest bombshell of all though concerns one Layla Miller. Two mysteries are solved. The first is her mutant power: she can resurrect the dead, but at the cost of their soul, conscience, and morality. She proves this by resurrected Fitzroy, giving the C-list villain a really fascinating and tragic origin story. It’s Fitzroy who stops Cortex, but now his fate as a villain has been sealed! Layla needed to revive him to save Jamie and their friends, but in doing so she turned Fitzroy into a monster.
The other big reveal is to how Layla knows stuff. It’s not her power, it’s a time travel thing, and it’s a scene that weirdly haunts me. I can’t get it out of my head. Adult Layla traveled back to earlier in the series and uses some future tech to transfer her adult knowledge into her child self. It’s too much for one person to comprehend, but all those jumbled memories are in there. And now she knows stuff.
Both of these reveals are masterfully done. Go back to earlier in the series and they’ve been foreshadowed since Layla’s first page. Remember that first issue where they get her out of the orphanage? She revives a dead butterfly. It doesn’t have a soul, but nobody notices- it’s a butterfly.
Now that Jamie’s lost-in-time story is resolved though, I really hope the book slows down to discuss his relationship with Layla. I get them hooking up. He was at the lowest moment of his life, he just lost a kid and all his friends, and Layla was there for him. He was lonely and miserable. But that’s not the basis of a stable relationship, it’s just barely a justification of the squick factor of their respective age difference. He knew her when she was a tween!
But that complaint doesn’t make this series less fun to read. Far from it- this is red hot drama! These last two arcs have been the best of the series so far and it’s looking like the next arc is going to be a ton of fun too. “X-Factor” is finally firing on all cylinders.
