Review of X-Factor #26

As a teenager just starting into the worlcouple of issues of X-Factor.  As I recall, the cover decorated with the figure of Iceman riding upon a wave of ice a spray of cold shooting from his fingertips excited me, particularly because I remembered even younger days waking up in the morning watching Spiderman and his Amazing Friends of which Iceman counted himself among.  The story of the issue appealed to me and reading it marked the first time when a comic sunk its claws into me and compelled me to buy issue after issue.  X-Factor became my comic and my team. TIn true heroic form,nfortunately, I found myself on the tail end of run because, right about that time, the old team of Cyclops, Jean Grey, Beast, Angel and Iceman abandoned the name in order to form a second X-men team.  Fortunately, the old team dropped the name like a dinner scrap to a team of lesser-known, often misunderstood mutant heroes, Havok, Polaris, Quicksilver, Madox the Multiple Man, and Strong Guy.  

I loved the few issues I collected before the economic pressures of college and marriage prevented me from colecting.  The themes they explored, the struggles of being unknown, feared and hated while having to answer to a government liason breathing down your neck, instilled a fresh young man with an uncertain future with a cause to motivate him even fictional.  

Of course, the stories were hardly original.  The writers of X-Factor merely recycled the stories that comic book writers penned since the inception of comic book heroes.  Oddly enough, Havok is now leading a team, the Uncanny Avengers, whose heroes are maybe a little more known than the X-Factor team he led, but he and his team of misfits still struggle with the government-types mandating to them protocol and procedure while being feared and hated by those whom they are entrusted to protect.

A few years ago, I stumbled upon a stash of old issues of X-Factor which I was able to snatch-up for a decent price, permitting me to start all over again from the early days of the team.  The purchase promised morphed into a daunting test much like an eating challenge where you are tasked with consuming a super-sized burger at one sitting.  Unlike reading a single issue when released on a monthly basis, I placed myself in the position of staring down a pile of bagged and boarded issues, always present and and demanding my attention.  Somehow, the individual issues seemed thicker, contained more substance, perhaps reflected in the number of panels on each page or the amount of dialogue spoken.  Perhaps the perceived thickness flowed from the hand drawn pages, so unlike the computer composed art of more recent comics.  In the end, I read small runs in the comics, searching for covers with interesting images and characters I knew from other comics.

I read Issue 26 of X-Factor the other night.  The issue picks up right after the team grounded Apocalypse's ship after it had spun out of control, destroyed multiple buildings in New York City, and injured multiple citizens.  The issue is adeptly written by Louise Simonson and drawn by her partner, Walter Simonson, of Thor fame.

The issue begins with the heroes attempting to convince the people of New York City that, even though mutants, the team desires only to help and not harm.  It seemingly is the same old-story that runs through most of the X-Men titles.  There is a palpable tension with New York City Police Department with the friction threading its way through the story.  Constantly, the authorities are threatening to arrest the heroes for their alleged role in the destruction of the city and the injury to its citizens.  By the end of the issue, the authorities understand that X-Factor is not a team of mutants to be feared but to be celebrated, so much so, the city gives the heroes are given a parade and permitted to relocate into Apocalypse's now vacated ship.

The story might have been boring told by anyone else, a kind of clean-up issue, which should only be reserved for the last two pages of finale to wind down a major event.  But the writer made the issue something more, stories within a story, not content to let the aftermath be merely that.  It is what good comics do, not let the dust settle before the heroes are required to face the next problem head-on. 

Louise Simonson lays on top of the prejudice plot line other more personally plots exploring the difficulties of being super heroes in the bodies of regular humans. For example, a furless Beast, who had been tricked by Apocalypse to alter Apocalypse's ship, inadvertently cause, the ship to spin out of control and the resultIng damage.  A side effect to his act manifests in a personal dilemma wherein Beast has to chose between using this enhanced strength in which case he loses his intelligence, or, as his friend Iceman tells him to do, to sit on the sidelines while his friends do the heavy lifting. In In true heroic form, Beast opts to sacrifice his strength for the good of others thereby becoming childlike in his thinking.  By the middle of the issue, we see him crouching in the corner with tears in his eyes, much like a child hiding after doing something wrong.  

The double panel on the bottom of page 13 spectacularly shows how far Beast has fallen.  His figure still takes up most of the panel showing his largeness.  The fact that he wears his costume reminds us he remains a super powered being capable of feats no mere human can do.  Yet his head hangs and tilts like punished animal.  In the second panel, a tear flows from his eye in realistic way, and the realization that this is no longer the Beast we knew, clever and adept, but a mere child, almost feral as his name suggests, scared of the world around him, so much so that he hides from it.  Kudos to Walter Simonson for capturing this image so powerfully.

Also presented in this issue is the love triangle between Scott Summers, also known as Cyclops, Jean Grey, whom he had up until recently thought was dead, and the noticeably absent Madelyne Pryor, a Jean Grey doppleganger who Scott marries in the hopes that the void Jean left when she died would be filled by Madelyne.  As I put these words down, it occurs to me how melodramatic the story sounds.  However, Louise Simonson plots the conflict so that the obtruse conflict sits at the issue's fringes, suggesting of the turmoil each of these characters suffers but never fully revealing its intensity.  Perhaps, pages 18 and 19 best exemplify Louise Simonson's adept plotting of the love triangle.  On each of these pages, a panel represents a diner in which the customers peer outside as the heroes pass with the customers commenting on how the heroes' good deeds.  Also in the panels, a television reveals the image of Madelyne Pryor making a plea to Scott.  The two panels remind us that we are like those customers present and celebrating the heroic deeds of Cyclops and his team, but, despite the current celebration, there are matters pending which still remain unresolved and that will likely come to haunt Scott and Jean.

I like the way Louise Simonson frames the struggle that Scott suffers in the triangle, that he expected the marriage between he and Madelyne different than what it was but that duty requires that he remained faithful to her and his son, even if she and the child have disappeared.  The reasoning strikes a chord of realism, that factors other than love compose a marriage, factors which prevent a person from terminating one relationship to begin another one, even if your lost love has been found.  

Walter Simonson's art only enhances the beautifully plotted issue, with art subtle and yet demanding emotional reaction.  Walter Simonson performs his magic right from the beginning when on pages 2 and 3, he fills the space with Apocalypse's ship, large, heavy, unweildy.  In the crevices of the details, Walter Simonson makes tiny tally marks meant to represent the characters in the scene which, if it were not for the dialogue bubbles, we would could only take to be printing errors.  The pages evoke the grandness of the feat that the heroes have just overcome and emphasizes the destruction as a result of it.  The ship becomes a physical manifestation of the life threatening acts of the villain X-Factor just foiled overshadowing X-Factor's own insecurities, flaws, fears, and woes much as it overshadows their physical presence on the page.  Matt Wagner employs the same technique in his award winning series, The Sandman Mystery Theatre, in which the first couple of pages of each issues has a large panoramic scene spread across the top half of two pages, followed by a series of smaller panels depicting a close-up of the characters.

Later, Walter Simonson uses the bleeding of panels to show the connection of time and space.  Specifically, on page 5, he plants Apocaypse at the bottom of the page stamped over panels depicting in one some of his horsemen who he is presently adressing and in another the horseman Famine as she destroys a number of crops.  The image evokes even more power when you consider the manner in which Walter Simonson has Apocalpse standing on the page, almost outside of the panels, almost, with Apocalypse with his back facing the reader inspecting the havoc wrought by one of his minions.  I wonder if Walter Simonson contemplated making Apocalypse span the entire height of the page to oversee all of the page itself, and whether he rejected said version as too over the top or overbearing.  Regardless, the composition impresses upon the reader the god-like nature of Apocalypse and hints at his future run-ins with X-Factor.

Issue #26 of X-Factor shows Walter and Louise Simonson at their best, developing a story which in the hands of another writer or another artist might have been little more than a quick wrap-up to end an arc before the start of a new one into a rich, complex masterpiece.  They sowed seeds into a series which later reap rich rewards.