As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.

X-FACTOR vol 5 #1
“Red Carpet”
Writer: Mark Russell
Artist: Bob Quinn
Colour artist: Jesus Aburtov
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Editor: Darren Shan

X-FACTOR:

This is the fifth volume of X-Factor, a name which has been attached to all sorts of unrelated concepts. Volume 1 started as a reunion book for the original X-Men and changed direction completely in the early 90s to become a book about a team working for the US government. Volume 2 was a miniseries about the Mutant Civil Rights Taskforce, volume 3 was Jamie Madrox’s X-Factor Investigations, and volume 4 was the Krakoan group who investigated mutant deaths. (EDIT: For those asking in the comments, the book about a corporate X-Factor team isn’t in the volume count because its official title was All-New X-Factor.)

This new version of X-Factor is essentially the 1990s government team, but hybridised with Peter Milligan and Mike Allred’s X-Force/X-Statix – though tonally, a better comparison might be Justice League International. That said, it repeats the trick from the first issue of X-Force of introducing a team and promptly killing most of them off, which feels like it might be a homage. To be fair, what we’re actually told is that the team members are “dead or clinging to life”, which leaves a back door for anyone who wants to bring the characters back.

The Angel is the team leader, and far and away the most high profile member of the original cast. He’s signed up for an 8% share in this venture and seems willing to go with Broderick’s ideas, but right from the start he’s clearly getting a sinking feeling that his team of D-listers is going to be a disaster. To be fair, he’s even a bit dismissive of characters like Havok and Frenzy who deserve a bit more credit than that.

Angel claims that he can’t turn into Archangel any more. Since he was doing it in Heir of Apocalypse just last month, either he’s lying or something has happened off panel. He survives the first mission but gets sidelined, ostensibly because he’s so badly injured – and understandably, he views it as a failure. But since he still presumably owns 8% of X-Factor, maybe we’ll see more of him.

Xyber (Daniel Choi) is a new character with the power to fire an EMP that shuts down all the electronics in the area. He’s 17. Other than Angel, he’s the only member of the original line-up to survive their first mission. He seems much more happy posing for the cameras than the others, at least at first, but does seem disappointed to be treated as a pariah. He seems much more uncertain about what he’s doing when he poses with the second team at the end of the issue.

He appears to have no meaningful combat experience, and freezes when asked to jump out of a plane, but he has genuinely useful powers and seems like a decent guy who just needs more time. His power is dangerous to people around him, at least in repeated exposure, but he does warn everyone about this. Using his power seems to exhaust him, so he’s basically just a normal guy except for the big attack he can use once per fight.

Firefist is Rusty Collins, one of the trainees from the original X-Factor series in the 1980s – and yes, he did use this code name, very briefly, back in the day. He died in X-Men #42 back in 1995, and although he was resurrected on Krakoa, he did essentially nothing while he was there. Given that he was at least a recurring character in a main book for most of a decade, he’s a bit put out to be treated as a nobody by the media. He (probably) dies, but hey, even during Krakoa nobody wanted to write Rusty Collins stories.

Feral is easily the biggest name to be put in this book as cannon fodder. The pro-mutant public mostly seem baffled by the nobodies that X-Factor are presenting them with – Feral gets an actively bad reaction, and seems surprised by it. It does seem a bit harsh for somebody who never did anything that bad in public. She (probably) dies.

Cameo is a shapeshifter. He (probably) dies.

Havok has applied to join X-Factor. His reputation is apparently so flaky that he didn’t make the cut for the first team despite the blatant barrel scraping. Well, either that or Broderick actually expected the first team to get themselves killed and he was deliberately holding some bigger names back – but Angel seems to agree that Havok would be a desperate choice.

Over in X-Men: From the Ashes Infinity Comic #7-9, his zombie status turned out to be a hex placed on him by the Goblin Queen, he got cured, and he understandably quit. Several months have passed since then, during which he was approached to join Darkstar’s mercenary group X-Term and turned them down. As the series begins, he’s with Polaris in Malibu. He seems to have lost self-confidence and he’s applied for X-Factor in the hope of influencing the system from the inside and doing some sort of good. In what seems to be a call back to his depiction in Uncanny Avengers, Havok expressly rejects mutant separatism, and the notion of “mutant names”. He insists that Lorna call him Alex. He wants to reintegrate with the humans.

Havok is appointed as the leader of X-Factor II, and we only briefly see the members of his new team. They don’t get any significant dialogue.

• Xyber is the one hangover from the original team.
• Frenzy also didn’t make the cut for the first team, and similar points apply. She seems happy to be there.
• Pyro has done this before as a member of Freedom Force, and seems reasonably happy to have a chance to show off and burn stuff. He still has the skull tattoo on his face from Marauders.
• Cecilia Reyes is a very odd choice, since she’s traditionally had zero interest in being a combatant, and still doesn’t have a codename. We’ll doubtless find out more next issue about why she’s here. To the extent you can read anything into her brief appearance, when she poses with the team she looks like she’s trying to be professional but isn’t entirely convinced.
• Granny Smite is a new character. She’s a granny and we don’t find out anything more than that.

SUPPORTING CAST:

Rodger Broderick is a mercenary TV producer who has somehow or other struck a deal with the US government to create a mutant strike force for them. From his point of view, this new X-Factor are “soldier-tainment” and he believes he can make a fortune off them once they’re fighting for America in a

Basically, he’s an awful reality TV type who seems largely indifferent about the wellbeing of individuals on his team. He openly tells Angel that the team are interchangeable. That said, he does want the team to succeed, and he seems curiously convinced that a mutant superhero team is a marketable, popular proposition. He seems to honestly believe that America is going to turn the corner on its attitude to mutants, that pro-mutant views are in the ascendance and that he can profit by getting in on the ground floor. While some of this is doubtless a sales pitch, it’s not obvious how anything he’s doing makes sense unless he believes it to some degree. And the one area where he does have common interests with the team is that he genuinely wants to make mutant heroes successful and popular, even if he has ulterior motives for doing so.

General Mills is the US general to whom X-Factor are answerable in the military chain of command. She has no faith in the project, thinks Broderick is an idiot and believes that the American public are irredeemably anti-mutant. But she doesn’t seem to be personally anti-mutant or to have anything against the team members, and she does want the team to be used for sensible missions. Basically, she seems to be more of a level-headed cynic who thinks she’s been saddled with a stupid idea.

She works from a secret military base called Nevermor, but note that this isn’t X-Factor’s base (a Hollywood mansion called the Factor House). We only see one of its mutant residents – a guy called McCloud who doesn’t get any dialogue – but he seems happy and well treated. The base also includes something kept behind a “top secret” vault door, and she thinks it would be pretty disastrous if anyone found out about it.

Polaris is deeply unhappy about X-Factor and seems to be keeping an eye on it out of concern for Havok. She completely rejects his idea of working within the system, and insists on being called Polaris rather than Lorna, which she no longer acknowledges as her name. She tries to get Alex to do the same, and he won’t have it. Mark Russell’s essay on the letters page makes clear that he agrees with Polaris that the members of X-Factor are wasting their time trying to help mutants in general by signing up for this group.

VILLAINS:

X-Term are a mutant mercenary group led by Darkstar – a very odd choice of character, because as far as I can tell, Darkstar was never on Krakoa. For at least some of the Krakoan era, she was still appearing as a member of the Russian superhero team Winter Guard. Nor is she traditionally the sort of cynical villain seen here. It’s hard to tell whether it’s some sort of act, or something’s happened to prompt this, or she’s just being written wildly out of character. But she is out of character, whether there’s a reason for it or not.

Although X-Term appear to be mercenaries, Darkstar claims that this puts them in a position to influence the course of world history by affecting the outcome of armed conflicts. She’s very vague about how they might use that influence, other than to say that they’d be fighting for themselves. In context, that could mean fighting for mutants, or just for the X-Term members.

The rest of X-Term appear to be generics in normal military uniforms with a small logo (a yellow diamond), but they do mostly seem to be visible mutants.

Broderick selects X-Term as X-Factor’s first target because fighting other mutants will boost their popularity. Mills seems to regard it as a legitimate choice on purely military criteria, though.

OTHER CHARACTERS:

Refusenix are a mutant campaign group who reject the fall of Krakoa and think that mutants should boycott human nation states. They’re not very happy about the idea of a government sponsored mutant group. They are in no way stand-ins for a segment of the readership. At any rate, Refusenix mean that there are both pro-mutant and anti-mutant campaigners who oppose X-Factor: “Go back to Krakoa!”

OTHER SPECIFICS:

Page 8 panel 3: “Actually, I was an original member of X-Factor.” He wasn’t. If you’re willing to push it, Rusty was a member of the original X-Factor, but even then it would be fairer to say that he was one of their trainees.

Page 11 panel 3: “They hold on to this idea of Krakoa like it was this utopia that everyone’s somehow misremembered.” Clearly, for Broderick, Krakoa was a false paradise. He’s not entirely wrong, to be fair.

Page 17 panel 1: The Soviet propaganda poster shows their national superhero the Red Guardian. The Russian reads “Mutants of the Future!”

Page 18: Kunashir Island is in the Kuril Archipelago, and it’s under Russian control, though it’s claimed by Japan.