X-Factor #4 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-FACTOR vol 5 #4
“The Nematode”
Writer: Mark Russell
Artist: Bob Quinn
Colour artist: Jesus Aburtov
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Editor: Darren Shan
X-FACTOR
Havok actually seems fairly competent in this issue, if you overlook his willingness to be on this weird team in the first place.
Cecilia Reyes is being pressurised to adopt a codename for marketing purposes. She says that she joined X-Factor to get over her relationship with Oskar / Wintergeist (of whom more below) – she also mentioned this in passing in issue #2, and we saw them texting last issue. Once she gets his explanation for his disappearance, she does take him back.
Pyro has either been talked or pressurised into having his facial tattoo removed – it’s not clear how he was persuaded to do this, since he’s clearly not happy about it, or why X-Factor’s superiors waited until after his public debut. He claims that he joined X-Factor in order to promote his romance novels.
Frenzy joins the mission but doesn’t do much of importance.
Granny Smite is left behind. Havok insists on her sitting out the mission in case she gets trapped underground and buried alive. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to her before that a failed attempt at suicide could have that sort of result.
Xyber doesn’t appear in this issue; Havok says that he’s “going to be out for a while”. His spacesuit was damaged during the moon mission last issue, but it didn’t look as if he’d suffered any particularly serious injuries.
SUPPORTING CAST:
Wintergeist is Cecilia’s ex-boyfriend Oskar, who makes his on-panel debut here and doesn’t get a full name. I’m not counting him as a regular cast member (at least yet), since he’s explicitly just filling in for Xyber – though he does claim that he’s trying to join the team. He’s a teleporter.
Oskar disappeared from Cecilia’s life without warning, but claims here that this is because he had fallen in with X-Term, and quit after being asked to kill children. According to him, X-Term killed his parents in a revenge attack, and he cut off ties with Cecilia before they could find out about her. All this seems a little questionable – how was he maintaining a relationship with her at the same time as serving in X-Term? And how thoroughly can he have cut off ties, when he was texting her last issue?
At any rate, he claims that he’s come to X-Factor in order to “start over” with Cecilia, though if he’s telling the truth about X-Term being after him, you might figure that he’s also just looking for some allies.
Wintergeist gets injured in what seems a genuine attempt to sacrifice himself to the giant spiders in order to protect Cecilia.
VILLAINS:
Darkstar appears in flashback, giving Wintergeist a similar recruitment speech to the one she gave to Havok in issue #1. That flashback was also listed as “months earlier”, so apparently all of this is at around the same time. She claims that her X-Term group are acting as merceneries in human conflicts in order to insinuate themselves into human conflicts and give them an opportunity to influence the outcome. Havok was sceptical of this. Wintergeist also seems unconvinced but signs up anyway.
There are giant spiders in the underground caves, but they seem to be nothing more than standard Subterranean monsters.
OTHER REFERENCES:
Page 7 panel 1: The Alamagordo superbore is, obviously, not a real thing. The X-books’ main connection with Alamagordo is that the parents of Professor X (and the Juggernaut) worked there; the original idea in the Silver Age was to reference its role as a nuclear test site, but thanks to the sliding timeline it’s become a genetic research facility. All this may be entirely coincidental.
Page 7 panel 2: The Ori is the name of the lost science vessel. The significance isn’t immediately obvious – it means “head” in Yoruba, if that helps, though it also has a sense which seems to be more akin to “soul”.
Page 7 panel 3: “The Earth’s mantle is not completely solid…” Dr Grieves is presumably referencing the Marvel Universe’s well established Subterranea realms.
Page 7 panel 4: Nematode. A nematode is a roundworm; they can be found virtually everywhere.
I don’t know. I am definitely seeing the problems in toneshift with this book that others have mentioned. Is Russell alternating issues between a comedy issue and an issue we are meant to take more seriously? Maybe Russell’s writing doesn’t translate well into a monthly mainstream comic.
I do like the added dimension with X-Term which makes their agenda more interesting, and them more fully-dimensional. I’m not sure if I want to keep reading this series either, which would only leave FF and Immortal Thor as the Marvel comics I am reading (and I’m going to drop FF when the next cross-over starts because I can’t be bothered with Marvel’s cross-overs anymore). I’ll give this another two issues, for now.
It does seem like if there is a mole passing information to X-Term, as General Mills suggested in issue 2, it’s Oskar. We saw him texting with Cecilia, and he’s a former member of X-Term (and we really only have his word for the “former” part). The weird thing is that none of the characters consider this.
And we have more of the character assassination of Darkstar- she’s willing to kill children, and killed two people just to punish their son for leaving her group.
It’s sort of funny how Oskar thinks Cecilia won’t forgive him for having killed people considering that she’s working with Pyro. who turned a dozen babies over to mad scientists, and Frenzy, who killed a nurse trying to protect a kid with Down’s Syndrome.
Alex says he was recently “dead and buried”. If this is a reference to the Dark X-Men zombie thing, then no he wasn’t. Russell doesn’t seem to understand how the zombie thing worked. (in fairness, Alex could be referring to being killed and resurrected in Hellions.)
@Chris V: agree that the tone-shifting isn’t working. I think Oscar is indicative of that. He seemed to veer from a serious character to a joke depending on the panel. Cecelia Reyes is, generally, being written consistently with past portrayals, and I can’t see her ever falling for this guy.
I liked seeing Havok portrayed as more competent, though. I’m fine with Pyro and Granny Smite being (mostly) joke characters, but even a full-blown comedy needs figures that aren’t always played for laughs.
Yeah, this one isn’t landing for me at all, and X-Force is unreadably dull. I’m enjoying the mutants-in-society books (Exceptional and NYX) a lot, and UXM and X-Men are solid comics that hit enough of what I want from serialized x-books. But I think I’ll only be following these other ones through the summaries here.
If ever there was an opportunity to mention Alex’s unfinished PhD in geology, it would be this issue.
But by know I now better than to expect a character’s past to inform Russell’s writing.
(Though I enjoyed his Fantastic Four Life Story mini, and that was character focused, so what do I know).
The mole shouldn’t be Oskar – Cecilia wasn’t on the team when the X-Term mission happened. And you’d think they’d be wary of hiring someone from X-Term.
Then again, this is an alleged comedy book, so maybe the joke will be that the obvious traitor is obvious but the characters are too stupid to see it.