Review: Nation X: X-Factor
Yes, this comic is like three months old, but I just got around to realizing that I had never set up a subscription to X-Factor at my local shop so a backlog of that comic is coming to me now.
This comic is just a one-shot, so I don't want to dither over it or get too deep into my usual philosophical quagmire, but I do have some pretty raw reactions to it. You can find them after the jump!
First, I really, really love Peter David's writing. As far as I can tell he and Joss Whedon are the two people who are writing or have written X-books recently with anything like humanity and sympathy for the characters. Warren Ellis' work on Astonishing X-Men has left me completely cold - turned me off that book entirely, in fact - and Matt Fraction's Uncanny X-Men is something I keep wishing I liked more than I do, but I don't. On the other hand, X-Factor still seems to be about people who, in most cases, started out as people who later realized they were Homo sapiens superior. (No, the opportunity to say "homo superior" will never get old.) The relationships in this are pretty shallow, to be honest, but they're entertaining. As a one-shot - and as a way to point out a lot of what's wrong with the "Utopia" storyline's incessant pouting - it's just fine, though: we see a familiar set of characters go somewhere else, do something else, remember what they like most about their normal set and setting, and leave again. It's like a really good cross-over episode between two related TV shows: neither necessarily rocks the other's world, but everyone gets a break. It's also a nice way to break set between major X-Factor story arcs and it lets a lot of the characters just plain ol' stretch their legs and be themselves. The scenes of Jamie Madrox debating iterations of himself were pretty great. It also manages to include a pretty clever contribution to the Utopia metaplot, some flavorful foreshadowing and foreboding, just the kind of thing I think David is best at doing.
Second, the art in this book is just lousy. I hate to be like that, but it is. Sometimes the faces in this are great, and I'll give it that, but the rest of the time it's pretty lackluster. It's a little Hanna-Barbera, to be honest. I kept expecting Speed Buggy to buzz by at the water line.
The thing that's most interesting of all about this book, though - and about the X-Men: Pixie Strikes Back mini-series, issue #1 of which I'll be reviewing later this week - is the way the magnitude of the Utopia storyline creates opportunities for other writers to step in and tell some of the most potentially interesting stories in the shadows of the massive narrative edifice at which Matt Fraction toils day and night. This book wouldn't be possible without Utopia, a narrative that creates truly unique opportunities for characters to cross paths who otherwise never would, and at the same time it pokes fun at Utopia and at the over-the-top nature of X-books in general. There's a fascinating tension there, and I'm extremely glad to see Marvel unafraid to allow its writers that creative free reign. On the other hand, when the most interesting stories are the ones being told in the shadows of one's meta-plot, what does that say about the meta-plot?
Klarion
Posted to Review on 22 February 2010
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Other stuff like this: Peter David, Utopia, X-Factor, X-Men
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