The truth is that at first this issue didn't at all strike the right notes to make me think, Yeah! Can't wait for next month! There was a little too much backbiting and sourness between the characters in this issue, a little too much bickering. I love adventure and I love comedy and I love sass and sharp wits. I love the verbal shuttlecock of, say, The Thin Man or The Rockford Files or, more relevantly, books such as X-Factor #207 or #208. All that is there in this issue, yes, but sometimes it veers away from the verbiage of Firefly and towards the shrewishness of an episode of All In The Family. That's not a style of comedy or character interaction that appeals to me, personally, but it clearly does to others as there are plenty of successful works about people who are constantly annoyed with themselves and one another. So, take my reservations with a grain of salt; what doesn't work for me probably does for you. Suffice to say, for most of this issue I kept saying to myself, Wow, this is not about a team of people I want to watch work together. I like dialogue and interactions that emerge from the synergies and frictions of confident, effective people working side by side and a lot of this issue's dialogue springs from someplace more uncertain and shaken. Madrox is, as leader of a rag-tag team, harried by narrative necessity and I realize and accept that. There are times when it is played to perfect effect, too - the duplicate rounds of "If one of your dupes...!" and Jamie's metaphor of the Swiss timepiece vs. the cuckoo clock are the best ones I can name - but there are times when it just seems like everybody's having a bad hair day and that's a lot less interesting to me than seeing capable people pursue disparate agendas in each other's company.

That said, boy is this issue about Vegas - backbiting and bitchiness and all. It brings to mind a trip taken a few years ago during which I spent several days in Las Vegas with some friends. By Day Three I was ready to burn the whole town to the ground. It is a place where one cannot be a tourist and find any solace from lights and noise and music and pizazz. There is no distraction from its many opportunities for distraction and one starts to feel ground down in very short order. One can never sleep enough and one can never play enough in Las Vegas and one starts to feel more and more thinly stretched between those two opposing poles. I remember all of us sitting in an only slightly swanky seafood place for ten minutes before we realized that they didn't think we were classy enough to be worth their time - they seated us and then simply ignored us - and the fight that broke out in our social circle when someone suggested we say fuck it and head for a sub shop instead. Watching the blood sugar of half a dozen people - people who haven't slept, who have all had too much to drink, who are all trying to power through a hangover already and who haven't eaten a well-rounded meal in possibly 48 hours - collectively crash was no fun; being one of them was even less so.

A blink of the eye of memory later, we were laughing and playing Blackjack at a table we'd taken over and the cocktail waitresses were hitting us with plenty of free drinks because we were tipping well and losing at cards. Vegas is a place where the thinnest of gaps exists between homicidal and hilarious. It's a city where an engine of good times runs on the fumes of hope. Up and down, winning and losing - all that stuff sort of loses its objective meaning as one begins to experience a topography of extremes devoid of larger context. Losing and winning become equally fun, in their way; it stops mattering that the fifth free cocktail isn't as good as the first. All that the place can offer is experience and it can offer every kind of experience one could want. That may all sound like exaggeration - and it probably doesn't at all work as discouragement, nor is it in any way meant to be - but it is absolutely a representation of what I took home from the times I've visited. Vegas is too much and never enough, and X-Factor #209 gets that. What this issue of X-Factor also understands is that Las Vegas is a ton of fun and that even though the words "Las Vegas" conjure up a pretty consistent image and set of impressions across large swaths of people and demographics, from moment to moment the experience of the place itself is completely unpredictable. The team's up-and-down-and-all-around relations and attitudes are reflective of that place and there are plenty of reasons the overall story arc is equally in sync with the setting of the piece.

What better setting for a story that includes this massive gamble by Rahne? What better place to use as a frame for Hela than the absolute, hands-down contrapositive of Broxton, Oklahoma? If the quietly interconnected town of Broxton is no refuge from the forces that orbit the idea of Asgard then Vegas is in truth no anonymous wash of chaos free of the attention or influence of the powers that be. There's a delightful symmetry, actually, between the way the mundane and supernatural powers are portrayed as working in this book: once the team starts winning big the hotel comps them high-roller rooms filled with flowers and masseuses, and all because the casino assumes that they, like everyone, will sooner or later start to lose; likewise, Hela is happy enough to push around and/or employ anyone who might be of use to her because, after all, everyone winds up at her mercy sooner or later anyway. As to the art, it does keep up with the writing. The art isn't is as solid as that in some of Marvel's flagship titles, no, but it beats the hell out of some of the art we were getting last year and it does a magnificent job of portraying the emotional flux one finds in that place.

The story itself is hard to comment on. There's a pretty predictable arc coming with Rictor and Shatterstar and I'm a little yawnsome about that but I suspect it will turn out happily enough in the end - well, as happily as any soap opera ever does - and I have absolute confidence that Peter David is going to pack some surprises into that lunch. I confess that I absolutely detest Rahne and I cannot wait for the truth about her baby daddy's ID to get dragged out into the light simply because I think that will be unpleasant for her. In the meantime, the close of the book promises action sequences in #210 and I am always ready for an X-Factor action sequence. The general shape of this issue was great, too. Longshot working the tables in Vegas is an idea so fun one can't not enjoy it and Peter David isn't at all afraid to have fun with that - and to show his characters having fun with their circumstance once the potential fun becomes apparent to them. Overall, though, this is much more of a setup issue than a story issue, and that means we don't get much meat until #210 - a wait I'm happy to endure for more of what is easily my second-favorite book on the shelves.