Review: X-Factor #216
Issue #215 was a great, crunchy issue with a fun little one-shot story and plenty of good development of the relationship between Jamie and Layla. I liked it a lot, and the story it presented was a nice way to shine a light on the collateral damage the whole Marvel vampires storyline must have necessarily generated in the larger world that story inhabited. That said, the art was really uneven, and in no two panels did Jamie's face look the same.
Issue #216, however, gets us back into a new plot arc and I adore it, not just because it has Pip, my current favorite non-Tick comedy relief in all of comics, going toe-to-toe with J. Jonah Jameson. It's got fantastic art, updates on other plot threads and guest appearances. Love!
First, let me say that every other page of this book could have been terrible - it could have been straight-up bad on literally every other page - and it still would have been worth it to see Layla lay down the law for Rahne. Yeah, so Rahne's had some rough stuff to deal with and she's had a lot of religious issues to try to resolve and blah blah blahdy blah, but girlfriend busted in on my favorite couple in comics and I am not OK with that. What I am OK with is her taking the piss in some form or another every time she's on the page. Layla has a gift for finding the chink in someone's armor and shoving a crowbar through it and this is no different. Delicious. That's all I really need.
The rest of the book is pretty great, though! Peter David draws in a lot of other faces from Marvel, some large and some small. I don't know enough about Beverly Lacoco to have any particular emotional reaction to her but she has a history and David is clearly enjoying getting to use the character. On the other end of the fame spectrum, of course, are J. Jonah Jameson and Spider-Man. It makes my heart trill just a little to see Spidey chatting with Shatterstar and Monet, even as David uses the occasion to wonder aloud how Spider-Man manages to find so many convenient surfaces for webbing. Loved it.
I was especially pleased with the hilarious (if brief) interaction between Pip and J. Jonah Jameson. The bit about Pip being an Internet troll took a little too much squeezing to get it out of the tube, by my tastes, but the who's-on-first style banter between Jameson and Pip was enough to make me laugh out loud in a public place. It's the little conversational corners where David really finds third gear as a writer. He can squeeze more significance into a few seemingly lightly tossed lines of dialogue than just about anyone else in the industry, as in the interaction between Layla and Rahne, or he can manage to pump out several good laugh lines in rapid succession, as with Pip and Jameson and Jamie's recollection of Jameson using a line from The Godfather.
But what of the most important conversation of all - the one between Monet and Shatterstar at the start, when Monet is advising Shatterstar to stake out his territory? A few sentences at most, half-obscured behind an amusing allusion to watersports, yes, but one of those David classics: the planting of an idea in a mind. I was saying it the last time I reviewed X-Factor, I know, but it's still true: David is so good at juggling we barely even see him put another ball into the air. I wish Shatterstar would tell Rahne to back the hell off, yes, but at the same time there's a lot of context there preventing that. It creates a tension by its very suggestion, and one that's interesting to me, and one we know will pay off somehow or another, sooner or later. Nicely done.
Klarion
Posted to Review on 10 March 2011
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Other stuff like this: J. Jonah Jameson, Peter David, Spider-Man, X-Factor
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