“Re-X-Aminations”
Writer: Peter David
Artist: Pablo Raimondi
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Plot: Troubled by recent events, each member of Jamie’s emotionally fragile team meets with a counselor, revealing their biggest secrets and fears.
Comments: Talk about a jumping-on point! This inaugural issue of Year Two of this title is a sequel to an infamous high-concept issue also written by Peter David and involving several of these characters some years ago, in an earlier incarnation of the title team. David’s challenge is to depict a scenario that reflects the changed world of Marvel today.
It also marks the welcome debut of the artist who should have had the title from the start. Raimondi was part of the reason for the quirky appeal of the Madrox mini-series that led to the relaunch of X-Factor, and hopefully this marks the end of the musical artists besieging this title since Ryan Sook’s promising debut petered out.
Raimondi’s figures can be a bit stiff, but in an appealingly stylized Paul Gulacy kind of way. He has these characters down, from their facial expressions to their posture and costume, and he works hard to make an action-free issue inventive with details of clothing, furniture and shifting point of view. His cover alone lets you know that this team of misfit rebels, powered and not, male and female, young and less young, are a cohesive unit, as united by their foibles as they are by their strengths.
David uses this format (which he pretty much invented) to introduce and clarify each character, and to give them motivations for the next year. At least they provide explanations the therapist can understand. This book has been beset by three of Marvel’s big event crossovers in its short life. It was founded in the wake of House of M, reconfigured in the response to Decimation, and now exists on the opposition side of Civil War.
David has embraced several concepts that resulted from those arcs and more: Morrison’s New X-Men ghetto of Mutant Town provides the setting for the noir antics David dresses up with mutant quirks; the growing sense of alienation from Decimation haunts Rictor especially; but most of all it’s the constant presence of that irritant Layla Miller that has galvanized this title.
David regenerated interest in the X-Factor concept through the persona of its least developed member, Madrox, in his eponymous limited series. But Jamie’s interview here shows he’s grown little since then: he’s still the boy who can do everything simultaneously, so he ends up choosing nothing, wracked by indecision. But Layla, little more than an off-key plot device in House of M, has become a compelling enigma at odds with Jamie, not to mention Pietro (a character David has an impressive affinity for, even in his current grim fallen form), and several of their other friends and foes.
David, much like JMS on Amazing Spider-Man, has taken crude editorially mandated concepts to new levels that impact character. X-Factor is its own quirky territory, though, and David has managed to preserve that vital tone in the midst of too many shifting currents. With Raimondi on board, Year Two is off to an auspicious start.
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