“The Isolationist” (conclusion)
Writer: Peter David
Artist(s): Pablo Raimondi, Valentine de Landro (p), Drew Hennessy (i)
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Plot: That title refers to how the villain lives his life, and what he’s done to the team. Monet and Siryn are off on a wild goose chase, Layla’s still coping with her stalker, and Guido, Madrox and Rahne have been stranded in the Arctic. But that’s okay, because Huber still has to face a powerless Rictor.
Comments: If this issue has a flaw, it’s the absence of Quicksilver. Sane or mad, cheerful or depressed, angry or loving, nobody gets all the ins and outs of Pietro like Peter David. He’s a pre-requisite to any version of X-Factor, and it’s too bad that the power-free nonsense he’s coping with now has put him in such a state. Though he should be grateful he looks like a teenager again for some reason, to judge from last issue.
This issue is Rictor’s show, and he’s fighting a mutant with everyone’s powers. Huber is basically Rogue (my speculation that he might have been yet another cracked version of Nimrod was way off base) turned up to ten; he absorbs everyone’s powers, and it has nothing to do with touching them or even proximity. Telepaths cause him lacerating pain, and Decimation was, too him, a blessing of apparently brief duration. His amazing abilities come from his mutant gifts and his wealth, not because he’s a robot from the future. So what was his goal when he realized there were only a few hundred mutants left? To wipe them out, too.
Only he’s not a villain so much as a sick man, and so he hoped to convince most of them to kill themselves and each other, rather than actually having to assassinate them himself. Apparently his pain hasn’t taught him that a “raze the ground” approach is pretty much the only option for coping with the stalwart remnants of a dying race. Bring on a Mutant Massacre or stay home.
Weirdly, Rictor manifests a surprising resilience to his attacks (something to do with Pietro’s stolen crystals), and when Monet (not exactly a dim bulb) arrives at super-sonic speed despite his distractions, Huber realizes he’s lost. He hightails it back to his hidey hole, and our team is mostly none the worse for the wear. David continues his penchant for dealing with the fallout of M-Day head-on, using it as an excuse to explore everyone’s fatalism, desperation and depression. With Raimondi (the perfect artist for this title, able to sell each one of David’s bitter jokes) on most of the art, this hasn’t been a bad little arc. Nothing earth-shaking, but stronger for its simplicity (without all the time travel and multiple identity confusion of earlier arcs).
It’s time for M-Day to be over, though. In the back-up feature, Henry finds no more help in magic than he did in science, but there’s a sense that a new hope is right around the corner. That’d be great for this book, because these doobies are depressed enough with all their personal issues without contemplating the death of their species as well.
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