X-FACTOR #1: THIRD GENESIS!

The Original Five X-Men are back -- deal with it.

Originally Published February 1986

(Note: This is the second part of a rare double post day! You may have missed my write-up on Uncanny X-Men #202. It's not necessary to understand what's going on in this comic but you may want to double back and read it by clicking here!)

We begin near Anchorage, Alaska, where Scott Summers is attempting to enjoy his civilian life, using his optic blasts to cut firewood for his wife and son.

It's a lot of firewood. That's basically all he has to do in life, so he does it. A lot. All firewood all day.

Scott and Maddie are going through a rough patch, given that he recently abandoned her to give birth on a kitchen floor, rubbed salt in the wound by attempting to rejoin the X-Men as leader, and generally does not seem the least bit invested in his role as husband and father, which he seems to view as a sort of consolation prize.

It also doesn't seem like they've completely moved past the Jean of it all, with Madelyne still suspecting that Scott is only with her because she somewhat resembles Scott's famous ex.

This has not been presented as a wedge issue for them in some time, but Madelyne may have a point, since Scott has a habit of waking up in the middle of the night to stand outside staring at the moon - the very moon where Jean Grey died.

To put the status of their relationship bluntly...

The truth hurts.

Far far away, down in sunny New Mexico, soaring high above the mesas and buttes - under his own power! - is the high flying mutant known as Angel. He and his compatriots Iceman and Beast - fresh off a disastrous stint in the Defenders that seemingly ended in all of their teammates meeting a grisly death - are getting ready to start new civilian lives. When a rig snaps and they make a hash of trying to rescue some contractors working on Warren's house, it just confirms that, without a certain one-eyed leader calling the shots, these three are all washed up as heroes.

Literally, I suppose.

But no sooner than Bobby and Hank leave does Warren receive an urgent call - from none other than Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four! He leaves for New York posthaste (in his private jet, not under his own power) leaving his girlfriend Candy to sexually tempt the remaining construction workers.

I'm not being gross, that's what she plans to do.

Elsewhere, we see a sheepish young sailor named Rusty being commanded by his C.O to have his way with a prostitute named Emma La Porte. Rusty is really not in the mood and absolutely does not consent, but Emma forces herself on him anyway, triggering an anxiety attack that brings on Rusty's mutant powers.

...yikes.

Meanwhile, back at JFK Airport, Angel has arrived and immediately does the sensible thing by disrobing, unfettering his wings so that he can flap around the terminal like a madman calling out for Reed Richards instead of simply calmly walking up to him like an idiot would.

Never mind the fact that anti-mutant hysteria is at an all-time high, causing a considerable-sized mob to form and pelt Angel with garbage. He does reach Richards though and the two adjourn to Avengers Mansion where Dr. Richards reveals the big news.

Jean Grey is alive.

Warren struggles with the decision over whether to call Scott and tell him this life-changing news. After all, if Scott doesn't know, maybe Warren and Jean could get close again. We all know Scott has completely moved on with Madelyne, and as for Jean, well, why should she get a say in it?

Of course he calls, and well, we all know how Scott is going to react to this.

And so, in the blink of a ruby quartz-covered eye, Scott is in New York.

Jean is obviously very excited to see Scott, and immediately proceeds to paw at him, trying to pick up where they left off. Warren has "helpfully" not explained anything about what has happened in the last few years to Jean, leaving that to Scott. But first we need to know - what the flick is going on here - how is Jean alive??!?

As we know, many years ago, the X-Men were abducted to Stephen Lang's satellite base and encountered some trouble with their ride home - namely the unshielded shuttle Jean had to pilot through solar radiation. As you no doubt recall, Jean appeared to die in that event, only to emerge from the waters of the Jamaica Bay (which, again, is off the coast of Long Island, not the Caribbean) with a fancy new set of duds, and supercharged cosmic-level powers, declaring herself to be fire and life incarnate - in other words, PHOENIX!

And so began a pretty crazy time in the X-Men's life, resulting in Jean destroying a sun, then committing suicide on the moon as a sacrifice to prevent herself from doing any further harm. You may have heard the tale.

But -- are you ready for this? -- It turns out that wasn't really Jean at all.

Very recently, the Avengers discovered a mysterious capsule at the bottom of Jamaica Bay, radiating extraordinary energies. They brought it to Reed Richards, who ran some tests and inadvertently unlocked it, releasing its occupant: Jean Grey!

As it turns out, the entity we all thought was Jean, from Uncanny X-Men #101 through #137, was in fact a cosmic being (The Phoenix) which used Jean's body and personality as a template, while sending her down into stasis to heal from her injuries or whatever.

In short, that means that nothing that happened to Jean in the last years of her life really happened to her, and nothing she did was really done by her. She has been rebooted, given a blank slate, tabula rasa, a state of grace, completely innocent and pure, just as Stan Lee intended and in no way responsible for anything the entity known as Phoenix did.

The other side-effect is that her telepathic abilities - transferred to her by Professor X back in the 60's - have disappeared, but her telekinetic abilities have increased "dramatically" (for certain values of "dramatic" - after all, she is certainly not as powerful as Phoenix was.)

The Unbreakable Jean Grey is dismayed at what she has seen in the world since waking up. Mutants are hated and feared more than ever. With Professor X gone and Magneto - that psychopathic murderer - running the X-Men, there's no place for them there either. It's time to form their own club!

Worst of all, The Bay City Rollers are no longer popular. When did that happen?

Of course, Angel has just recently given up the superheroic life, and Cyclops - well, he's got some stuff going on that maybe we should tell you about - but Jean is not having it, and flies off in a telepathic fit.

Warren catches up to her a few blocks away and lets her know that he's had some time to think it over in the last five seconds, and maybe there's something they can do.

A few weeks later, we catch up with Beast's attempts to get a research position at (Boston's) Harvard Medical School, only to find that the Harvard faculty would not be accepting of a hairy blue mutant among its ranks, genius scientist or no. ("Perhaps you could try Yale...")

Me, I would put it down to the X-Men's proclivity to inappropriately undress in public spaces, but it could be a combination of things.

Hank is approached by a mysterious figure with a job for him. Similarly, Bobby Drake receives a call at his job at the accounting firm of "Harras, Brown and Some Other Assistant Editor" where he is all too excited to ice up and skate out of the joint.

These mutants do not "get" civilian life. 

Hank and Bobby are brought into the fold but before the big scheme can be revealed, they have to track down Cyclops, whom they find moping on a pier, unshaven and despondent.

Scott's pretty shaken up, the very picture of a midlife crisis, wondering why he's so soft in the middle now when the rest of his life was so hard, and who will be his role model now that his role model is gone.

Okay really, he's obviously very conflicted about having mourned for an alien space bird and not his actual girlfriend. And for some reason, about sushi.

"Scott... it was the Coffee A-Go-Go. We never went to 'Coffee Bean Cafe'."

Still, they convince Scott that it's time to get the band back together - Jean will understand about what Scott had to endure when he thought she had died. And that's really the only person whose feelings matter in all this.

These knuckleheads go back to Warren's base of operations where they are introduced to one Cameron Hodge.

Hodge is a college associate of Warren's - a P.R. whiz and a real pal. A great choice for Right hand man. Someone who would really stick his neck out for a friend.

Hodge's scheme is to take advantage of the anti-mutant hysteria and use it for good by pretending to be a team of anti-mutant investigators but actually rescuing mutants in trouble. They'll have a catchy name and a hotline you can call.

And hey, no pressure or anything but the ads are already running.

Naturally, X-Factor is contacted to track down Rusty, who has escaped from prison after his former-C.O., Fisher, attempted to kill him in his jail cell. His powers are once again going haywire.

The team meets with Fisher under the guise of the mutant-detection agency, but locate Rusty clad in their newly-designed superhero getups, openly operating as Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Iceman, Beast and Angel, five extremely distinctive-looking known superheroes.

They locate him in the desert outside San Diego. In a panic, he collapses a cave in on the lot of them, which Jean saves them from using her telekinesis. Scott blasts them free and they change back into their X-Factor duds to extract payment from Fisher.

Hahaha, hilarious right? They're profiting off anti-mutant hysteria. What a laff.

Anyway, all's well that ends well as they take Rusty into their own custody where he will be safe, and all the loose ends are tied up.

Further Thoughts:

Now everything changes. I have spent the last several weeks looking upward as this book fast approaches like a bomb from the sky set to blow up everything I do here, and seemingly, everything the X-Men are. My tag on X-Factor #1 has always been... "Man, that was so much work for one of the worst ideas I've ever heard." That's a slight hyperbole, but it's pretty hard to be nuanced when trying to craft a really good pithy remark. 

Back in the mid-80's, someone realized that four of the original X-Men were now free agents, with Beast having ended his stint in the Avengers, the New Defenders wrapping up their run in late-85, and Cyclops having ridden into the sunset, and so - despite the wishes of Chris Claremont, who fancied himself the overseer of All Things X but was really just a cog in the machine like any other creator at Marvel - this book was conceived to reunite them. While it was originally going to feature a different female character, likely Dazzler, word started going around about an idea that had been pitched to Marvel Editor Roger Stern about how they could possibly bring Jean Grey back and not have her be damaged goods or a villain-in-waiting. To, in effect, undo everything that had been written about her since 1976 with one of the most famous "retcons" in comic book history.

The solution is complicated, but in a characteristically comic booky way expands the world of Marvel, and while it does take some of the resonance out of the Dark Phoenix Saga and the death of Jean Grey, in the long run the story has lost little of its power, even when you mentally go back and imagine you're looking at a cosmic space creature that looks like a redheaded human woman, not the real deal.

This development helpfully makes Jean perfectly capable of being the protagonist of a new series. If only the same could be said for Cyclops. 

Now we know what Scott's behaviour in recent issues of Uncanny X-Men has been leading up to: there's surely no way that Jean and Scott could both be alive in the same universe and not available for each other, so this Madelyne chick has got to go. And if there is a kid involved, well that's just inconvenient for them - nobody wants to read about a married superhero with a kid, that's too... grown up! 

There are ways to end a marriage in fiction, you know - something comic books are spectacularly bad at, historically speaking. There are ways to make it nobody's fault, and better yet there are ways to make it so that the person who is supposed to be a superhero is wronged, or at the very least not completely in the wrong. But every time Chris Claremont, and now Bob Layton, have sat down to write Cyclops this past year, they chose chaos and violence. At least for Claremont, you could argue that it was protest - perhaps he was torching "his" character in response to the editorial mandate. Layton runs with that and helps make him the most inattentive, callous prick you could imagine, with the temerity to have him cheerfully thinking "I belong here, and nowhere else!" as if that will get us, the readers on board, while also twisting the knife by reminding us that Madelyne is at home alone crying while Scott pursues the very woman Madelyne was already worried about, even when she was dead.

And yeah, Scott has always been a little distant, a little cold, and definitely morose, but this is beyond.

I am skeptical, to say the least, that this comic is able to thread the needle of having its lead character do the things Scott has done, keep his credibility, and depict any kind of fallout from his actions with any degree of narrative integrity. But this is what it is, it happens and we all have to live with the fallout from that. And you can't say they don't make hay out of the negativity generated by Scott's behaviour here, but that's another story, and will be told another time.

It is therefore my sad duty to report that notwithstanding all this, this is still not a great comic. Pilots such as this tend to be very utilitarian, setting up a premise in a very basic scenario, which this does, once the heavy lifting is out of the way, and the best you can say is that at times it is a perfectly capable execution. This group - the O5 - are not great characters together. I grappled with it constantly through my writeups on the 60's issues and it feels like their voices have all reverted to that era. It feels like you are reading flat 60's personas in an 80's comic, which is shocking when you're used to the standard of quality established by Chris Claremont, where even if it remains often a cheesy comic book, some measure of depth and insight is strived for. The book is short on the nuance necessary to handle the characters or the extremely delicate situation in which they find themselves. Even the new guest characters like Rusty and Chief Fisher seem to have popped out of a catalogue of simple archetypes that were cheap when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were the scribes. Only Hodge, as the fussy PR nerd, has anything going on at all. And the less said about including an attempted rape as a key inciting incident, the better.

There are extenuating circumstances of course. This book was fully rewritten and redrawn at the eleventh hour over the course of a weekend, with Hurricane Gloria bearing down on New York City, at the demands of an increasingly fickle Jim Shooter. But it hit the shelves, with these names in the credit box, and that's that.  

Even beyond the storytelling hoops that had to be negotiated to get here, and my personal dislike of the former X-Men revertigoing back to their 60's personae, at the end of the day I don't love the X-Factor concept. I get it, sort of - it's cute that they're using PR and media manipulation, but I have a hard time seeing how conventional costumed superheroics fit in to the mutant-hunting scheme and how much wheels the charade has as story material. It's just not something that I buy into. It wants to be a breezy throwback comic that still engages with the then-current state of mutant affairs and the grittier flavour of the times, and also happens to be built on an incredibly fraught character dynamic and a tricky high concept to manage. It would be tough to pull this off, under the auspices of the industry's tetchiest Editor-in-Chief, and not trigger a ton of my critical no-go zones. But if there are readers who can buy in, hey, they may be fun to be had. 

Some days I am very lighthearted and forgiving, but that is not today.

I don't know... maybe if they got more of a superstar creative team, introduced an iconic new foe, and became increasingly re-enmeshed in the X-Men's lives and adventures to the point where you are obligated to read that book to understand this one for long stretches... maybe I could see it working.

Lastly, this book marks and end - and a beginning - in more than one way. You see, the whole discovery of Jean Grey was teed up in a Fantastic Four Annual, a book that was being written and drawn by former X-Men artist John Byrne, who was famously fed up with Chris Claremont overriding his input into the direction of the story. Only problem is, as a concession to CC, he was allowed by Shooter to re-write portions of that issue pertaining to the X-Men story (with art provided by Jackson Guice doing a John Byrne art impression.) Incensed that he couldn't escape Claremont's tentacles even in the book he was writing, JB's relationship with Marvel soon ended, with him going over to DC Comics to help relaunch Superman. 

And all that so the 30-year-olds who were 10 when the X-Men debuted could see their old faves together again. Hope it was worth it.

Portions of this write-up are informed by Sean Howe's invaluable Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.