‘X-Factor’: When Nostalgia Menaced the Mutants
The X-Men spin-off became a great series, but it launched from a shaky foundation.
I’ve always loved the original run of X-Factor, but I have to admit: The earliest issues are a mess. They’re entertaining, and it’s fun to see the original five X-Men reunite. Unfortunately, how they reunite is hardly organic.
Uncanny X-Men was easily one of the greatest comic book series in the decade leading up to X-Factor’s 1986 debut. Written by Chris Claremont, Uncanny X-Men was a dynamic book. Characters grew and changed. Some moved on. Some even died. Different artists would bring out different qualities in Claremont’s writing, which helped keep things fresh and exciting year after year.
The first major spin-off series, The New Mutants, represented a natural progression for the X-Men. Professor Xavier was supposed to be running a school, after all, so it made sense that he would recruit a class of younger students who were never meant to be superheroes. That series brought something different to the table and fleshed out the X-Men’s world.
Claremont wrote the first 50+ issues of New Mutants, but he did not write X-Factor. Development of this title fell to Bob Layton and Jackson Guice, who have done excellent work on other books. Thanks to their talents, the first five issues of X-Factor turned out much better than they should have, but there are some problems nevertheless.
X-Factor sounds like a logical idea for another spin-off: Why not have a book starring the original X-Men? Cyclops, Beast, Iceman, Angel, and Marvel Girl were designed to be each other’s co-stars back in the 1960s, and they’ve always had great chemistry. A book focusing on that ensemble should work. And it did … eventually.
But by 1986, most of the original quintet hadn’t been X-Men in quite some time. Beast joined the Avengers while Iceman and Angel helped form the short-lived Champions. The three of them found their way into a new team of Defenders. Marvel Girl evolved into Phoenix and then sacrificed herself to save the universe from her ultimate incarnation, Dark Phoenix. This devastated Cyclops, though he was finally starting to move on, more or less. He married a woman who looked remarkably like Jean and had a son with her. It was no idyllic romance, but he had committed to trying to make it work.
So, three original X-Men were establishing themselves as bona fide superheroes and integrating with non-mutant teams—the sort of peaceful cooperation Xavier had always envisioned. Jean died in one of the greatest comic book storylines of all time, raising the stakes for all subsequent X-Men stories. And Cyclops, having stuck with the X-Men the longest, finally got to ride off into the sunset and start a family.
What could possibly threaten all this forward momentum?
Nostalgia, of course.
To reunite the original X-Men, Marvel needed to dismantle the Defenders, separate Cyclops from his young family, and resurrect Jean from the dead.
The Defenders were no real loss. That iteration of the group never quite gelled, so some sort of change was due regardless. But the other two …
It appears Marvel was considering leaving Jean dead and casting Dazzler as the fifth member. The final panel of Dazzler’s solo series suggests she was supposed to have some involvement in X-Factor.
That could have been interesting, as she already had some history with both Beast and Angel, and it might have spared Cyclops some unfortunate character regression. But Marvel went ahead and resurrected Jean, and Dazzler wound up joining the X-Men—just in time for them to all die and go to Australia. (And she got to appear in the failed X-Men cartoon pilot but not the successful one. Some mutants can’t catch a break.)
Jean returned in a two-part story in Avengers and Fantastic Four, which was handled pretty well. The main part was written by John Byrne, who had drawn and co-plotted her demise, and there was a clear effort to make sure that Phoenix’s death still meant something. It worked better than it should have, and it cast the revived Jean in a Rip Van Winkle role, sort of like Captain America years earlier.
Leaving Jean dead could have been more dramatically interesting for the X-Men as a whole, and would have avoided the awkwardness of killing her again years later. (Once a character starts having plural deaths, the impact lessens.) But as a way of keeping the character in use, it was a reasonable compromise, and it opened up interesting possibilities—how would Jean react to all the changes the X-Men have experienced since her death?
Unfortunately, there was also the matter of Cyclops’s reaction to Jean’s resurrection. In hindsight, before the launch of X-Factor, Cyclops needed a story in which he lost his family. He could have—and should have—some responsibility for the situation, but he needed to not be morally at fault.
Something like that happened a few years later. However, in X-Factor #1, retired Scott Summers gets the call that Jean is back, so he just abandons his wife and son to go see his former lover. He’s not even man enough to tell Jean that he’s married, and he makes his other teammates keep his secret. Not a good look, as the kids say.
So already, this nostalgic X-Men reunion diminishes a noble sacrifice and reduces a major character into a deadbeat dad. And the premise gets shakier still.
Jean’s resurrection brings the team back together, which makes sense, but what keeps them together? What new mission justifies permanently reforming the group?
The original X-Men don’t feel they can trust the current X-Men because their old enemy Magneto has taken over as the headmaster of Xavier’s school. That also makes sense, and this version of Jean barely knows any of the new X-Men anyway. This motivates the original team to carry on Xavier’s mission. Great. So they use Angel’s wealth to open a new school and they start finding young mutants to train, right?
No. They pose as mutant hunters.
They pretend to be regular humans using advanced technology to capture dangerous mutants. People call in and hire X-Factor’s services, and X-Factor shows up to apprehend the alleged mutant menace. The plan is that once they’ve got these mutants back at their facility, the original X-Men would then reveal their true nature and train them on how to control their powers.
To achieve this, our heroes permit a marketing campaign that plays into the public’s fears about mutants.
The former X-Men adopt another role as well—they pose as renegade mutants. In #7, they even come up with a name for this act: X-Terminators. So basically, they’re inflaming prejudice from both sides.
The book tries its best to justify this strategy. In the first issue, we see X-Factor sticking a bigot with an exorbitant bill for their services. Plus, they do indeed save the life of a young mutant with uncontrollable fire powers, and they take him under their wing and start training him.
But the strategy clearly harms human/mutant relations, endangering the very people they’re trying to help. Quite simply, the original X-Men come across as fools—so preoccupied with their own personal problems that they can’t see all the damage they’re causing.
Maybe the characters were always supposed to realize their error eventually—see the below panels from #5 in which Jean points out the obvious. But I simply don’t believe that all five of them would have erred so egregiously in the first place.
Additionally, the early issues have a somewhat retro feel compared to the contemporary Uncanny X-Men and New Mutants. Back in the ’60s, these X-Men fought the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants in several of their earliest issues, so now they fight another group of misbehaving mutants, the Alliance of Evil, with an early version of Apocalypse playing the Magneto role. Plus, Beast loses his furry appearance so he resembles his original incarnation, and Angel seems to quickly forget all about his longtime girlfriend, Candy, who was very involved with the Defenders to the point of being named team leader. Much of it feels very backward-looking.
However, the book started getting on the right track once Louise Simonson took over as the writer beginning with #6. Simonson previously served as editor of the main X-Men title and brought some of that Uncanny magic to X-Factor.
It took another few issues to sort everything out—things needed to come to a head before they could turn around—but soon the characters were again moving forward. Angel experienced major changes and became Archangel. Beast eventually regained his furry form and developed a new romantic interest. Cyclops started actually being a father to his infant son, which gave the whole team some non-superhero adult responsibility. Stories were progressing, and what began as an exercise in nostalgia turned into a classic in its own right.
Nostalgia can serve as a springboard into something good (see Cobra Kai as a recent example). But if the characters’ motivations stem from an external mandate and not their own organic desires, we’ll be left wondering if they’ve stumbled into an Invasion of the Body Snatchers situation.