This is the part 15 in my continuing insane effort to try to read EVERY MARVEL COMIC EVER PUBLISHED and write about them. You can see previous posts using the tag "complete-marvel-run". It has been a while since the last post, mostly because I got derailed and distracted from my reading plans; that and I wanted to read more X-Men related stuff and I decided to maybe slow down the pace of posts in this series and maybe rethink my approach (more on that later).
I was originally planning to start writing about the recently-ended Krakoan era of X-Men, but instead decided to delve into an older series instead. This post is all about v1 of one of the earliest X-Men spinoff books, X-Factor.
X-Factor v1 (1986-1998)
I believe this was only the second ongoing X-Men spinoff series (the first one being New Mutants). It's hard to believe that there was a time when there weren't a TON of X-Books being released monthly!
Original X-Men (#1-70)
The first X-Factor team consisted of the original five X-Men: Cyclops, Jean Grey, Beast, Angel, and Iceman. They started out posing as "mutant hunters" but were actually using that cover to find new mutants and protect them. This allowed them to introduce many new supporting mutants characters and villains such as Rusty Collins (who would later appear in the feature film Deadpool 2), Rictor, Nanny and Orphan-Maker and so on.
This run was hugely influential on later X-Men related comics; most notably it introduced the villain Apocalypse, who would go on to plague the X-Men many times and be a huge player in many later events. It also picks up Scott and Jean's relationship following the reveal/retcon that Jean was still alive and that the "Jean" they knew before was actually the Phoenix, which was a source of much drama during the run. The run also included many memorable crossovers such as Inferno, X-Tinction Agenda, and X-Cutioner's Song. And for a good while in the 80s their alien ship headquarters (appropriately named Ship, which they had taken from Apocalypse) was a common fixture in the New York skyline.
Given its influence, it's a bit surprising I haven't read most of this run before I started binging it on MU this year. That being said, there are long swaths of "filler"-like issues in there that aren't really essential reading. For example: There's a longish arc where they're suddenly warped off to a different planet and they all got split up and got involved in a local conflict and it ended up being the sort of thing that didn't really matter afterwards.
Overall not especially impressed with this run, but I appreciate it for the landmark first appearances.
Government Team (#71-149, -1)
Following the events of the X-Cutioner's Song crossover, the X-Books reorganized themselves and the original X-Men went back to the main team(s) to participate in the Jim Lee-led relaunch. X-Factor continued this time as a team of mutants under the auspices of the US government.
This was one of the earliest comic books I regularly read back in the 90s. My brother was buying the X-Factor issues, while I was buying the X-Men ones. We got into X-Factor quite late though, but were fortunate enough to catch the start of Joe Quesada's run. Quesada was one of my favorite artists of the time because of this, and honestly I found myself a bit miffed that he later moved on to become EIC of Marvel instead of doing more comic runs as an artist.
The first two-and-a-half years of the government team were written by Peter David. At this point a friend had already been collecting his Hulk run so I was a bit familiar with his work. He remains one of my favorite writers and this run is one of the main reasons (along with his second X-Factor volume which I'll cover at some point). He took a team of mostly tier-2 and tier-3 X-Men supporting characters and built them up with strong, solid characterization. To this day I don't think anyone else has done justice to Madrox and Strong Guy as characters. In particular #87 (his first issue with Joe Quesada), where therapist Leonard Samson (a character Peter David developed in his Hulk run) psychoanalyzed the team, remains one of my favorite single issues to this day.
Unfortunately, the series and the team didn't really do too well after Peter David and Joe Quesada left. In #96, a new villain Haven was introduced by writer JM DeMatteis, and she subsequently "killed" Madrox in #100, and the team started to fall apart from there. A lot of it was consequences of X-Men events like Age of Apocalypse/Onslaught/Zero Tolerance. Havok left and leadership fell to Forge and eventually known criminals Sabretooth and Mystique were coerced into working with the team. I think they intended to build up Haven to be a major recurring X-Men villain, but that didn't really work and she was unceremoniously killed off in #117. I'm frankly surprised they made it all the way up to #149 TBH.
Annoyingly, so much of this volume was missing from Marvel Unlimited, I had to find copies to read elsewhere. Although we collected this series back in the day, I believe we stopped at around #133, and most of the older issues are gone (I'm not sure if my brother sold them.) Only three physical issues remain in the comics I had managed to keep from those days:
Screenshot Gallery
X-Factor #70 where the original team disbandsX-Factor #72 "It beats collecting comics"X-Factor #78 TackyX-Factor #80 Rahne's World
This is one of my favorite covers of all time (despite the hologram), but I can no longer find my physical copy of it, not sure if I sold it off before. More annoying is that the Marvel Unlimited version of this issue does not include the wraparound cover! The above image is sourced from http://marvel.wikia.com/wiki/X-Factor_Vol_1_92
Not much to say about the annuals. The original team ones mostly involved Marvel's annuals crossover events (Evolutionary War, Days of Future Present, Atlantis Attacks, Kings of Pain). I must note annual #8 by Peter David, where he resolves a running gag in his main run which involves X-Factor meeting their "greatest enemies" that they've never actually met before. It's too bad I no longer have a physical copy of this issue, I really liked it.
Prisoner of Love
This was a Beast-focused one-shot written by Jim Starlin involving an alien entity and very little continuity involvement. It was not particularly interesting.
Progress Bar
Total issues covered in this post: 160.
Total number of titles/volumes covered in this post: 2
Total issues covered so far: 4,830 + 160 = 4,990
Current total (released) according to the reference reading order: 35,196 (+232 since the previous post, I'm falling behind!)
Progress: 14.18% (13.81% last post)
Up Next
As mentioned, I was originally planning to start covering the more modern Krakoan era of X-Men books (from 2019-2024), but this proved difficult because there were just soooo many titles involved. This is generally a problem with covering more modern Marvel runs. Volumes never quite last as long. The total number of issues isn't too bad, but it's a big task to cover so many different titles and write notes on each one. Frankly, the number of entries in each Comics reviews list page was getting out of hand.
As such, I'm rethinking my approach. Not entirely sure yet how, but it certainly means a reduced pace and volume for these "complete-marvel-run" posts. Possibly something closer to "read everything, but don't need to review them all", though that means I still need a way to better track "completion progress". For now, I'll focus first on posting about longer series/volumes to avoid having to write too many review items.
I'm going to try to get one more of these posts out before the end of the year, maybe Hulk-focused (since we just did Iron Man.)
