okay I just had a thought about the upcoming x-factor —
what if Alex hasn't been dezombified? and on top of him being on the bootlicker team in the story about the price of fame and "safety," he's also hiding a fundamental truth about his body from the cruel eyes of Society?
it would be a really, really cool take on Alex's tendency to be unaware of his body's nature/loss of autonomy over his body for him to be actively hiding the truth, for once, I think.
(not to mention, the hugely transgender subtext inherent in an arc about hiding the truth about your body and how it's been modified from your coworkers and Society)
Cover A by Greg Land | Variant Cover by Mahmud Asrar | Havok Solo Variant Cover by Marcus To | Windowshades Variant Cover by Luciano Vecchio | Disco Dazzler Variant Cover by David Lopez
having complex feelings about the x-factor 2024 announcement.
pros:
Pyro and Frenzy are there. Be Gay Do Crimes Twink + The Giant Woman I Always Want To See = Good Shit.
The guy who's writing this book is well-known for his one-shot rewriting the Hanna-Barbera character Snagglepuss as a mid-century homosexual playwright. Considering that Pyro is here, this is promising.
Alex is no longer wearing the classic costume, which reduces the chances of him being forced into the Goblin Gown significantly, forcing his arc to rely less on his sexual objectification.
The solicit seems to imply that social media will act as either a framing device or a plot point, which I like the sound of.
Alex and Frenzy serving on a team together rockets her to the #1 spot on the list of Potential Alex Summers Sex Mistakes, since she's a slightly bitter Scott ex with BDSM inclinations.
My longtime Twitter mutual Gail Simone called it a gem of the line, and I'm inclined to trust her judgment on many things.
The writer specifically namedrops Alex and Frenzy as characters he's excited to write, which implies they'll see at least some focus.
The artist is Bob Quinn, a guy I quite like and who sent me free art once for my birthday when Knights of X was delayed.
As someone who hasn't read much X-Factor from the 90s due to my ongoing feud with a particular writer from that era (iykyk), I'm kind of looking forward to seeing what X-Factor as a government team is like, as opposed to X-Factor as an investigating body.
cons:
Alex in a leadership role is never a good sign. Bad things happen to Alex when he leads.
Not a huge fan of the fact that the current known roster includes three white guys and two WOC, with one of the WOC also being a visible mutant who has fur instead of human skin, and the other being a medium-to-dark-skinned black woman famous for being buff and angry, and the three white guys are all blondes, ranging from "dumpster twink" to "hunk"
Alex working for the U.S. government feels like a microagression against me personally, as I've been very vocal about thinking that Alex needs to finally come to terms with the fact that clinging to mainstream institutions and dominant social groups will only ever hurt him, and I was hoping the Hellions or Limbo could be that for him in the Krakoan Era
The marketing seems to imply a different tone and genre from the domestic/workplace horror-comedies Alex has been part of for the last five years, and I don't know how I feel about that yet.
Greg Land is doing the covers, and I hate that for me.
"Who will die?" Of the characters we have announced so far, Alex is the most expendable. He's one of three blond white guys, and while Warren seems to be taking center stage as the Face Of The Team, and St.John's movie counterpart is returning to theaters this summer in Deadpool & Wolverine, so I doubt they'd kill him off in comics at the moment, Alex feels kind of superfluous as a co-leader, and he also is just...less loved, I think.
"Who will fall in love?" Again, worried for Alex because one of his, like, three recurring stories is "gets picked up by the scruff of his neck by a girl way out of his league so she can use him to self-actualize while playing at transgressive forms of heterosexuality." We don't really have similar core recurring storylines for other announced characters.
"Who will be the first to sell out?" Honestly I feel like St.John might be the answer to this question. He's a novelist. Novelists have egos. He's worked for the U.S. government before, under Mystique. And I guess this kind of makes me sad.
The fact that the whole cast hasn't been announced yet fills me with fear that Lorna will be in this, mostly because a fair chunk of FTA seems to be focused on catering to nostalgia on some level, and Alex/Lorna is very 90s. And frankly Dr. Dane should be doing better for herself than the man that left her at the altar for a gay man's girlfriend.
So yeah, I have complex emotions about all of this and will be watching with a fair amount of suspicion as we draw closer to the release date.
Options for how Alex is the secret traitor in the upcoming X-Factor #2, given the solicit that dropped yesterday:
Option #1: Genuinely Scheming
Option #2: The Other Alex
Option #3: Down Bad Again
Option #4: Possession/Brainwashing
See below the readmore for my more lengthy thoughts about each, but right now, my money's on option #4.
Option #1: Genuinely Scheming
This is the option for Alex genuinely agreeing with Lorna's goals and feeding her info. This is technically possible given the way the solicit is worded, but it feels unlikely because Alex never chooses the non-institutional side of a conflict of his own free will. He will always choose a comfortable bed and incrementalist change within the system over liberationary terrorism when given the choice; it's just who he is. So I can't imagine him playing spy on purpose in a way that would risk his creature comforts.
Option #2: The Other Alex
This option is for Alex's dissociative disorder from Hellions coming back with a vengeance after the fall of Krakoa and whatever events put him in the gutter in Malibu, and while vanilla Alex has no idea he's dissociating, his violent, ruthless counterpart is feeding Lorna and her group info and possibly working more directly with them. This is possible, but I doubt it because Alex's disorder didn't really manifest in a way conducive to this kind of plotting before, because alter!Alex is kind of an immediate action violence kind of guy, not a schemer.
Option #3: Down Bad Again
In this option, Alex has reunited with Lorna in some fashion and is giving her information about what X-Factor is doing, not knowing she's using that info to further her group's goals, and thus the reveal in #2 is that Lorna has been leading this group and using him. This is entirely possible, considering Alex's down-badness is chronic and terminal, and all Lorna would have to do is act like she needs him, and he'd roll right over. I don't like it, though, because Alex/Lorna is my least favorite Alex relationship, and rehashing it again is not something Lorna deserves to have to endure. She's a fucking PhD now, she shouldn't have to have her role in the story be about how she and Alex are fucking again and it's causing him problems.
Option #4: Possession/Brainwashing
In this option, someone in Lorna's camp, with or without her knowledge and blessing, has possessed or brainwashed Alex in order to infiltrate X-Factor. I think this is the most likely option, because it keeps Alex from doing anything ethically dubious while still allowing for the betrayal plotline, and keeping it from Alex's knowledge that he's doing this. Alex also has a long and storied history of being brainwashed and used against his teammates, so like, it's kind of a classic trope for him now. My specific sub-theories here are:
A) Malice has joined up with Lorna and is doing what she does best, possibly without Lorna's knowledge. I like this theory because Alex being possessed by Malice would mirror the nostalgic 80s & 90s Malice possessions, and it would inevitably give me more lesbian Alex subtext to work with.
B) Alternatively, The Exes Have Unionized, and Maddie is manipulating Alex psychically because she and Lorna are working together to further Lorna's liberatory goals. If this is what happened, it's entirely possible that Maddie dumping Alex, which i think is what lead to his Malibu gutter era, was part of the plot, and I think that's a strong possibility, given the way Maddie treats Alex in Dark X-Men as a sort of pet or object, and how we don't really have an in-built reason for her to decide to dump him.
Either way, I'm curious as to which option Russell's chosen here, and nervous about what Alex is about to be compelled to do, but I'm feeling a little more positively than you might expect, given my typical opinions and thoughts.
I'm just hoping that, whatever happens, Alex gets some, like, genuine characterization and development out of it, rather than just reiterating everything the Krakoan Era did with him, which was to use him as a plot device and crutch for other characters' development rather than his own.
Satire is a tricky beast. It's the behavior you hate amplified to an extreme in order to mock those in power. Simply portraying the actions of those you dislike or criticize isn't enough, it has to be exaggerated to show an end point.
X-Factor feels a lot like it's trying to satirize a number of things, two primarily: the military-industrial complex and influencers. Both of these intersect on a rich guy who puts together a team for the military to stop mutant terrorism (which Havoc has to convince himself aren't actually freedom fighters) and who forms a ClickClock (bleh!) account to document the whole thing. He also eats corndogs constantly, which gets old fast.
Neither satire is particularly effective here. Sure, climbing the social media hierarchy is cringey, probably intentionally so, but beyond a very stupid documentation decision it's just one more Thing that happens in the book. The nature of the military-industrial complex (corporations pushing policies so they can sell hardware or make a profit from wars) is also reversed, in that the rich guy is just someone who happens to benefit from the government's interest.
It also feels a lot like the Suicide Squad, but lacking the very simple mechanism that keeps sending these lunatics on dangerous missions, meaning the "heroes" on X-Factor need to be there for personal reasons. The kind of issues that would cause mutants to join an anti-mutant response team that views them as disposable isn't really delved into; most of the characters are pretty flat beyond Havoc's wrestling with duality, and if I didn't already know Pyro I wouldn't know him from this book.
I'm done. I don't have anything to recommend it to anyone beyond the superhero/military aesthetic it bathes in.
Some notes on Mark Russell's interview on the Blake's Buzz podcast/YouTube show, posted 6/12/2024:
Starting with the not-directly-related-to-X-Factor stuff —
Interviewer says Russell's studied religion; Russell says that religion and meaning are topics that obsess him.
He also says that you can't always been working on projects that are epic in scope, and calls projects like that the equivalent to your Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album.
He want to write "stories of human survival."
His critique of modern civilization is: "We are not allowed to survive in the way that we evolved to survive." He goes on to explain that people evolved to walk and think and help each other problem-solve in small communities.
The conversation has a fascinating (imo) anti-capitalist bent, especially when Russell discusses the threat of A.I.
Discussion of X-Factor starts about 45 and a half minutes in, and here are some notes:
X-Factor isn't the funniest book he's writing right now, My Bad is.
He wants X-Factor to be, more than anything, a "fun read," and he thinks that's found in the character relationships, which he calls the "glue" of the series, referring to friendships, romances, and characters falling out with each other.
Another major theme: "How expecting everything to be entertainment is sort of disastrous."
And also, "How expecting people to choose an institution over [...] people [...] will lead to pain and betrayal.
He sees the work of writing X-Factor as being "a lot" of "really little chapters."
He also reiterates that he was pleasantly surprised by the amount of collaboration in the X-Office, in a positive way.
Overall, I thought this interview was pretty reassuring, though we get basically no real details on specifics for characters. Russell is clearly interested in these characters as characters, not just as vessels for satire, which I admit I was a little worried about.
