This week's other X-Factor offering is a Layla Miller one-shot.  Like the recent Quicksilver book, The Quick and the Dead, this isn't really a spin-off at all.  It's essential reading for those following the regular series, because it picks up on the fate of Layla Miller after she got dumped in the future during "Messiah Complex."

I rather suspect that this is a story designed to give at least some closure to a character who is being written out for the foreseeable future.  And on that level, it largely succeeds.

Layla does not lend herself to a solo story.  Although she was notionally created by Brian Bendis in House of M, she was little more than a cipher in that series.  The character as we know her was laid down by Peter David in X-Factor, when he cast her as an enigmatic, irritating child who was a literal know-it-all.  Her role in the book was to annoy other characters and nudge the plot along with shameless, tongue-in-cheek contrivances.

Fine when she was on the margins, but this presents more of a challenge once she takes centre stage.  Layla's trademark is that she's a plot cheat, and how do you build a satisfying story around that?  The answer is partly to focus on her limitations: Layla can only take advantage of things that were going to happen anyway.  And partly, the answer is to let Layla have the importance her powers would suggest. 

So what we get here is Layla escaping from the mutant prison camp where we left her, thanks to particularly absurd, but paradoxically satisfying, contrivance.  And then she sets the ball rolling to start the Summers Revolution.  (Nitpickers will quite rightly point out that the "Summers Revolution" is supposed to be from Bishop's timeline, which ceased being a potential future back in the nineties when Onslaught failed to wipe out the X-Men.  But whatever.)  And of course, because we're probably not going to see her for a while, so it might as well happen now, she gets to drop the mask and show emotion.  For a couple of panels.

This is the sort of story where Peter David really impresses me, not so much because the results are fantastic, but because he's working with such unpromising material and manages, yet again, to hammer it into something worthwhile.  For readers who are remotely interested to know what happened to Layla, this is a thoroughly satisfying answer.

Rating: A-

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