Finally, X-Factor #32 completes the team's departure from "Mutant Town", and sets up their new direction.

It's taken us quite a while to get to this point.  Mutant Town is finally and decisively dismantled, and the government offers X-Factor a choice: join the Initiative or become freelancers for the O*N*E.  They choose option three: run away and move to Detroit.

I confess to slightly mixed feelings about this change of direction.  On the one hand, it can't help but feel a little contrived.  You can feel the gears grinding, as the series lurches in a new direction.  On the other hand, Peter David is the sort of writer who can work with anything.  And there were problems with Mutant Town - a setting that hasn't really made a great deal of sense since M-Day.  Getting the team out of there, and making them into a lower-profile investigative agency in another city, is probably for the good in the long run.

But that still leaves the challenge of extracting the book from its previous set-up in a satisfying way.  David has dealt with that, in the preceding arc, by playing up the way that setting collapsed around him, and having Arcade force the team's hand by burning the place down.  It didn't come across all that clearly last issue, but this time around, there's a much stronger sense that the neighbourhood has been destroyed.

By taking a few months to go through this, David has managed to make this seem like the turning point where the team start their fight-back from total defeat, instead of the clunky change of direction that it could so easily have been.  And there's a nice bit of misdirection, as he establishes what seems to be a perfectly viable new set-up in its own right, before throwing in one extra element at the end.

David has always been able to make the best of a difficult job, and I think he's done it here.  It's not the greatest story he's ever written, but the change is probably for the best, and he's made it work better than most writers could.  Sure, I can hear the grinding of editorial gears in the background.  But I can live with that.

Rating: B

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