Rounding off this week's X-books, Peter David completes his first year on X-Factor.  Ryan Sook, unfortunately, didn't make it this far, and we've now got Renato Arlem instead.

This issue brings the team's feud with Singularity Investigations to a head, and while it doesn't actually end the storyline, it does explain most of the mysteries that the book has set up over the last year.  Interesting enough, it seems to be this relatively peripheral X-book that's giving the most attention to M-Day.  Most of the core X-Men titles have paid lip service to the concept, but politely pushed it aside in order to get on with their own stories.  This was probably a mistake.  If you're going to make a change that big, you really need to do stories that follow up on it.

X-Factor is following up on it, and putting the concept at the centre of the book.  The big idea is that the villain has come back from a future where they actually succeeded in reversing M-Day.  Apparently, the result was a bit of a disaster.  Nonetheless, with Quicksilver hanging around in the cast (as the one character who can supposedly re-power the ex-mutants, however unreliably), we now have a clear, strong direction for this title that contrasts nicely with the street-level, vaguely noirish setting.  Really, this is a story that one of the X-Men books ought to be doing, but if they don't want it, I'm more than happy to see Peter David giving it a go.

Renato Arlem's art is still a little bit off-putting to me.  One possible reason (pointed out to me in an e-mail) is that he's rather shamelessly reusing the same art from panel to panel.  Look at his first page in this issue, for example, and you'll see that the same art is used for Rahne's face in the first two panels - and then he does it again in panels 3 and 4.  A couple of pages later, an entire scene with Layla Miller is done using one drawing of her and one close-up of her hand, repeated to fill the entire page.  And it's a bad, emotionless shot of her, to boot.  This isn't being done for repetition effect; there's enough changes to the rest of the panel to avoid that.  It seems to be just a labour-saving device. 

On top of that, when he's not positively drawing an emotion, his background characters tend to stand around looking a bit vacant.  The cumulative effect looks a little strange.  Superficially, it's very realistic, but the characters often feel unnervingly inhuman.

This drains a little life out of the book.  But David's writing is still compelling, and it's great to see at least one X-book really get its teeth into this concept.

Rating: A-

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