X-Factor seems to have dropped out of doing story arcs for the moment, but issue #6 will presumably be the cut-off for the first trade paperback, which makes it a good point for a review.

Before I start, though, it's worth pointing out the cover by Gabriele Dell'otto.  He's done a lot of work for Marvel recently, mostly painted artwork with a gritty and scratchy feel to it, such as his covers for Annihilation.  Here, it's line art coloured by Jose Villarrubia, and it's a very different (and much more interesting) side of his work.  Okay, Villarrubia can make any old schmuck look good, but there's some lovely body language on that cover.

Returning to the actual content, Marvel have taken the unusual step of running half-page adverts promoting X-Factor #6-8.  We don't normally get significant promotion for books at this stage in their life and it's nice to see a title getting some follow-up for once.  Issue #6 is the issue devoted to Layla Miller, who was introduced during House of M as a shameless plot device, and then showed up in this book as a mysterious enigma.  With this issue, Peter David starts trying to move her beyond that, to become a more rounded character.

What we get is a partial explanation.  Layla apparently just knows how various things are interrelated and how they "should" turn out, which allows her to either meddle and put things on the right track, or just leave things be, depending on how she feels.  She claims that she can't actually tell everyone her full agenda because itself would have disastrous consequences; then again, there's a fairly powerful suggestion here that she may simply be manipulating them all.  There's clearly a lot more to be done, but at least she's now emerging as a character.  She's plainly a manipulator, and the question now comes down to her agenda.

This is also the first issue where most of the cast get together in a room and get a scene where they act like some sort of team.  X-Factor isn't a team book, strictly speaking, so much as a book about a firm of private investigators, but I'm wondering whether this should really have been left so long.  I confess that, at this stage, the book is falling a little short of my admittedly very high expectations.  It's been consistently good, but on the strength of the Madrox miniseries, I was bracing myself for great.  In part, I wonder whether the problem is a lack of focus, and whether it would have helped to have everyone dealing with Singularity Investigations right from the opening arc.

Dennis Cavello fills in on art again, with generally decent results.  I'm not at all keen on his Wolfsbane, which looks like a woman wearing a wolf head from to a costume shop, but otherwise it's right for the book's subdued atmosphere.

A very solid issue, but it doesn't quite blow me away.  We're moving incrementally forward with Layla, and in general there are plenty of interesting character ideas here.  Yet the book seems to lack a strong central thread to drive it forward. In theory that's supposed to be Singularity Investigations, but it doesn't quite seem to be clicking.

Rating: B+

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