All New X-Factor #16 Review

The series is due for cancellation in a few months, but it’s nice to see that Peter David continues the focus on character relationships despite the AXIS tie-in. He finds time for all the members of the team to do their own thing in this issue. The group retreats behind a protective bubble to avoid the psychic attack of Red Onslaught as well as that of an army of human-controlled Sentinels.

Several characters have standout moments: Quicksilver’s surprising "admission" as well as Cypher and Danger launching their kick-ass counterattacks.

Carmine Di Giandomenico renders all of this material with his trademark flair.

The one plot element that failed to connect is the drama surrounding Havok spying on Polaris. This seems like an unnecessary and regressive move given Havok's activity in Uncanny Avengers.

All New X-Factor #15 Review

The Story: Washington DC is full of crazy people and they must be stopped.

The Review: This is a wonderfully action-packed issue with a little something for everyone to do, and it sets itself up as the middle chapter in a (likely) three-issue arc. It takes its set-up from the events in Avengers and X-Men: Axis story, or at least I think it does. There was no segue from the previous issue into this one, leaving the set-up to be just a reference in the “Previously” page and some lip-service by Polaris a couple of times. It’s also taking such a tangential angle that it’s almost a disservice. It’s possible for a regular series to have a good tie-in to a publishing event, like having your cake and eating it, too, but I can’t help but feel this comic is taking some cake, eating it, but making sure not to enjoy it with every slow, frowning bite.

A really nice thing is that this issue is very nicely balanced among all the characters. A key sequence features a Polaris versus Gambit moment, but all the members of the team get a moment, too. In P v. G, there’s some nice display of powers, and Gambit proves a smart fighter. Polaris is very forgiving, however, and nothing really comes out of it, which is surprising given that the two have been bouncing off of each other from the start.

The art, again, is nice when characters are posing, often floating between panels. Some of the layout/sequencing just isn’t effective, though, such as when Luna is about to be shot. The angle of the layout shifts so dramatically that it doesn’t read as a continuous moment, when it would be more effective to visually be as similar as possible *before* the characters move. Luna is carried away in the space of a bullet by her father Quicksilver, a move that we have seen to good effect in movies (X-Men: Days of Future Past!) and on TV (yay, The Flash!) but comics are not film and what works visually on film can’t be expressed the same way in comics. I’ve looked at this page a lot, and I can see the layout working if the coloring between the panels were more consistent and if dialogue was clipped between them– as I said, perhaps to read as a continuous moment.      

The Bottom Line: This is an abrupt jump into some version of the Axis story that leaves all the characters scrambling into action without a lot of context. There’s some dynamic layouts among some poor ones, and some interesting character moments among some poor character decisions, and all that mixed messaging to the reader won’t be enough to distinguish the comic as living up to X-Factor’s real potential

The Grade: C+

Get the full review on Weekly Comic Book Review here