X-Factor Forever (X-Factor

X-Factor Forever #1-5

by Louise Simonson, Dan Panosian (Illustrator), Eric Nguyen (Illustrator)

THEY'RE BACK! Once they were Xavier's young mutant teens who bore the responsibility of protecting a world that hated them. But time has hardened these five X-Men, forcing them to reimagine their mission and purpose. And now, the original dream team returns to fight the one threat that's haunted them since the day they took on the X-Factor name. Join legendary X-scribe Louise Simonson as she reunites with the title and characters she made famous for an epic in the FOREVER tradition!



X-Factor Forever #1-5, X-Factor #63-64

Genres: Comics, X Men, Graphic Novels, Marvel, Comic Book

176 pages, Paperback

First published October 27, 2010

About the author

Louise Simonson (born Mary Louise Alexander and formerly credited as Louise Jones, when married to artist Jeff Jones) is an American comic book writer and editor. She is best known for her work on comic book titles such as Power Pack, X-Factor, New Mutants, Superman, and Steel. She is sometimes referred to by the nickname "Weezie".

Since 1980 she is married to comic book writer and artist Walter Simonson

Reviews

[Sean · Rating 2 out of 5]

The idea of Louise Simonson coming back to write a continuation of her run of X-Factor is enticing but I don't think this was executed well. The Celestials were some of my least favorite elements of that earlier run so seeing them again wasn't pleasing. Apocalypse seemed beneath himself and his journal entries were monotonous. The dialogue was fitting for the era but the story wasn't what is could have been. Overall, basically a sense of nostalgia but not much substance.

[Jase · Rating 2 out of 5]

Talk about a journey into the past with this new storyline. Hard to remember all those things that happened but if you read the back of the TPB, you will get the whole story recapped in 3 pages (all 60+ issues).

[Jameson · Rating 3 out of 5]

At its height, Simonson’s X-Factor was okay. At its nadir, it was frustratingly bad. But she takes the Forever remit more seriously than Claremont ever did and it actually makes for an… okay read. The cool art and coloring helps heaps. There’s just something bland about it, alas, despite the good intentions, the scope, the ambition, and the nice artwork.

Chris Claremont really, really didn’t attempt to continue his X-Men run with X-Men Forever. That he did try was farcical. Simonson, though, does try. She picks up right where she left off. For better or worse, the dialogue is vintage Louise Simonson, and the story makes a good if overly ambitious effort of tying together the themes and characters and plots of 1990 X-Factor. A better effort than Claremont/Lee/Portacio’s attempt, for sure.

(Some of Simonson’s choices are majorly stupid, though. Ex., saddling Trish Tilby with a child. Who comes home from a work trip with a kid? I get she’s going for a family theme, but not every single X-Factor member needs their own family, Louise! They already are a family. The original X-Men. Together. A family. She only has five issues here. What the hell was Louise thinking. Those very few panels Tilby appears in would have been better spent developing Trish Tilby as a character in her own right, and developing her relationship with Hank, instead of just slapping motherhood on her. And Hank should have dumped Trish ASAP! This was originally released in floppies at the height of the “celebrities adopting third world kids” craze, but until now Tilby was presented as a hard-nosed journalist, not a “celebrity” “journalist.”)

Anyway, Simonson does get props for her ambitious scope. But the story of Apocalypse, Sinister, the Celestials, Genosha, Ship, the reason mutants are barren, etc, etc, needed about three times as many issues. (Again, what was she thinking? Had she lost her sense of scale? This is a hell of a lot to cram in five issues. Fifteen wouldn’t be enough, probably, if you wanted some down time and soap opera stuff.)

All told, it’s a fun enough little book that doesn’t outstay its welcome, stays true to the spirit of the game, and looks cute. Recommended, but barely. There’s just something bloodless and lame about this project.

(10 demerits for Simonson and/or the artists showing Cyclops light candles on a birthday cake with his mutant powers. His optic blasts should have simply knocked the candles over. This is definitely not the first instance of creators mistaking Scott’s concussive blasts for a heat ray, but it’s still stupid. X-Factor Forever is filled with weird little bits like that.)

[Adam Stone · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another reviewer mentioned that this was "nostalgia without substance," which feels accurate to me.

While I'm glad Simonson got to return to finish the storyline she was working on when the book transitioned from her to Jim Lee and Whilce Portacio, I feel like she crammed about twelve issues into the five she was given for this series, and it just doesn't work.

She ties up the Apocalypse/Sinister/Celestials storyline in a brisk but unsatisfying way that even tosses in the destruction of Genosha, which Grant Morrison did with greater effect in New X-Men by Grant Morrison: Ultimate Collection, Book 1. Yes, this would have been a more epic end to her run than the actual ending, which is also included in this volume. But I'm not sure More Epic = Better. Her original ending story, where Iceman's girlfriend, Opal, is kidnapped by her birthfamily and becomes embroiled in a Yakuza War, was definitely Of Its Time, but it was pretty good for its time, particularly as it followed a series of over-saturated crossovers.

There's no real reason to pick this up unless you're a massive Louise Simonson fan (and there's no shame in that, she was definitely one one of the more underrated writers of the late 80s and 90s), who wants to see how her story would have ended if it was on her own terms.

[Jean-Pierre Vidrine · Rating 4 out of 5]

An alternate timeline if a certain writer had stayed on past her last issue, eh? Not a bad idea. X-Factor in this stage will always be a high point of the X titles for me. This story really delivers. Apocalypse's real motives revealed, the Celestials . . . going beyond the simple prejudice morality play that the X books are meant for and giving us cosmic adventure.
For the main story, Dan Panosian and Eric Nguyen are great at depicting all folks in colorful costumes or otherwise extraordinary appearances. At first I found their depiction of ordinary people a little garish, but their style did grow on me.
I can't praise the Apocalypse Journal story enough. It was an entertaining history and tell-all about two villains that I heretofore didn't know enough about. And I loved the artwork by Aluir Almancino and Terry Austin.
Of course the reprinted issues 63 and 64 (Louise Simonson's original last issues of the title) were grand. Iceman gets the spotlight as he should since so many of us loved him since the Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends animated series with impeccable artwork by Whilce Portacio and Art Thibert.
Reading this collection was like having a glorious moment from the past captured, replayed, and revealed to be even greater than you thought before.

[Don · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have fond memories of Louise Simonson's X-Factor from the late 1980s, and eagerly anticipated her return to the characters, in the place she'd left them. So it's slightly disappointing that the results aren't stellar - a fair bit of the expository dialogue is clunky, and certain characters and situations are disposed of too efficiently - but it's still an enjoyable read for a couple of hours' time. Oddly enough, this collection might suffer from being slightly less than the sum of its parts; while it has too many loose ends and extraneous characters (like Opal, Charlotte & Tilby) for a single book with a specific beginning, middle and end, I would gladly pick up an X-Factor Forever ongoing series and be highly pleased to read these characters and concepts on a monthly basis. Sad to say, that doesn't look likely...

[Shannon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Art was not bad, but it was not good either.
Story was uneventful. I'm not sure why this had to be retroactively tacked on to the X-Factor history as it really did nothing the expand the existing story. It was much like reading the epilogue for a book you finished 20 years ago.

[Jen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was OK, a true throw-away that isn't necessary to any other run (although reading Louise Simonson's originals probably helps a lot!).

I found the Apocalypse journals in the back more interesting.

[Russio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Uneven, I would say. The first part is this odd kind of alternative reality revisionist story that is rather Ho-hum. X Factor were always a bit strained, like the X Men's less interesting older brother. They did have some good soap operatics and villains though, which all get a reference here. Part Two in this collection is a short sequence telling the story of Apocalypse's training of Mr Sinister, which is rather good actually. The final section is two original editions of the comic for the early 90s, which are also quite decent. The whole lot feed into the other parts, so it is not bad. Which is how I would describe the team as a whole.