X-Factor has long been one of the most malleable series in the X-Men line of comics. Originally a reuniting of the first X-Men team members, it then became a government-sanctioned task force, a detective agency, and more recently mutant resurrectors. This volume finds us within the team’s initial iteration of Jean, Scott, Beast and Iceman. Despite packing some top tier talent within it’s pages, Judgement War leans more into being a collector’s piece rather than a cohesive narrative experience.
This volume picks up right where the last X-Factor collection, Angel of Death, left off…in the middle of the Inferno event. Inferno is its own beast of an event that deserves its own review. Going into this collection, I was familiar with the broad strokes of Inferno, but when the opening pages dropped me in right in the middle of the event I found myself very lost. I can see how this volume continues reprinting where the previous collection stopped, but it doesn’t help newer readers such as myself to be thrown right into this massive story and bouncing back and forth between X-Factor and Uncanny X-Men right off the bat.
X-Factor #40 follows Inferno and delivers both a brief coda to the event but also acts as part two of X-Factor #35 which immediately preceded Inferno. ’90s era Rob Liefeld artwork was a pleasant surprise in this issue, but again, I felt lost in a story I had little context for. Then comes X-Factor Annual #4, which drags the book into the annual-wide event Atlantis Attacks. There are a few fun shorts in here, and the pairing of John Byrne and Walt Simonson is a welcome inclusion, but in the name of reprinting everything in publication order, narrative cohesion is tossed aside.
Credit: Marvel Comics
Finally in X-Factor #41, 245 pages into a 496 page collection, X-Factor returns to normal. A two-part arc takes the team to London to battle trolls. In a surprisingly funny twist, the trolls seek to plummet global gold economy through an alchemical mutant they kidnap. This is where I finally got a foothold on this series – these issues are entertaining and stand apart from the continuity-bogged-down preceding issues.
Rounding out the collection comes the titular Judgement War arc. When the X-Factor’s ship is suddenly yanked half-way across the galaxy, the team finds themselves transported to an alien planet in the midst of a civil war. In the confusion the team gets separated across both sides of the conflict and our heroes must navigate this new world, all while the monolithic Celestials hover in the skies. Simonson’s writing crafts a grand space opera adventure paired with new series artist Paul Smith making for an absorbing arc.
The best aspect of this volume is the sheer variety of great artistic talent. From Walt Simonson and Art Adams to ’90s hotshots Marc Silvestri and Rob Liefeld, every issue here is just about guaranteed to look great. This partially redeems the scattershot first half of the collection, and really enhances the back half.
Credit: Marvel Comics
The character writing is the one constant across the collection. Louise Simonson pens all the X-Factor issues here and keeps here characters sounding like themselves. As someone who has had little “X-posure” to this X-Factor iteration, it was cool to see this classic line up matured in a sense. Jean and Scott have a child, Christopher, which serves as a main point of tension. Sure, it can be comical how many times they lose Christopher in each story, but it serves to show how these characters have changed over time. There’s something special about this era of X-Factor and I’m interested in going back and reading more to hopefully have a better grasp on the series, but this volume is not helpful in that regard.
X-Factor Epic Collection: Judgement War makes for a volume suited for the collector. For those who picked up the preceding Angel of Death volume, this is a direct continuation. However, for new readers, this may not be a good volume to pickup and try out the series. While the characters are well written and the artist lineup is great, if you don’t have solid grasp on this era of X-Men continuity you’re going to be very lost. That’s kind of the double-edged nature of these Epic Collections – they can be a good way to keep classic stories in print, but they can also be impenetrable to new readers.
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