X-Factor #42

Hey, it's time to read my favorite X-title, X-Factor! Hopefully Peter David can keep up his recent streak of great writing in this series.

-We begin this issue with Rictor finding a news report online about Rev. John Maddox getting into a shooting incident that ended with the attacker dead. Rictor calls Guido and Siryn over to show them the picture of Maddox, and all three are shocked to discover that Maddox is the spitting image of Jamie Madrox. The guys want to investigate this, but Siryn tells them no and storms off, still obviously reeling over the "death" of her child. After Siryn leaves Guido and Rictor decide to make the trip anyway.

-Longshot has been tasked with protecting the woman who hired XF investigations because she thought someone was out to kill her. Naturally the woman can't keep her hands off of Longshot, but Longshot decides to keep things professional. Later on in the evening, the woman's mother stops by, pulls a gun and shoots the woman... Or does she? I'm not really sure what happened there...

-Finally, in the future, Jamie, Layla and Ruby Summers fight off a Sentinel robot. After the robot is defeated, Jamie tries to make sense of what's going on, but before he can, the trio is attacked by some more Sentinels. The Sentinels manage to temporarily take Ruby out and Jamie tries desperately to stop the Sentinels from killing Ruby. Luckily, a few of Layla and Ruby's teammates show up and rescue Jamie and the girls. Jamie, Layla and the 4 mutants from the future try to get away, but are pursued by the Sentinels. Finally, a huge blast strikes down the remaining Sentinels, allowing Jamie and the rest of the mutants to get away. Jamie discovers the cause of the blast was a VERY old Cyclops!

Huh, so Cyke is still kicking some 80 years in the future. Impressive. Granted, he looks like crap, but at least he's still alive. I've always been a sucker for futuristic tales, especially futuristic X-tales. I'm happy to see a few new mutant faces in the distant future, that means that somewhere along the line Joe Quesada's asinine "no mutants" policy has been relaxed!

Overall this was a very good comic, but it was a bit of a step back from the previous couple of X-Factor books. I wasn't really sure what the hell was going on in the Longshot portion of the comic... It was kind of like one of those "choose your own path" novels I used to read as a kid. You know, the novels that would say something like, "if you choose path #1, turn to page 121, if you choose path #2, turn to page 145". We got to see Longshot save the woman in one panel, and fail to save her in another... I really wasn't sure what that was supposed to mean.

As always, Peter had the dialogue between the various members of the team dead on, and Val's part was done to perfection as usual. For a score, I'll give this comic an 8 1/2 out of 10. Personally, I would have preferred it if this comic would have concentrated solely on the storyline with Jamie, but regardless, this comic was a very good, very enjoyable read.