Previous Posts: Introduction | Chapter 1: Lee/Kirby Era Part 1 | Chapter 2: Lee/Kirby Era Part 2 | Chapter 3: The Roy Thomas Era (1966-1968) | Chapter 4: The End of the Silver Age (1968-1970) | Chapter 5: Origins and Flashbacks Part 1 | Chapter 6: Silver Age Flashbacks Part 2 | Chapter 7: X-Men: First Class Vol 1 | Chapter 8: X-Men: First Class Vol 2 Part 1 | Chapter 9: X-Men: First Class Vol 2 Part 2 | Chapter 10: The Hidden Years | Chapter 11: X-Men on Hiatus (1970-75) | Chapter 12: The Champions Part 1 (1975-76) | Chapter 13: The Champions Part 2 (1977-78) | Chapter 14: The College Years (1978-83) | Chapter 15: The New Defenders Part 1 (1983-84) | Chapter 16: The New Defenders Part 2 (1984-85) | Chapter 17: The End of the New Defenders (1985-86) | Chapter 18: X-Factor Part 1 (1986) | Chapter 19: X-Factor – Mutant Massacre (1987) | Chapter 20: X-Factor – Fall of the Mutants (1987)

 

The next chunk of X-Men history is largely collected in the X-Men: Inferno Prologue Omnibus, although it’d be a stretch to call most of the stories it collects a prologue to that story.

Nevertheless, in the aftermath of “Fall of the Mutants” Iceman is once again a public celebrity superhero, and this short era plays with that status to give Bobby ample opportunity to not have sex with women.

 

X-Factor #27 (April 1988)
Writer: Louise Simonson
Artist: Walt Simonson

X-Factor distributes gifts on Christmas.

The team give a press conference announcing who they are to the world. Rusty, still fleeing justice, appears in a mask.

Iceman replaces the Empire State Building’s spire – destroyed by Apocalypse’s ship in issue #25 – with a fabulous ice Christmas tree. You’d think all that ice might do structural damage, or be a huge public safety risk when it melts.

Cyclops finally sees Madelyne’s televised plea that he find their son from Uncanny X-Men #227, making him feel guilty and blame Jean. Jean also feels guilty and finally tells her parents she’s back from the dead.

We get confirmation that Hank and Bobby share a room in their HQ, which is twice the size of any skyscraper in Manhattan.

 

X-Factor #28 (May 1988)
Writer: Louise Simonson
Artist: Walt Simonson

X-Factor’s ship starts behaving oddly until Artie helps the team realize that Apocalypse has left them a trap. The team disables the locks Apocalypse put on the Ship’s AI and removes the bomb he’d hidden on board. “Ship” is a defacto team member from this point forward.

Even though Cyclops is on his way to Dallas to investigate his wife’s death and his son’s disappearance, he turns right around to help X-Factor stop the Ship.

In the subplots, Angel learns that Candy Southern’s been abducted, and that she had been feeding info about X-Factor to Trish Tilby.

And on the final page, we meet a sexually promiscuous young woman we’ll come to know better next issue.

 

X-Factor #29 (June 1988)
Writer: Louise Simonson
Artist: Walt Simonson

X-Factor fight off Infectia’s goons.

Infectia is a fascinating creation even if she is pretty one-note. She’s a sexually promiscuous woman whose power can make men become her slaves before killing them. She chooses the name “Infectia” even though her powers have nothing to do with disease (at least in this story they don’t). Basically, she’s a really regressive walking metaphor for AIDS in the 1980s, isn’t she?

Infectia wants X-Factor’s ship for… some reason. It’s not explained. But before she gets back to her story, we have to squeeze in a few adventures.

Meanwhile, Iceman has really taken to performing for reporters, but feels badly when the questions cause the still mentally handicapped Beast stress. Though he seems sympathetic, he doesn’t miss the opportunity to call into question Hank’s interest in Trish Tilby.

 

Strange Tales Vol 2 #18 (September 1988), Mutant Misadventures of Cloak and Dagger #1-2 (October-November 1988)
Writer: Terry Austin
Artist: Dan Lawlis and P. Craig Russell

After corrupting Dagger and setting her loose on Manhattan, the villain Night calls X-Factor to fight her in a desperate attempt to raise the profile of a struggling new series do something or other. It’s not at all clear why Night wants X-Factor to stop Dagger from carrying out her own attack on New York. It’s crazy to me that they launched the new book with Part 2 of a story, but that’s why I’m not an editor at Marvel.

Cloak and Dagger are teenage superheroes who got their powers after being injected with experimental drugs. This was a second attempt to launch an ongoing series with them, and adding the word “mutant” to the title and featuring X-Factor were transparent attempts to latch the characters onto the popular X-books, though it never really took. Honestly, I’ve always thought the concept behind Cloak and Dagger was incredibly dated and quite a bit racist (the blonde from the good family has light powers and the Black kid from the wrong side of the tracks has spooky darkness powers – at least when Freeform adapted it into a TV show, they swapped their socioeconomic statuses).

Anyway, X-Factor barely contribute to the plot, which ends when Cloak is freed from an unrelated subplot and saves Dagger. Bobby and Hank get a nice little moment reinforcing their special friendship. The gayest thing to mention about these books is that they’re inked by openly gay artist P. Craig Russell, his second time inking Bobby.

X-Factor only appear on the last two pages of Strange Tales #18 and the first two of MMC&D #2, by the way.

 

 

X-Factor Annual #3 (August 1988)
Writer: Louise Simonson
Artist: Terry Shoemaker, Tom Artis

X-Factor rescue some of the Moloids from the High Evolutionary’s henchmen, who are sterilizing them as part of his plan to shape the planet’s evolution.

This is X-Factor’s contribution to “The Evolutionary War,” a story that ran through all of Marvel’s 1988 annuals and follows the High Evolutionary’s attempts to rush human evolution to the level of godhood. New Mutants Annual #4 had the team foil the Evolutionary’s attempt to wipe out dangerous mutant powers, and X-Men Annual #12 saw the team help restore the Savage Land.

There’s not much specific to Bobby in the main story, though in subplots, Jean seems to be developing telepathy again, and Apocalypse fights the Evolutionary directly because at first he opposes the “unnatural selection” of the genocide of the Moloids. It seems like a fine hair-splitting to me.

In a backup strip, the kids still on the ship rummage through old photos as a way of catching up readers on the plot, and we get another siting of Bobby in his arms akimbo pose. Major points off for this off-model drawing of Bobby in civvies with glasses, though.

 

Marvel Age Annual #4 (June 1988)
Writer: Chris Claremont
Artist: John Buscema

Basically a trailer for all the X-Books. Wolverine wanders through Madripoor thinking about the other X-Men teams. We get a group shot of X-Factor on their ship as it passes over Madripoor for an unspecified reason. The biggest plot contribution of this story is it’s the first time we get confirmation that Wolverine knows Jean is back from the dead and X-Factor are their old teammates (at this point, Madelyne Pryor is supposed to have prevented the X-Men from seeing any of the press about X-Factor after “Fall of the Mutants”).

 

 

X-Factor #30-31 (July-August 1988)
Writer: Louise Simonson
Artist: Walt Simonson

Infectia attempts to seduce Iceman as part of her plan to steal X-Factor’s Ship, while Cyclops and Marvel Girl ask Freedom Force if they know anything about Cyclops’ missing son.

Iceman takes Beast on the town while Scott and Jean are away. Bobby is reveling in the attention X-Factor is getting since they came out as public mutant superheroes. But Hank suddenly leaves in a huff as soon a woman very unsubtly flirts with him.

Infectia tricks Bobby into rescuing her from a police officer she mutated with her powers. Oddly, even though the entire tension of the plot is that Infectia is seducing Bobby into kissing her and everyone else having to throw obstacles in her way, every time she gets close, he looks downright uncomfortable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Also, Infectia’s powers are kind of all over the map here. It’s implied she needs to kiss men in order to mutate them, but she also manages to mutate objects with her hands. Maybe it’s just a preference when it comes to men.

Finally, Beast jumps in between Infectia and Bobby and ends up taking the kiss meant for him, and in a super-plot-convenient way, her kiss seems to just weaken Hank while undoing the effects of both Pestilence’s touch and Carl Maddicks’ experiments, bringing back his ape-like form, to Bobby’s dismay.

In the subplots, Destiny relates an unhelpful vision of how Cyclops will find his son, but in retrospect, lines like “the same displacement of place and time subsumes your son” sure seems like unintentional foreshadowing about Cable. And Archangel is investigating Candy’s disappearance by attacking Worthington Enterprises locations, and Nanny and the Orphan Maker make their first appearances.

 

X-Factor #32 (September 1988)
Writer: Tom DeFalco and Louise Simonson
Artist: Steve Lightle

X-Factor stops a group of Xartan aliens disguised as the Avengers who want to use Ship to conquer earth.

Rictor is taking Beast’s injury particularly hard – or he just creeps in to look at the naked Beast in the med-bay. The kids complain about X-Factor’s plan to send them to boarding school, a plot that will be picked up in the X-Terminators miniseries.

In a subplot, Cameron Hodge makes a bargain with N’Astirh to provide him with mutant babies in exchange for protection from “total destruction at your great enemy’s hand.” Functionally, this becomes an immortality charm that has persisted in Hodge to the present.

Sign this was made in 1988: Boom Boom complains that the Ship doesn’t have a CD player and she has to listen to vinyl records.

Where to find these issues: All of these issues are reprinted in X-Men: Inferno Prologue Omnibus, which is getting a new printing in September, except for the Cloak and Dagger story. That story is also the only one not available on Marvel Unlimited.

 

Meanwhile, in the X-Books:

• The X-Men continue letting the world believe them dead, and relocate to Australia, where they fight the Reavers (Uncanny X-Men #229-230); Colossus has an adventure with Magik, who thinks he’s a ghost (#231); the X-Men fight the Brood in Colorado (#232-234); and discover the mutant slave country Genosha (#235-238)
• Wolverine has several adventures in Madripoor under the alias “Patch” in his new solo series, Wolverine Vol 2 #1-3, and in Marvel Comics Presents #1-10; he also fights Wild Child in MCP #51-53, and helps Mariko stop the Clan Yashida in Wolverine: Doombringer.
• The New Mutants grieve the deaths of the X-Men and Doug Ramsey (New Mutants #63-64), Empath and Magma have an adventure in Brazil (#62); Magik fights Forge and Freedom Force seeking answers about the X-Men’s deaths (#65-66); and they have an adventure with Lila Cheney where they meet Gosamyr and Magik’s dark side is unleashed just in time for “Inferno” (#67-70)
• Kitty, Nightcrawler, and Phoenix, grieving the X-Men, form Excalibur in Excalibur: The Sword is Drawn; they fight the Warwolves (Excalibur #1-2), Juggernaut (#3), and Arcade (#4-5)
• Colossus encounters anti-Russian racists in America’s Heartland in Marvel Comics Presents #10-17 (“Colossus: God’s Country”)

Next Time: I may be moving to a biweekly, or even a monthly format going forward, but the next post will cover the Inferno story and its immediate aftermath.