X-Factor was born during a hurricane. Jackson Guice, the seriesâ original artist and co-creator, recalled its origins to Comic Book Resources in 2009:
The first issue was double-sized. We put it together under the guiding hand of Mike Carlin and the first issue was finished and submitted for final approval to Jim Shooter — who, for reasons he would have to explain himself, decided the entire issue was unacceptable and would need to be redone from scratch — with only 2-3 weeks remaining before the printer’s deadline!
I holed up in my hotel room and drew like crazy, night and day, sitting on the floor hunched over a small coffee table serving as my drafting table; Bob [Layton] often sitting a few feet away scripting or inking. Inker Joe Rubinstein was shanghaied into our merry band of misfits to help speed up the work. During the course of the next, mad few weeks, a hurricane churned up the eastern seaboard and seemed determined to drive straight into New York harbor for dramatic effect. Overnight, Manhattan Island (and apparently the entire hotel staff) evacuated the city. The last surreal act before departure was the hotel concierge handing me a roll of masking tape and requesting I tape off the windows in my room — and wishing me luck.
Long story short, we did somehow manage to completely redo that first issue — Bob, Joe, and I gang-inked the last of the pages while they were hurriedly being colored in the Bullpen right up through the final hours of the deadline. The book went to the printer and the rest is history.”
Jackson Guice, Comic Book Resources
It was a fitting end for the development period of a series around which controversy had swirled since the beginning, a series at the center of the storm created when creative passion meets the demands of the market, a series which, in many ways, marks the point at which the X-Men went from being a smash-hit, critically-lauded, single comic book series to a collection of intellectual properties churning out new stories and titles which would, at various times, critically and commercially lead the entirety of Marvel Comics itself.
If X-Factor was born in a hurricane, the story of its birth began with a death. In 1980, six years before the launch of X-Factor, Jean Grey died. She took her own life, rather than risk the return of the genocidal Dark Phoenix. It was the culmination of several yearsâ worth of stories from writer Chris Claremont and artist John Byrne, the climax of a creative partnership that still stands as one of the most celebrated in X-Men history. In killing Jean Grey, known as Marvel Girl before her transformation into Phoenix, the duo also broke the original X-Men, shattering the group of five mutants who launched the X-Men in 1963 before giving way to the more international group which Claremont and Byrne (along with others) took to new heights. Though they had long since collectively stopped being X-Men, with the death of Jean Grey, the original X-Men, as a distinct entity, were at an end. Yet Chris Claremont wasnât done with the X-Men.
[Chris Claremont] didnât really want to do a second book because he thought it would dilute the intensity of X-Men. Chris loved his book and he loved his characters almost like they were real people. He really wanted the best for them. [New Mutants] was his way of preserving the integrity of X-Men and still keeping [Jim] Shooter happy.â
Louise Simonson, Comics Creators on X-Men
John Byrne left shortly after Jeanâs death, storming off the series due to what he felt was the heavy hand of Claremont, who, thanks to the structure of the âMarvel Methodâ of comic book creation, had the final say over what went into each issue. But Claremont stayed, and with additional artistic collaborators, including his editor Louise Simonson (nee Jones), made the X-Men even more of a commercial smash hit. Soon, it was Marvelâs highest selling title and Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter wanted more. The first X-Men spin-off was New Mutants; Claremont, intent on making it distinct, centered it on a new group of young students, teenagers like the original X-Men were in the sixties. It too was a hit, consistently landing alongside its parent series in the top 10 best-selling comics each month. Shooter, no dummy when it came to selling comics, wanted more. One best-selling X-Men book begat a second. Why not a third?
This is going to be a team idea that hasn’t been seen before at Marvel. It’s not a bunch of guys waiting for the Earth to be threatened. It’ll deal with threats on a smaller scale and large scale. They’re not the Avengers. They’re not the X-Men, because they’re public, very much so, the most public organization weâre going to have at Marvel. None of the others are going to advertise on TV, that’s for sure.”
Mike Carlin, Amazing Heroes #83
The question then became, what would be the hook of a new X-book, and who would star in it? New Mutants was the âmutant kids in schoolâ book, while at that point in time, the more international ânewâ X-Men that replaced the original five were firmly established as the X-Men in the minds of readers. But while Jean Grey was dead, her four original teammates were still out there: Cyclops, after a lengthy stint leading the new X-Men, had entered semi-retirement after Jeanâs death and his subsequent marriage to Madelyne Pryor, a woman who bore an uncanny resemblance to Jean herself. Meanwhile, Beast, Angel, and Iceman, after bouncing around between different series and teams, had settled in as members of a new iteration of the Defenders.
From these scattered, surviving remnants of the original X-Men came inspiration. Jackson Guice & Bob Layton, both fans of the sixties era team, felt they should be reunited in a title of their own, thereby giving the new spinoff both its hook and initial premise.
It was an idea that Bob Layton and I pitched to Jim Shooter (in 1985) about putting together a title, but neither one of us was really volunteering to work on it. It was just an idea that sparked in our heads.
We said, âJim, THIS is what you ought to doâŚtake these original X-Men and you put them together in a new book; and you go back to the original premise of the first run of X-Men â which was when Professor X said that the purpose of the team and the school and everything was to seek out and find mutants and help them cope, to eliminate mutant threats, to basically be the bridge between mutantkind and humanity.â
Jackson Guice, Comics Interview #28
So, if the new X-Men spinoff (which gained the name âX-Factorâ from its eventual editor, Mike Carlin) was to be a reunion book for the original X-Men, a place for them to get back to the root idea of the X-Men that Chris Claremont had largely moved the core X-Men title beyond, what would be done about the large, Jean Grey-shaped hole in the roster? The answer, at first, was Dazzler.
Dazzler, a disco performer with the mutant ability to convert sound into light, was created in 1980, the result of an attempted cross-promotional venture between Marvel Comics and Casablanca Records. She debuted in Uncanny X-Men #130, an early chapter in the larger âDark Phoenix Sagaâ story that would end with Jean Greyâs death, and went on to headline her own solo series. By 1985, the days of disco were long over and sales on Dazzlerâs solo book were growing fallow. During the development of X-Factor, Layton realized it would need to have the so-called âbabe factorâ; he and Guice decided to draft Dazzler as Marvel Girlâs replacement in the nascent X-Factor â thereâs even a scene at the close of her solo series in which a guest-starring Beast seems to offer her a place with the soon-to-be super group.
But before X-Factor â complete with Dazzler as the fifth team member â could launch, John Byrne stepped forward with another idea.
An annoying little eager-beaver fanboy named Kurt Busiek had come up with the idea that Phoenix was not, in fact, Jean, but a precise duplicate created by the Phoenix Force as a “housing” for itself, and the REAL Jean was in suspended animation at the bottom of Jamaica Bay, where the shuttle crashed. When [Bob] Layton came up with the idea for X-Factor, I was reminded of this notion and suggested it would be a way to put Jean back into the group. Shooter agreed, and Roger Stern and I concocted a two-part crossover between The Avengers and Fantastic Four to accomplish just this end.â
John Byrne, Byrne Robotics
Jim Shooter, despite being the one who pushed Chris Claremont and John Byrne to kill Jean Grey in the first place as punishment for the acts she committed as Dark Phoenix, liked the workaround to bring her back. According to Claremont, Shooter came to believe the marketing oomph the return of Jean Grey would give X-Factor was greater than whatever that return would cost the legacy of the âDark Phoenix Sagaâ. Claremont himself wasâŚnot so wild about the idea.
It was a Friday night and Ann [Nocenti, X-Men editor] took us out to dinner and didn’t tell us about a X-Factor until it was, like, 6:30-7:00 at night and the office switchboard was already closed. I wanted to call Shooter, but I couldn’t remember his direct line. Ann knew his number, but she wouldn’t tell me. She told me to just sit down, have another drink and relax. I mean, she played me beautifully. Since it was a Friday, I had the whole weekend to go berserk. I spent the weekend coming up with a whole new set of characters that they could use for X-Factor. The fact is, Ann did the smart thing. If I actually had gone in to see Shooter on Friday night, I would’ve quit. I was so pissed off. I couldn’t believe what they did to Cyclops. He was supposed to be a hero and they had him walking out on his wife and newborn child and not even thinking twice about it. No one was connecting the dots.”
Chris Claremont, Comics Creators on X-Men
Rather than quit then and there, Chris Claremont made a counterproposal, drawing on one of those ideas he came up with while stewing over the creation of X-Factor. If not Dazzler, then how about, instead of Jean Grey, the fifth member of X-Factor be Jeanâs sister, Sara Grey-Bailey?
Sara had, to that point, been a relatively minor character. She appeared, alongside her and Jeanâs parents, during the âDark Phoenix Sagaâ, mostly to react in shock and dismay at Jeanâs Phoenix-fueled behavior. But in 1981âs Bizarre Adventures #27, a little-read issue of a black-and-white magazine featuring three different solo tales of X-Men, Claremont teased the idea that Sara could in fact be a mutant like her sister Claremont, a writer known for seeding story ideas then not returning to them for months or years (or ever), proposed establishing Sara Grey as a kind of âliving Cerebroâ, capable of detecting and locating mutants.
When John and Roger Stern and company proposed the resurrection in X-Factor, I countered to it. The pitch I made to Jim Shooter was that we utilize her older sister, Sarah. For me, as a writer, that was a far more intriguing reality, because we’d introduce a Grey back into the team, but we would introduce a Grey who was a mutant, who hated the idea of being a mutant, who hated the idea of being an X-Man, yet accepted the responsibility. More importantly, she was uninvolved with any of the four guys.
There was no, ‘I am the center of Scott’s life,’ which made her totally accessible emotionally to Bobby and Warren and Hank, and it allowed Scott to continue, unvarnished, with his relationship with Madeline. I mean, on one level, I was looking at it and thinking, ‘If you bring back Jean and Scott dumps his wife and his newborn baby, to go back and embrace his old girlfriend… ew, icky, disaster for the boy.’ And so I made the pitch and Jim actually thought it was a good pitch. He thought it was a great character, he was happy for me to use the character anywhere else if I wanted to, but he had fully embraced, for commercial reasons, the resurrection story that the other guys had pitched and that was that.â
Chris Claremont, Comic Book Resources
And so, X-Factor would continue moving forward with a resurrected Jean Grey rounding out the cast, reuniting the original X-Men in a book for the first time since 1970.
Unfortunately, the return of Jean also wreaked havoc on Cyclopsâ characterization. After Jeanâs death, Claremont ultimately positioned the character for something of a happy ending: marrying him off to Madelyne Pryor, ho just happened to be an exact physical duplicate of Jean Grey, like Kim Novakâs characters in Alfred Hitchcockâs Vertigo. From there, Cyclops settled into quasi-retirement in Alaska, appearing alongside the X-Men when needed but otherwise engaging in a life of domestic bliss. In the months leading up to the launch of X-Factor, Madelyne revealed she was pregnant; their child would be born the month before the publication of X-Factor #1.
That happy ending came to an end in the first issue of X-Factor, as Cyclops, responding to the return of Jean Grey, left his wife and infant child behind to, essentially, go off and play with his high school friends. This original sin, the awkward and forced way Cyclops separated from his family in order to participate in the new seriesâ status quo, would poison the series launch.
Not helping matters was the initial premise of the series. Layton and Guiceâs original pitch to Shooter had involved a general âback to basicsâ approach, in which the reunited original X-Men would find and train young mutants like their mentor before them. Yet when X-Factor #1 was published, that approach had been complicated by the unfortunate idea of having the title characters pose as professional mutant hunters, in order to better locate young mutants-in-need. Promoted in-universe by Angelâs friend, lawyer and PR man Cameron Hodge, it was an attempt, in publication terms, to give the series something of a Ghostbusters feel while serving as an easy storytelling engine for introducing new characters and conflicts. But it stood in stark contrast to the core themes of the X-Men, fanning the flames of the anti-mutant hatred they were meant to combat, to the point that it made everyone, not just Cyclops, seem wildly out-of-character for going along with the idea. Fans werenât happy, and before long, neither were the creators.
We gave [Jim Shooter] the second issue, and he wanted us to redo that one from scratch. I said, âYou know what, Iâm not quitting Marvel, but Iâm quitting this book. You should edit this yourself. Youâre the only one that knows what you want to have happen here.â And he goes, âAlright, alright,â and he gave it to Bob Harras to do after that.â
Mike Carlin, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story
The team that launched X-Factor, that labored in the midst of the hurricane to churn out pages that would pass the muster of the mercurial Jim Shooter, was not long for the series. Once it became clear Shooterâs micromanagement wouldnât stop with the first issue of the book, editor Mike Carlin left (as payback, Carlin was made the editor on a variety of low-regarded licensed comics, and soon thereafter, left Marvel entirely to become an editor on the similarly-disgruntled-by-Shooter John Byrneâs Superman books). The initial creative team of X-Factor would follow in his footsteps shortly thereafter: Bob Layton was gone by issue #5, Jackson Guice by issue #7. Whatever tales they had planned for the reunited original X-Men would go untold.
Ultimately, the decision to bring back Jean Grey proved a crucial one, not just because it gave X-Factor its initial hook of reuniting the original X-Men, and not just because it meant the ending of the seminal “Dark Phoenix Saga” would be, if not undone, at least significantly retconned, but also because it ensured Chris Claremont would have nothing to do with the launch of X-Factor. Claremont bowed to market pressures with New Mutants but by launching the series himself, was able to maintain control of the characters and keep the X-Men’s corner of the Marvel Universe under his control. But by staying off X-Factor, the launch of the series would therefore feel a bit more mercenary.
Like the hurricane raging outside the hotel window as Jackson Guice and Bob Layton feverishly re-worked the pages of its initial issue, X-Factor upended the landscape of X-Men publishing upon its arrival. It brought Jean Grey back to life, simultaneously altering the perception of one of superhero comicsâ most notable and resonant stories and the perceived stakes of all future stories. It ruined the intended happy ending for Cyclops and tarnished his character. It loosened Chris Claremontâs hold on Marvelâs best-selling comic, and in doing so, lay an early seed for his eventual separation from the X-Men.
What had been two, Uncanny X-Men and New Mutants, a series and its spinoff, both authored by a single writer in a self-contained narrative that often passed characters and plotlines back and forth between the books, became three. The narrative fractured, and a second branch formed. Those three books would soon become four, then five, then many, many more, the narrative and the creative voices therein, fracturing further and expanding with them. X-Factor begat, ultimately, an entire line of books, the âX-Booksâ, a quasi-imprint within the larger publication universe of Marvel Comics. A line which continues, perpetually supporting far more than two or even three books a month, to this very day.
Austin Gorton also reviews older issues of X-Men at the Real Gentlemen of Leisure website, co-hosts the A Very Special episode podcast, and likes Star Wars. He lives outside Minneapolis, where sometimes, it is not cold. Follow him on Twitter @AustinGorton
