X-Factor #236 – Review

Written by Peter David, Art by Leonard Kirk, colors by Matt Milla

The Story: Shatterstar in a fight that is more awesome than anything he’s been in for the last ten years. Awesome.

The Review: (This won’t take long) I read, through Peter David’s twitter feed, a review that called this issue a “return to form” for the series. That is a fallacy—to me, they must not have been reading the same series I have for the last 5 years. This is not a return to form. This issue of X-Factor is simply has more awesome than the standard amount of awesome that Peter David always brings us. The only times I’ve ever really felt that X-Factor wasn’t a top notch series was when they assigned a subpar artist to the series. I can’t remember the artist, but it went through an “amorphous blob” phase that couldn’t end too quickly. But thankfully, those issues are not present here at all. In fact, Once the fight kicks in, you become very appreciative of Kirk’s art. I always feel bad describing an artist to other artists, but Kirk’s art is like the marriage of Dodson and Deadato, and, continuing with the point of this review, it’s awesome. I love that the more brutal the fight gets, the more skewed the panels are. Never to the extent of what Deadato does, but if it were, it would be too much like another artist and not Kirk’s own thing. In fact, the fight is so well drawn and written that it’s not until after Scattershot reveals who he is and who he’s working for that you realize you didn’t even need to know that—but now that you do, it’s even more awesome! David answers questions you didn’t even know you were supposed to be asking.