Fully agree with everything that HighlandRay & fubarthepanda wrote. At his best, Roy Thomas may have been a wonderful scribe (e.g., some of his Avengers and Thor), but his X-Men was inexcusably bad (obviously excluding the Neal Adams collaboration).

VisualFiction wrote:
But it would be interesting to also know what people thought of the original X-Factor, maybe a comparison/contrast.



"Original X-Factor"? You mean the 1980s series? Ok, let's see.

First, the background: TUXM was selling huge amounts and Marvel wanted to cash in on its success by releasing more and more X-books. Then one of them had the bright idea, "ok, how about this: the original X-Men team returns!". Oops, only one problem: one of them is dead. How to get around this?

Well, you retcon the original story (a great, story, one of Marvel's best ever!) so that it actually wasn't the real Jean Grey in that story to begin with - and completely ruin its tragic pathos!

You bet the fans of the classic CC/Byrne stories like me were extremely pissed off at the retcon. Maybe, just maybe if we had been given some equally stellar stories in exchange, we might have felt that the retcon was a justified one. So what did we get?

The first creative team was pretty mediocre. The art was ok, and the stories were readable, but nothing beyond that. Not a patch on CC/Byrne.

Then the Simonson/Simonson team. Somehow, Louise Simonson seemed to have no idea how to write X-books, and while her X-Factor stories were more likable than her New Mutants ones, the majority of them were not very convincing. Her husband Walt Simonson's angular art was ill suited to the book. It worked in some books like Thor but here it definitely doesn't.

All in all, a bad exchange. I want the original version of the Dark Phoenix saga back. Someone needs to borrow Doc Doom's time machine, travel into the past and prevent X-Factor from ever occurring so that Jean Grey can stay dead.


imagePray.