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Thursday, August 10, 2017

X-amining X-Factor Annual #8

"Charon" / "What Have You Got to Hide" / "Crawlin' From the Wreckage"
1993

In a Nutshell
The Chalkers return as part of Charon's first appearance.

Writer: Peter David, Skip Dietz (2nd & 3rd Story)
Penciler: Terry Shoemaker, Buzz (2nd Story), Chris Batista (3rd Story)
Inker: Mark McKenna, Al Milgrom (2nd Story). Jeff Albrecht (3rd Story)
Letterer: Lois Buhalis, Dave Sharp (2nd Story), Pat Brosseay (3rd Story)
Colorist: Joe Rosas, Carlos Lopez (2nd Story), Joe Rosas (3rd Story)
Editor: Kelly Corvese
Group Editor: Bob Harras
Editor-in-Chief: Tom DeFalco

Plot
Leaving a movie with his parents, Charlie Ronalds is devastated when his parents are killed by an attacker who says he is a mutant. Years later, Charlie is injured during an accident at his school involving Guido Carosella, another mutant. In the present, Guido, along with Polaris, appear on a talk show while the rest of X-Factor trains in the Danger Room. Charlie, his hatred for mutants and Guido in particular still raging, contacts a demon named Cloot. Learning of Charlie's hatred for X-Factor, Cloot grants him powers, and allies in the Chalker family, in exchange for Charlie delivering the souls of X-Factor to Cloot. As Charon, Charlie leads the Chalkers in an attack on X-Factor, but the Chalkers quickly die once more as Charon battles Strong Guy, and when he declares he simply wants Strong Guy to die, Cloot appears, telling Charlie he's broken their deal and sending Charlie to the same hell dimension where his parents reside, leaving X-Factor confused about what exactly has just happened.

2nd Story: Val reviews X-Factor's personnel files, and when she's finished, she's confidant she can put the information to very good use.

3rd Story: Strong Guy arrives on the scene of a subway crash, hoping to rescue some survivors, but everyone is already dead, save for a small puppy whom he brings to the surface. Outside, both the gathered crowd and emergency personnel give him a hard time for failing to save anyone, appearing insensitive, and being a mutant. He leaves, feeling low, but the puppy tries to cheer him up.

Firsts and Other Notables
The sensational character find of 1993/trading card recipient for this annual is Charon, real name Charlie Ronalds, a one-time classmate of Strong Guy whose parents were killed by a mutant, instilling in him a hatred of mutants that was exacerbated when he was injured in the same accident during which Strong Guy's powers manifested. As an adult, he makes a deal with a devil, gaining mystical abilities in exchange for attacking X-Factor and sending their souls to the demon (hence the name Charon, the ferry man of the dead from Greek mythology). This marks the only appearance of Charon to date.


The demon who gives Charon his powers is Cloot. He references a past encounter with the Hulk, which means Cloot is actually Satanish, one of Marvel's more notable demonic characters (who is not Mephisto), as in that Hulk story, Cloot ultimately tells Hulk he is Satanish.


Assisting Charon in his attack on X-Factor are the Chalkers, whose souls ended up in Cloot's realm after their death, burning with hatred for X-Factor. He resurrects them, but they proceed to be killed again pretty quickly (and equally ignominiously). This marks the payoff to the various Chalker family scenes that Peter David sprinkled throughout his run, with all of those scenes building to the gag that X-Factor's greatest enemies are three people they've never heard of or met before.


Cloot says that he wants X-Factor's souls because a conflict is brewing amongst the various Hell lords; David will later depict such a conflict in his return to X-Factor, though it's unclear if that was based off whatever he was planning here, or just a coincidence of a writer returning to an underdeveloped but still intriguing idea twenty years later.

Though it goes unstated, Random is obviously the mutant who kills Charlie's parents. Nothing really comes of this (it just seems like a way for David to tie together the history of two new characters), aside from the fact that later stories will establish that Random is significantly younger than he appears, making it hard for him to have executed Charlie's parents since Charlie has grown into adulthood by the present day setting of the story.


X-Factor's Danger Room returns, though it is once again played mostly for laughs, with the gag here being that due to budget cuts, there's no money for anything fancy, so it's just Val shooting at the team.

Cloot makes a joke about political correctness being a demonic invention; I'd love to be able to put that under the "Grim 'n' Gritty 90s" heading, but America just elected a president in part because some white people are mad they can't use the N-word, so sadly, ragging on the notion that some names and terms are more racially or sexually loaded/inappropriate than others is still a thing today just as it was in the 90s.


The second story in this annual is essentially a biographical feature on the members of the teams, presented as Val cross-checking their files. Items of note include: it's mentioned that Polaris was part of the group searching for the X-Men alongside Forge & Banshee during the "Dissolution" era, which isn't quite true (she was more or less a captive of the Shadow King the whole time), and that Polaris joined X-Factor at Xavier's request, something we never saw on-panel.


Strong Guy joined because he was "intrigued" by X-Factor, and his portion of the recap is hilariously short (four panels, filling one half page), a testament to the fact that while he appeared before the relaunch, it's really in this series that he became any kind of character,


Information on Havok's time with the Outback Era X-Men is said to be unavailable, possibly an acknowledgement of the fact that the X-Men were impervious to being recorded at that time.

The story of Madrox' power manifesting when the doctor spanked him after he was born is credited to Madrox himself, which may be an attempt to reconcile the fact that most mutants' powers don't appear until adolescent (the idea being that Madrox just made up that story), and it's said he joined the team seeking some kind of order in his life.


At the end, Val is depicted as being nefariously pleased with the information she's gained, most likely another nod at the "Evil Val" subplot.


The third story in the annual involves Strong Guy trying to rescue people from a crashed subway, but they're all dead when he arrives, save for a puppy he manages to save. There's some business about the crowd being mad because he couldn't save anyone and/or blaming mutants for the accident, and it's overall pretty sad.


Creator Central 
Presumably written before his departure from the series, this marks Peter David's final contribution to this iteration of X-Factor (before he returns to relaunch the series in the 00s). He is joined by Terry Shoemaker, making this the third X-Factor annual drawn by Shoemaker (in addition to #3 and #6).

The Chronology Corner
This issue takes place between issues #91 and #92 of the regular series.

A Work in Progress
In the course of detailing Charlie's origin, the events surrounding the manifestation of Strong Guy's power is revisited, specifically the incident involving young Guido being hit by a bus and his body deforming as it absorbs the kinetic energy from the hit.


Returning to the running gag, a talk show hosts gets X-Factor confused with X-Force.


Wolfsbane later asks if the Chalkers have them confused with X-Force, because everyone else does.


And Strong Guy notes they're the only team without any action figures (though in the real world, at this point in time Strong Guy at least had a figure).


Quicksilver declares that upon learning #1 Fan's name, "Strong Guy" is no longer the stupidest name he's ever heard.


The Chalkers die again almost as stupidly as they did the first time, with #1 Fan attempting to catch a falling Vic Chalker, once more forgetting his hands are now giant whirling fans. This leads to Vic getting sliced into pieces, and one of the lasers on his suit cutting #1 Fan in half.



Meanwhile, Carnosaur is killed when he chomps down on Madrox' arm, which allows Madrox to generate a dupe from inside Carnosaur, exploding him.


Quickly taken out of the fight with Charon and stuck hanging from Charon's "boat", Havok hopes his brother can't see him.


The Reference Section
Much of Charon's origin is lifted from Batman's, with his parents being murdered in front of his eyes after leaving a movie, only here the killer is a mutant and this sparks a lifelong hatred of mutants in Charon, instead of a lifelong hatred of crime.

Rahne is seen reading a book called Howling Mad (which she says should be turned into a movie); it is a book written by Peter David, published in 1989.


The Grim 'n' Gritty 90s
To tie a bow on the Charon/Batman parallels, the movie Charlie and his parents are leaving before they're killed is the '66 Batman movie. Charlie proceeds to make a crack about how it'd be impossible to have a Batman movie without Robin, a wink at the fact that it seemed hard to image Robin (especially the campy version portrayed by Burt Ward) working in the then-contemporaneous grim-and-gritty Tim Burton Batman films, with this issue coming out a couple years before Robin's cinematic re-introduction in Batman Forever.



The talk show Guido & Polaris appear on to discuss mutant rights is hosted by Phil Donahue.


Austin's Analysis
Let's get this out of the way: the resolution to the various Chalker bits that ran through Peter David's run is genuinely funny. The idea that X-Factor's greatest nemeses are a bunch of hapless guys they've never heard of is totally appropriate for this team, and also fits in with the running gag of nobody knowing who X-Factor is (or confusing them with X-Force). That said, I'm not entirely convinced that the resolution to the Chalker bits is all that satisfying. David didn't exactly devote a ton of page time to them, but he did drag the plot out over more than a years' worth of issues. Having the payoff amount to a couple pages' worth of a (granted, funny) gag is somewhat underwhelming.

Of course, it probably doesn't help that the payoff comes in this annual. As one of Marvel's "introduce a new character!" cash-grab-for-the-speculator-market annuals, David is forced to introduce a new character (because the Chalkers all previously existed), which puts the Chalkers into second fiddle territory. And it doesn't help that said new creation, Charon, doesn't exactly light the world on fire (making him of a piece with most of the other '93 annual creations). Inserting a villain into Strong Guy's past is fine - the character's pre-X-Factor history is small, as hilariously documented by the four panels devoted to it in the second story - but Charon ultimately comes out pretty generically, with his hatred of mutants motivated by a twisted take on Batman's origin being the most interesting thing about him. The demonic angle doesn't help, either, as doesn't really tie-in thematically or historically with either Strong Guy specifically or X-Factor in general, coming across instead like a cheap and easy way to power-up the requisite new character and bring back the Chalkers (which seems to be what David is most interested in).

It's certainly nice to see Shoemaker's unexciting but solid art again (I definitely like it more now than when I was a kid), and the Chalker stuff is legitimately funny, but it's hard not to escape the paradox at the center of this story: Charon feels underdeveloped and little more than a vehicle to pay off the Chalker gag, yet the Chalker gag feels overshadowed by the amount of page-time devoted to setting up Charon.

Next Issue
Tomorrow, more future shenanigans in Cable #2. Next week, Uncanny X-Men #302 and X-Factor #92.

Collected Editions

  

17 comments:

  1. Charon ultimately comes out pretty generically, with his hatred of mutants motivated by a twisted take on Batman's origin being the most interesting thing about him

    Nothing could be more interesting because the Batman origin twist is awesome.

    They at Marvel obviously took the emergence of BATMAN (1989) bad-ly, and it's beautiful show of impotent rage that the Batman film referred in the book at this era would have been the Adam West one with whole different approach to the character, and at the same time it is absolutely beautiful snide reference to that THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS book which was kind of big deal when coming to the early 90's and which also was the Batman story that introduced to Batman's origin the bit that the film the Wayne's were coming from would have been THE MARK OF ZORRO (1940).

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    1. In DKR it's the distressing news from TV that pushed middle-aged Bruce Wayne to re-assume the mantle of Batman. "The sign came to him -- as it does to so many -- on television", PAD tells us, when Charlie goes out to summon Cloot. It's hard to not think that mentions of Charlie knowing that the time has come and the first page "storm wouldn't be there for years" (to refer to the storm that coincides with Batman's return) also are somewhat subdued references to DKR.

      In Batman I believe it was a point of note that the mugger was a random representative of criminality, which superstitious, cowardly lot Bruce Wayne then chooses to fight. Here, the mugger is Random, a representative of mutantdom. If you think Random had no business showing up here, just remember it's a PAD book.

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  2. Ooof, yeah. You really have to question if this is the direction PAD was heading for the long-awaited Chalker payoff. The whole thing comes off as morbidly funny/borderline mean-spirited. That was probably always going to be the case, Charon or no, so it's hard to imagine any version of this story being worth the time and panels invested in the Chalkers.

    Personal example of giving the continuity more credit than it deserves: I recognized the killer as Random and assumed that must fit with his M.O., not realizing he'd just been introduced as a character. Furthermore, this must be some vitally important revelation about his backstory!

    Agreed on the demonic elements really being at odds with the premise and tone of this book. And yet, it is is a theme PAD seems fond of revisiting.

    That gag of Jamie's powers manifesting at birth stuck with me for years. I can't remember if it was officially confirmed by the much later story casting Jamie as a something-other-than-mutant, but I like to think it's legit.

    Evil Val seems far too pleased with receiving an info dump of character backgrounds and stories she should already be familiar with (and peripherally participated in). Maybe David was originally going for a switcheroo and this isn't meant to be our Val at all?

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    1. // Evil Val seems far too pleased with receiving an info dump of character backgrounds and stories she should already be familiar with //

      Yeah.

      // Maybe David was originally going for a switcheroo and this isn't meant to be our Val at all? //

      That had been my assumption ever since we saw Val accosted by a trash monster at the end of #87. Although this story wasn’t written by David, as Jason pointed out, one hopes that the editors would know the direction in which the Val plot was heading well enough to keep her appearance at the hands of another writer on track — not that hoping is really a valid strategy, and of course #92 proves otherwise.

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  3. My response to this being the place where the Chalker thing paid off was disappointment, mainly because I didn't want it to have a pay off!

    My hope with the Chalkers thing was that PAD was poking fun at the long stewing subplots of the Claremont era, and that the Chalkers would be like that: a long stewing subplot that simply never resolved as a commentary on Claremont's dropped plots.

    I suspect I'm the only one who thought that, mind you.

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  4. He's not Satan, he just shares some qualities with him; Satanesque or Satanish, if you will.
    -Pushpaw

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  5. " though it's unclear if that was based off whatever he was planning here, or just a coincidence of a writer returning to an underdeveloped but still intriguing idea twenty years later."

    ***Definitely no coincidence. 'The "Hell on Earth" War' was a story PAD was teasing with some regularity in the Hulk series. It was a slow burn (so to speak), but the Hell motif recurred three times in Hulk (and then once in this annual), and it was clearly all tied to the same intended payoff. The final bit before PAD's first Hulk ended was an alternate-future Rick Jones in Hulk #467 (published in 1998, PAD's last issue of Hulk for a long time) referring to the event by name for the first time.

    I stopped following PAD after that, so I don't know if he teased it anymore before at last paying it off when he returned to X-Factor so many years later, but it was definitely no coincidence. Just a very very prolonged final payoff. Personally I was disappointed to learn that when he finally did it, he made it an X-Factor story rather than a Hulk story. Ah well.

    "Rahne is seen reading a book called Howling Mad (which she says should be turned into a movie); it is a book written by Peter David, published in 1989."

    *** And it's about a werewolf, hence Rahne's enjoyment. (Also I believe it had been optioned around this time, but then went nowhere, so there's probably a bit of ruefulness in PAD's joke here. Or maybe just good-natured making fun of himself.)

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  6. "Evil Val seems far too pleased with receiving an info dump of character backgrounds and stories she should already be familiar with (and peripherally participated in). Maybe David was originally going for a switcheroo and this isn't meant to be our Val at all?"

    David didn't write that one.

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  7. On the references side: Charlie gets the idea of black magics in the hospital where some folks are trying to contact the spirit of Mary Jo Kopechne. She was a school teacher who died in a car accident in 1969 when US Senator Ted Kennedy drove his car off a bridge and then failed to report the incident. Kennedy's connections to the mighty & influential are thought to have helped him to evade the legal consequences, and Charlie here upon seeing Carosella in his official state X-Factor outfit may have thought that so has happened with Carosella and the X-Factor.

    It's probably coincidental, but beyond the usual "you can always tell where they have been" wreckage, Guido's studio partner Polaris has specifically been seen leading a mutant terrorist attack on a San Francisco hospital and around the city, is probably somewhat recognizable with her green-haired mutant mistress of magnetism thing, and has not gone through a trial or (I believe) any on-panel exculpation for it.

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  8. Cloot makes a joke about political correctness being a demonic invention; I'd love to be able to put that under the "Grim 'n' Gritty 90s" heading, but America just elected a president in part because some white people are mad they can't use the N-word, so sadly, ragging on the notion that some names and terms are more racially or sexually loaded/inappropriate than others is still a thing today just as it was in the 90s.

    Because it's wholly appropriate to play devil's advocate here, (because of Cloot you know, and not anyone else): the election in question may have gone how it went also because of the term usage on various folks is, especially nowadays, such a pointed issue. When a person is factually in breach of what is the legally set law (so, 'illegal'), the relentless insistence by the proponents of more lenient policies on using a politically correct euphemism of that kind of persons is only going to serve to heat things up with the opponents of such policies to a breaking point.

    So good job, Cloot, I guess.

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    1. And to emphasize, the power and peril of term usage cuts both ways obviously, and it's also just as much aggravation when the other guys choose to speak as "job creators" of someone who after hefty tax cuts fail to actually create any jobs except maybe in offshore banking.

      It's obviously common courtesy to not use derogatory names, of which Austin gives an extreme example, but at *some point* it crosses over from common courtesy to more politically inclined terminology, and people may have different (politically informed) views on where exactly that point is. I would guess "person of color", or "POC", is at this point more politically correct term than a de facto generally accepted correct one.

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    2. Being slightly on the cynical side, I must say, if I was running a private prison conglomerate, I sure would hope (and in the shadows promote) that my opponents would insist on calling my median projected customer an overtly PC "youth in peril" in their communications and see them butt heads with the gang in whose mind "thug" would be more appropriate word while alienating everyone in the middle, so that nothing ever would actually change and I'd continue to rake in profits while Cloot laughs.

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  9. I found the invocation of Mary Jo Kopechne pretty weird, but that’s par for the course in PAD’s run on this book.

    // hence the name Charon //

    And the name Charlie Ronalds, via reverse engineering or whatever.

    While I’m honestly trying to keep a lid on my spelling and grammar corrections, by the way, as a kid who enjoyed reciting Doctor Strange’s spells once upon a time I must note that it’s Satannish, with two ns (thus rhyming with “vanish”) rather than Satanish, with just one (and thus perhaps being read, like Pushpaw gibed, “Satan-ish”).

    // This marks the payoff to the various Chalker family scenes //

    Hoo boy. We’ll have to agree to disagree on this story making all of that worth it. Sure, I get the potential humor in X-Factor not even knowing their supposed arch-enemies, but this was a giant whiff from where I’m sitting.

    // Polaris was part of the group searching for the X-Men alongside Forge & Banshee //

    I had no recollection of Sunder being part of the Muir Island team, although I barely have any recollection of Sunder period.

    // Strong Guy trying to rescue people //

    That last story is the only one in this book I find even close to professionally executed. And it was such a downer I half-expected an ironic left-field turn where the dog he saved is actually a mutant who’s the despondent father’s daughter.

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  10. "Cloot makes a joke about political correctness being a demonic invention; I'd love to be able to put that under the "Grim 'n' Gritty 90s" heading, but America just elected a president in part because some white people are mad they can't use the N-word, so sadly, ragging on the notion that some names and terms are more racially or sexually loaded/inappropriate than others is still a thing today just as it was in the 90s."

    Good to know your blog can be added to the pile of smug, tone-deaf leftist blogs that ooze with racism and sexism yet somehow still consider themselves moral because they're racist and sexist against, I don't know, the identity groups that deserve to be targeted by racism and sexism according to leftist dogma? Rewrite the above paragraph so that it sneers about black people instead of white people and see how well it flies.

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    1. I wouldn't bother with trying to add logic to the writer's comments. He is either an ideologue or deliberately ignorant.

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    2. Where on earth is there any sexism and racism on this site? And why are you so butthurt over this? The truth hurts, I guess.

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    3. "He is either an ideologue or deliberately ignorant."

      Or just telling it like it is?

      Delete

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