X-amining X-Factor #-1

"A Summers Tale"

July 1997

In a Nutshell

Mister Sinister tests a young Havok, and finds him wanting. 

Writer: Howard Mackie
Penciler: Jeff Matsuda
Inker: Art Thibert
Letterer: Richard Starkings & Comicraft
Colorist: Glynis Oliver
Editor: Kelly Corvese
Editor-in-Chief: Bob Harras

Plot

13 year old Alex Summers is trying to fit into his new adoptive family, with his mother frequently mistaking him for her recently deceased son Todd and his dad urging him to pursue athletics like Todd. Alex's sister Haley convinces Alex to try out for the football team - which his father coaches - and his success at both football and in school attracts the attention of some school bullies. Haley scares them off, but their leader Vince follows Alex home. While lurking outside, he's approached by Mister Sinister, who urges him to take action. Vince and his gang kidnap Alex and Haley, taking them to an abandoned warehouse where they are hunted for sport. Haley and Alex manage to escape, but Vince catches up to them. He shoots Haley in the leg, implies that he killed Todd, and tells Alex he's going to kill the rest of his family. Haley and Todd race home, where Alex uses his powers for the first time to incinerate Vince before he can blow up the house. Having watched from afar, Sinister is pleased with the results, but feels Alex has too little control, so he erases everyone's memories of recent events, promising himself to reunite with Alex should he ever gain control of his powers. 
Firsts and Other Notables

X-Factor's flashback centers on Havok, taking place shortly after his adoption. While the fact that Alex was adopted away from Scott is established, this is the first time we've gotten much in the way of details about his adopted family - all of whom come across as exceedingly creepy/in a disturbed state following the death of their son/brother, whom they all clearly view Havok as a replacement for - to the point that the character who is positioned as most sympathetic to Alex is the one urging him to just act more like her dead brother for the sake of their parents. 

This of course means we get a Mister Sinister appearance, whom Matsuda draw an awful lot like General Bowser. 

A Work in Progress

In the framing sequence, Stan Lee appears as the backwards baseball cap-wearing "Unca Stan."

He suggests it may be hard to believe that Havok hasn't always been in the Brotherhood, like that's a status quo that hasn't only existed for all of six months or so. 

Apparently Alex's adopted mom's dead son loved sardines and mayo sandwiches; is...is that a thing? 

Alex says that Scott always enjoyed football, while Alex was a better basketball player. I'm not sure that tracks (I could see Scott as more of a basketball kid), but sure. 

The Grim 'n' Gritty 90s

When Vince is preparing to blow up Alex's house, he drops a vintage ",,,NOT!" 

Young Love

Before Stan Lee takes over the framing pages, the simmering Forge & Mystique romantic tension comes closer than ever to boiling over, an interesting moment to include in this otherwise out-of-sequence issue. 

Austin's Analysis
It's another narrative cul-de-sac story involving Mister Sinister! Instead of taking Nate Grey out of a bottle, messing with him, then putting him back in, this time Sinister messes around with Lil' Havok, then wipes the memory of it from him, leading us to question what the point of it all even is! 

While there is something fun in the idea - intentional or not - of using the Flashback Month gimmick to focus on a character who was once a huge part of the book's cast but isn't anymore, making it a flashback in more than one way - it's not really clear what is gained from this particular flashback. One of the notable elements of Havok's backstory was that, while his brother had to deal with growing up in an orphanage run by an obsessive science Dracula and getting hoodwinked into helping a diamond man commit crimes before becoming a child superhero, Havok himself had a mostly normal childhood once he was adopted, until crossing paths with his brother again as a young adult. Changing that doesn't really add much to the character, and changing it to basically the same thing as Cyclops - secret manipulation by Sinister - while making narrative sense, is more reductive than additive as far as Havok's character is concerned. And that's even before getting into the fact that Havok isn't even meant to remember anything that happens here. 

The idea, of course, is that Mackie is trying to lay some retroactive groundwork for Havok's then-recent heel turn. Of course, later stories will make that effort moot, but even in the context of the times, while that isn't a terrible idea for how to make use of one of these Flashback stories, Mackie still doesn't really hit the idea hard enough. If the argument is Havok turned evil because of something from his childhood exposed by Sinister, then it just creates an even more unfavorable impression of Havok - given his brother also had to deal with Sinister manipulation and turned out fine (at least in superhero terms).

It also doesn't help that the whole plot is weirdly intense. Even if we assume that Vincent's escalation from "bully" to "homicidal maniac hunting people for sport then trying to blow up a house" is goaded along by Sinister, and that the trauma of all that for both Alex and Haley is wiped from their memories, Alex's homelife even before all of that falls somewhere between "sad" and "disturbing." His dad is passive-aggressively pushing Alex to take the place of his dead son, his mom is just straight-up mistaking him for Todd, and his sister is guilting him into going along with it all. Yet all of that passes without comment or resolution from Mackie, making it all a really strange storytelling choice. 

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