Comicon Advent Calendar Day 21: Celebrate Christmas With The Simonsons in ‘X-Factor’ #27
by Austin Gorton
Recently,I wrote about my affection for Louise Simonson‘s run on X-Factor, and the way she carefully extricated the book from its terrible initial premise of “mutants posing as human mutant hunters” and established a better one for the characters, “X-Factor as the mutant version of the Avengers.”
“Gifts!” in X-Factor #27, originally published towards the end of Simonson’s second year on the book, is a notable entry in her run. For one, it’s an epilogue to the three part “Fall of the Mutants” arc (itself part of the broader event of the same name pulling in all the X-books at the time). As such, it’s effectively the denouement of Simonson’s efforts to reposition the team as publicly-facing and publicly-embraced, which climaxed in the previous issue. It’s also a sweet little Christmas story which concludes with Apocalypse and his Horsemen toasting the imminent demise of X-Factor with champagne.
The festivities kick off early as X-Factor is reunited with their young charges in the wake of Apocalypse’s defeat and introduce them to the media, after which Iceman uses his power to adorn the top of the Empire State Building (damaged during Apocalypse’s attack in “Fall of the Mutants”) with a giant Christmas tree. From there, Simonson settles in for what her run does best: soap opera drama. Beast rekindles his burgeoning romance with reporter Trish Tilby, A watching Archangel, recently freed from Apocalypse’s control, angst over his former teammates’ embrace of the human media. And Cyclops sees the broadcast of his estranged wife (whom he thought was dead) Madelyne Pryor’s tearful message to him shortly before she seemingly dies for real in another chapter of “Fall of the Mutants”, driving a new wedge between him and Jean Grey.
This prompts Jean to finally go and visit her parents, revealing her resurrection (which kicked off the series) following her apparent death at the climax of “The Dark Phoenix Saga.” In doing so, Simonson checks another box in her “deconstruct X-Factor’s terrible initial premise” efforts, which found Jean focusing on being a superhero more than a human being in the wake of her return. Seeing her finally reunite with her parents does wonders to make the character feel like an actual person and not just an agent of the book’s plots. It also speaks to “Gifts” general Christmas-y vibes.
Back at X-Factor’s new headquarters, the massive spaceship they confiscated from Apocalypse after his defeat, the X-Factor kids receive a massive delivery of Christmas presents (and even a Christmas tree of their own) donated by the city and the general public who felt bad when they learned all the kids’ Christmas presents were destroyed during the battle with Apocalypse. But while the kids are initially ecstatic about their sudden holiday windfall, in true Christmas special tradition, Leech, one of the younger X-Factor kids, is reminded of all the sick kids in the children’s hospital who have nothing, and convinces his friends to re-gift their presents to those kids.
They proceed to steal out in the middle of night dragging a pallet of presents and, following a bit of comic book action when they’re briefly accosted by a few of the roving gang members that were so common in comics set in New York in the late 1980s, successfully deliver the presents to the hospital. They are joined by the adult members of X-Factor who, after their initial anger at the kids running off in the middle of the night subsides when they learn why they left, add to the Christmas festivities, with Iceman standing in for Frosty the Snowman and Beast donning a beard and red hat to play Santa.
It’s all very sweet and Christmas-y, while also standing as a testament to the work Simonson has done rehabilitating the series to get it to that point, with the characters acting and sounding like real people instead of just actors in a plot. In the end, even Apocalypse gets in on the holiday act, having been monitoring the repairs of his former spaceship base from afar and upon their completion, leading his Horseman in a toast to his gift to X-Factor (of course, his hope is that the fully-repaired ship will now deploy its defense mechanisms against X-Factor, killing them, but that’s a concern for the next issue).
Ultimately, “Gifts” stands as sort of Platonic ideal for an issue of Louise Simonson’s X-Factor — character- focused, soap operatic, with simmering subplots and a touch of the fantastic, drawn by her husband, Walt Simonson. That’s it’s also a Christmas comic in the tradition of the great Christmas stories is just icing on the cake — or in this case, the star on top of the ice tree atop the Empire State Building.