With Carey’s increasing handle on the property and Brubaker/Fraction’s promising-sounding run, PAD’s position of writing the best X-book isn’t as secure as it once was, but that reflects the improving quality of the line rather PAD getting any worse. Even so, the events of Messiah Complex meant that the X-Factor’s stride wasn’t simply broken, rathar that its kneecaps were shattered.

To compensate for this, PAD has attempted to writte the events of Messiah Complex into a larger arc, putting X-Factor at their absolute lowest ebb – no plan, missing members and now no office. It does work to a point, but it still feels like a stumble compared to the way the book had been running in the past.

Taking X-Factor out of Mutant Town does make sense – after all, there aren’t any mutants there and since they’re more or less uncovered the conspiracy behind M-Day, there’s little to tie them to the concept of Decimation now. With the Messiah Complex shakeups still evident, it’s time to establish a new status quo, and the first part of that is getting rid of the old one. PAD does this by burning down Mutant Town.

It makes for an issue of fairly standard superheroics as X-Factor run around trying to rescue the few people left, and escape themselves. The sense of scale takes a bit of a knock, though – I get that Mutant Town is supposed to be empty now, but but showing almost no-one turn up to watch it get destroyed, it’s hard to get the sense that anything significant has happened. I gather from the writing that Mutant Town is pretty much gone for good, but that’s not what it looks like on the page, in part due to the small number of extras.

After an issue as the main villain, Arcade is fairly quickly shuffled off, having accomplished his remit of bringing random and pointless destruction to the cast without any discernable motive. It’s not exactly a strong idea, but PAD gets plenty of mileage out of it with some fairly good groaners along the way. Even so, the tone of X-Factor is largely serious, so it’s a pretty odd juxtaposition to have Arcade running around like a 60s Batman villain, and his flamboyant character design doesn’t remotely work in Raimondi’s fairly conservative style.

It’s not the best issue of X-Factor by a long shot, but it does at least do everything it needs to. Next issue establishes where the title’s going from here on in, and as such, it’s an ideal starting point for anyone looking for a good read. By comparison, this issue’s very much a sendoff, and with a strong sense of melancholy there’s no doubt that it certainly feels like one.