NEWS WATCH: X-Factor Gets New Mission And A New Look

By Chad Burdette

on February 13, 2020

This April, X-Factor returns as the team responsible for investigating murders and missing mutants as they are the ones tasked with keeping the rules of resurrections on track in the new mutant world order.

The team, which will consist of Northstar, Polaris, Prodigy, Eye-boy, Daken, Prestige, and Aurora, all of which will receive a few fresh looks thanks to the creative team of writer Leah Williams and artist David Baldeón.

In an interview with Marvel.com, Williams talked about including Aurora on the X-Factor team:

“I hadn’t originally planned on having Aurora be a part of the field team. She was destined to have a role more along the lines of operations and intel around the Boneyard, which is the name for X-factor’s Krakoan headquarters. Like Polaris, I need Aurora to have a lot of additional bandwidth to do individual character work with her—so keeping her untethered to explore her growth without Northstar overshadowing her was my goal. But then, I saw David’s design for her X-factor uniform and changed my mind.”

“What’s consistent with my original plan is that Aurora becomes a part of the X-factor family in a shockingly roundabout way, considering her twin brother is the new team leader, and also consistent—the reason she’s not a part of the team line-up in the beginning is a big mystery that I want readers to try and solve over the course of the first arc. There’s already some clues in the unfinished preview pages.”

Artist David Baldeón also weighed in on his part of the new designs:

“There were many different ideas and concepts I wanted to include in the designs, one of them doing an homage of shorts to the original Jackson Guice designs. I love those big bold X decals all aver the suits! While trying to integrate the X motif into the new suits, this little idea went into my head: these guys are not so much Super Heroes as investigators looking for missing mutants. “Missing mutants,” or “missing X’s,” perhaps? That took the shape, after some sketching, of this “empty set,” “non-X” logo that I really like, that worked like a charm on the suits, and that went great as a contrast to the classic X and its Dawn of X reinterpretation.”