X-Factor (comics)/Characters

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Characters that have appeared in X Factor series

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Main Cast

Caliban

• Anti-Hero: Type I-V depending on which version the writer is using.
• Blood Knight
• Deal with the Devil: When he joined Apocalypse...
• Dumb Muscle: Eventually became this after a convoluted series of events.
• Emotion Eater: Caliban feeds off fear as part of his mutant power
• Heel Face Revolving Door
• Killed Off for Real
• Only One Name
• Sixth Ranger: Subverted, he only joined the X-Factor because he felt that he was helpless to stop the Marauders from killing the Morlocks. Soon after, he decided to join Apocalypse to make himself stronger.
• Third Person Person

Russell "Rusty" Collins / Firefist

• Brainwashed and Crazy: When he was part of the MLF.
• The Cape (trope): Originally Cyclops' protege, and stated to have to potential to become a significant leader/figure for mutantkind. He went to prison as part of a protest over the treatment of mutants.....and then he got put on the first of many buses.
• Heel Face Revolving Door
• Playing with Fire
• Redheaded Hero
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Poor Rusty was killed by the time-displaced Holocaust...

Arthur "Artie" Maddicks / Artie

• Heterosexual Life Partners: With Leech
• Mind Over Matter: Had limited telepathy to "mind-lock" people and prevent them from acting.
• Progressively Prettier
• The Speechless
• What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?: Artie can telepathically project images from his mind.

Sally Blevins / Skids

• Abusive Parents: This is the reason why her mutant powers had first activated
• Barrier Warrior
• Brainwashed and Crazy: When she was part of the MLF.
• Heel Face Revolving Door

Leech

• Bad Powers, Good People
• Break the Cutie: Poor Leech has been through a lot of Hell, from being a survivor of Morlock Massacre to an unwilling pawn used for depowering mutants by a villain.
• Heterosexual Life Partners: With Artie
• Only One Name
• Power Nullifier: Leech has the ability to suppress energy around him, this includes electrical energy and a mutants ability.
• Progressively Prettier
• Third Person Person

Tabitha 'Tabby' Smith / Boom-Boom

• Abusive Parents: Her father, forcing her to run away from home.
• Action Girl
• The Ditz
• Fun Personified (in X-Men Evolution)
• I Have Many Names: Time Bomb, Boom Boom, Boomer and Meltdown. She's currently using Boom-Boom.
• Progressively Prettier
• Sticky Fingers
• Stuff Blowing Up
• Totally Radical
• Valley Girl

Julio Richter / Rictor

• Big Screwed-Up Family: The family business is selling weapons (and drugs) on the black market. He's less than proud of this and once worked to try to dismantle his family's business.
• Brought Down to Badass: Even though he has been depowered, he still earns his place as a member of X-Factor.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: By the Right.
• Deadpan Snarker
• Dishing Out Dirt: He used to have seismic powers until he got depowered on M-day. In Avengers: Children's Crusade #6, he's the first mutant to have his powers restored by Wanda.
• Dude in Distress: Kidnapped nearly a dozen times so far.
• Electric Torture: One of the few details given about his torture by the Right.
• Family Business: The Richter family business? Selling weapons illegally, or "selling death", as he explains it.
• Foreign Cuss Word: Prone to this, especially during the 90s.
• Gratuitous Spanish: Again, guilty of this during the 90s.
• Heroes Want Redheads: He seems to have a thing for them: Rahne, Shatterstar...
• Interrupted Suicide: Three so far — in the original X-Factor (#22), and in the current X-Factor (#1 and #38).
• Meaningful Name: His surname is Richter. He had has once again earthquake powers. You do the math.
• Relationship Reveal: He and Shatterstar were Heterosexual Life Partners; recent events have chucked the 'heterosexual' bit.
• Smug Snake: The Age of Apocalypse version is this in spades.
• Invisible to Gaydar: It's been revealed that Rictor is not bi as previously assumed, but full-on gay, having found no fulfillment in his relationships with Rahne and Tabitha.
• You Killed My Father: Held a grudge against Cable because of this, even after the truth came out.

Takashi "Taki" Matsuya / Wiz Kid

• Genius Cripple
• Child Prodigy
• L Is for Dyslexia
• Parental Abandonment: Lost his parents (and his ability to walk) in a car accident.
• Put on a Bus: Recently depowered after not appearing for over two decades.
  • was not depowered actually
• Technopath
• Twofer Token Minority: He is a handicapped Japanese mutant kid.
• The Woobie

Villains

Cameron Hodge

• A Nazi by Any Other Name
• Big Bad
• Complete Monster
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul
• Deal with the Devil
• Green-Eyed Monster: Projected his insane jealousy of Angel onto all muatnts.
• Karma Houdini: No matter how many times he's killed, he just keeps coming back.
• Losing Your Head
• Poisonous Friend: And how!
• Moral Event Horizon: He had already been revealed to be a nasty piece of work, but then he made a deal with a master demon - immortality in exchange for supplying said demon with mutant babies.
• Unexplained Recovery

Joanna Cargill / Frenzy

• Heel Face Brainwashing: In Eve of Destruction storyline, Jean Grey was desperate to find a new team, and quickly to save Professor Xavier. She acknowledges that one of Magneto's lieutenants, Frenzy, has been captured by the US Army. Not only does Jean enter her mind to get the info she needs on Genosha (Magneto's island) and its defenses, but she thinks that having a superpowered guide in that hellhole would be a good idea, so she just rewrites Frenzy's mind and makes her an X-Men enthusiast (so fanatically devoted to the X-Men cause, all of a sudden, that it was creepy).
• Nigh Invulnerability
• Scary Black Woman: A scary black woman...with muscles!
• Super Strength

Edward Pasternak / Tower

• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: His mutant power
• Psycho for Hire

Wendy Sherman / Stinger

• Eighties Hair
• Shock and Awe: Stinger can build static energy around her hands and discharge it as bio-electricity bolts
• Valley Girl

Timeshadow

• Time Master

Dr. Nathaniel Essex / Mister Sinister

See X-Men

En Sabah Nur / Apocalypse

See X-Men

Main Cast

Alexander "Alex" Summers/ Havok

See X-Men

Lorna Dane / Polaris

See X-Men

Jamie Madrox / Multiple Man

A former foe of the Fantastic Four. One of them discovered he was a mutant and handed him over to the X-men.

• Ascended Fanboy: Jamie Madrox keeps attempting to treat his Mutant adventures as Noir Detective novels. He usually fails miserably.
• Cloning Blues: For some time, his clones were cool with being who they are. Then things started getting weird. One turns traitor and joins with the long-term X-Men enemy Mister Sinister. Another dies of the Legacy Virus. Jamie starts going around the bend because he's just too much people for one man. Later, he gets it together but his clones don't. All the thousands of aspects, idiotic or not, in the human mind tend to get manifested in his clones. He can and has created a clone to free him from a prison cell but it's possible the clone will be his sadness and be too depressed to move. Another is unpredictable and tries to kill an old ally. It is reabsorbed but indicates that it could pop out in any future clones and go try to kill again.
• Fun Personified (most likely under Peter David's writing)
• Me's a Crowd
• Mundane Utility: Jamie constantly uses his dupes like this, sending them out to learn and explore the world, creating them on the other side of locked doors, playing duets on piano and the super-babysitting.
• Rescued From the Scrappy Heap
• Starfish Character: Jamie Madrox has a mutant power that creates duplicates of himself upon physical impact. Each tends to manifest some aspect of his personality.

Guido Carosella / Strong Guy

• Boisterous Bruiser
• Fun Personified
• Power Incontinence: Strong Guy has the power to absorb kinetic energy and redistribute it as super strength, but if he doesn't let it out soon enough, it has affects on his physiology (which is the reason for his... unique appearance).
• Super Strength
• The Big Guy

Rahne Sinclair / Wolfsbane

See New Mutants

Pietro Maximoff / Quicksilver

The son of Magneto who was separated from him and believed to be dead. Raised by gypsies, he developed a strong fixation on his sister, Wanda Maximoff. After Magneto saved Wanda from a anti-mutant mob, the two were indebted to him and were reluctantly part of the first incarnation of the Brotherhood of Mutants. After Magneto was abducted by aliens and the Brotherhood disbanded, Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch served for a long period as members of The Avengers, where they redeemed themselves. However, old habits and revelations about villainous heritages are hard to fight, and the two continue to bounce back and forth between good and evil and sane and insane. He's also the ex-husband of Crystal from The Inhumans and they have a daughter named Luna, but his relationship with them is... utterly troubled.

• Anti-Hero: Generally a Type II, but recently downgraded to type IV, and briefly even type V, since most American writers don't like stereotypcial "Euro Trash" characters.
• Big Brother Instinct
• Bishounen: Depending on the art, Quicksilver is usually not a bishounen except for X-Men Evolution cartoon. However, in one X-Factor issue, he was called 'Pretty Boy' by his inmates when he was put in prison for vagrancy.
• Brother-Sister Incest: It happens in the Ultimate universe
• Brought Down to Normal: He thought he had it bad when life moved in slo-mo, but after losing his powers, everything seemed so... fast. He went crazy, stole mutating mists from his in-laws, and used them to get time travel powers.
• Cry Cute
• In the Blood: Pietro's really, really prone to Face Heel Turns. It doesn't help that he looks almost exactly like Magneto anyway.
• Jerkass: Quicksilver has been a good guy, bad guy, and in-between, but never stops being an arrogant, self-centered dick. This extends to his other incarnations, such as his apperances on the different cartoons and Ultimate X-Men.
  • Jerkass Woobie: Just think about Pietro's life.
    • Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Depending on the Writer, Pietro is usually, beneath his jerkassery, a good guy who does anything for his friends.
• Karma Houdini: Recently Made a statement on the news that his Moral Event Horizon (see below) was a work of a Skrull imposter during the Secret Invasion crossover.
  • While the above is true, Luna herself knows the truth, and while she'll keep his secret because she loves him, she's made it very clear that she has lost all respect for him.
• Luke, I Am Your Father
• Motor Mouth: He talks faster in X-Men Evolution cartoon than in the comics
• Oedipus Rex
• Personality Powers: Well, except the most prominent part of Pietro's personality is how he's a total Jerkass because life moves in slow motion for him.
• Pet the Dog
• Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs
• Super Speed
• Time Stands Still: Quicksilver once explained his angry personality by asking his psychologist to imagine living in a world consisting entirely of the slowest queue at the checkout.
• The Unfavourite: Magneto's relationship with his kids is equally screwed up, with Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver being the Un-Favorite in both the regular and Ultimate Marvel Universe.
  • In particular, in the Ultimate Marvel Universe, Magneto is quite open with with his disdain for Quicksilver/favoritism towards Wanda, by "punishing" Wanda for betraying him by way of making her watch him kneecap her brother, who Magneto berated for going to work for the Ultimates.
• White-Haired Pretty Boy

Valerie Cooper

Started as a subordinate to Senator Kelly and Agent Henry Peter Gyrich, later rose to become a kind of US government superpowers and mutant czar and one of the top people of the O*N*E. Served as government liaison to X-Factor for a long time and also appeared a few times in the current incarnation of the title.

• Badass Normal: The Shadow King once sent her to assassinate Mystique, but at the crunch she overcame his mind control enough to turn the gun on herself.
• Shout-Out: In an X-Factor story written by Peter David, Val once mentioned her brother, an FBI agent who had been involved in a case concerning a dead girl wrapped in plastic. PAD also gave her an assistant called Baldrick.

Marshall Stone III / Random

• Adaptive Ability: Random's main mutant power is adaptive shapeshifting. He can harden his skin when stabbed or reconstitute himself from protoplasmic goop when caught in an explosion. The guns are just his preferred form for combat.
• Bad Powers, Bad People: Subverted, since Random is actually a heroic guy whose unsettling power is to shoot you with guns.
  • Until recently, he was a Mook in the Marauders team.
    • Not exactly. Just like back in the days, when he had to fight X-Factor, he has doubts on his allegiance. Also, he's shown to be the more charitable of his team... suggesting to his foes that they're lucky having to fight him, because he's the nice one.
• BFG
• Cool Shades
• Guns Akimbo
• Heroic Albino
• Nineties Anti-Hero: Random is the nineties as far as comics are concerned.
  • It is worth noting that his musclebound antihero appearance was supposed to be the shapeshifters idea of what a badass looks like, not his actual appearance. Subsequent writers have forgotten this, and even when depowered he is depicted as uber-ninties.
• Shapeshifter Weapon: He can turn his arms into guns. With dozens of barrels. You see what I mean about him being the nineties.

Forge

See X-Men

Shard

• Bad Future
• But Not Too Black: She is an Aborigine mutant with blonde hair
• Dark-Skinned Blond
• Virtual Ghost

Kyle Gibney / Wild Child

• Heel Face Revolving Door
• Progressively Prettier

Raven Darkholme / Mystique

See X-Men

Victor Creed / Sabretooth

See X-Men

Archer

Fixx

Greystone

X-Factor Investigations

A group consisted of a few old X-Factor members Multiple Man (leader), Strong Guy and Wolfsbane as well as the new members Siryn, Rictor, M and Layla Miller working in a detective style agency. The newest members included are Darwin, Longshot and Shatterstar. Wolfsbane, after a brief stint in X-Force, has returned.

Main Cast

James "Jamie" Madrox / Multiple Man

See "X-Factor Government Team" Above.

Guido Crossela / Strong Guy

See "X-Factor Government Team" Above.

Theresa Cassidy / Siryn / Banshee

See X-Force

Monet St. Croix / M

See Generation-X

Julio Richter / Rictor

See "Original X-Factor series" above.

Layla Miller

• Creepy Child
• Facial Markings: Layla Miller has recently received the 'M' brand on her face as a result of visiting Bishop's future.
• Oracular Urchin
• Phrase Catcher "I'm Layla Miller. I know stuff."
• Plot-Relevant Age-Up: Recently she has grown into an adult after staying too long in Bishop's Bad Future timeline.
• Rescued From the Scrappy Heap

Armando Munoz / Darwin

• Adaptive Ability
• Beware the Nice Ones: Slow to anger, but when he does get mad? RUN. Very fast.
• Body Horror: His powers allow him to evolve to survive, resulting in some horrifying transformations. Shot with a weapon that targets the nervous system, he becomes a sponge creature. Crushed beneath wreckage, he's reduced to an oozing mass that can speak. Decapitated by a headshot, a second head starts growing out of his torso, and so forth. Thankfully these are temporary changes, but made worse that he's got no control over what he'll become.
• Race Lift / But Not Too Black: Lampshaped within the series. Darwin's powers had turned him white in a primarily white community "to better survive", but once he gains some confidence he changes himself back to his original darker skin tone. The characters point out the Unfortunate Implications of this.

Longshot

See X-Men

Shatterstar

See X-Force