Saturday Splash Page #18

 

"Terrigen's a Helluva Drug," in X-Factor: The Quick and the Dead, by Peter David (writer), Pablo Raimondi (artist), Jeromy Cox (color artist), Cory Petit (letterer)

Near the tail end of my time buying X-Factor, Marvel released a couple of one-shots focused on specific characters. There was Layla Miller, charting her life in the dystopian future she was stranded in as a result of Messiah CompleX, and this one, where Peter David started to drag Quicksilver out of the toxic waste dump writers had shoved him into since House of M.

Quicksilver spends most of the issue in a jail cell, hallucinating. It is the after effect of having the Terrigen crystals (he somehow internalized after stealing them from the Inhumans) pulled out of him? Or is he just concussed after he took a shot to the skull chasing Layla Miller through a merry-go-round? Probably a little from Column A, and a little from Column B.

I did a whole long-winded post about all the conversations Pietro has with Crystal, Magneto, Wanda and Layla in his head, which you can read here. The point seems to be that Pietro needs to stop trying to excuse or justify the shit he's done, but that he also needs to stop beating himself up or it and wallowing. That if he wants to be better, be the person the people who care about him think he can be, he needs to get off his ass and actually be better. Which does not include using the Terrigen mists to jumpstart depowered mutants and cast it off as God's will it they die horribly from it.

Endgame is, Pietro has somehow gotten his mutant powers back. He leaves jail, saving a woman from an abusive boyfriend in the process, then takes a nice little run around the world. Not long after this, he joins the roster of Dan Slott's Mighty Avengers run and within a couple of years of that, was one of the instructors in Christos Gage's Avengers Academy. Unlike Wanda, I think Pietro's mostly avoided backsliding into Crazy Town, or being forced to constantly re-litigate his past fuck-ups. Must be nice!