Issue(s): X-Factor Prisoner of Love
Cover Date: 1990
Title: "Prisoner of Love"
Credits:
Jim Starlin - Writer
Butch Guice - Penciler
Butch Guice - Inker
Suzanne Gaffney - Assistant Editor
Bob Harras - Editor

Review/plot:
Get your wallets out, kiddies. Here's another $4.95 worth of crap that you must buy because there's an X on the cover.

The Beast meets a pretty woman named Synthia Naip...

...doesn't seem to notice that her last name is "Pain" backwards, and falls in love with her suspiciously quickly.

This despite (or because of?) the fact that she's a biter.

We start getting into surreal fever dream type conversations (something that Beast, from his Beauty and the Beast days, is surely familiar with)...

...and the Beast starts having weird dreams, first about a Dark One that is pursuing Synthia...

...and then of a demonic X-Factor.

Synthia reveals that she's some kind of alien, and she wants the Beast to protect her from the Dark One that has killed off the rest of her race.

Eventually the Beast fights the Dark One...

...and we see Synthia's true form.

Days had seemingly passed while the Beast was with Synthia, but after the fight and saying goodbye to Synthia, the Beast wakes up moments after he first met her. Although he does still have a hickey.

Based on the creative team, i had at least moderate expectations for this. Jim Starlin is currently doing great work on Silver Surfer. And Butch Guice's art on the early X-Factor issues was beautiful. Unfortunately, Guice has evolved into a kind of model tracing...

...and Starlin's plot plays to that almost to the exclusion of anything else. There's nothing wrong with drawing pretty ladies and for the most part Guice's art isn't exploitative in the sense of, like, drawing brokeback poses or panty shots, but you still need an actual story to hang around the pictures, and there isn't one here. And when it comes to the main non-pretty lady character, the Beast, he can get pretty unrecognizable.

Since i associate Jim Starlin with awesome cosmic stuff, i wonder if there was meant to be more to Synthia Naip's alien race and the Dark Ones that just didn't come across well in this story. Synthia will appear again in a back-up story in next year's Silver Surfer annual, but we don't learn anything more about her (and her appearance is overshadowed by Ron Marz's rape-y interpretation of Starfox's powers).

Quality Rating: D

Historical Significance Rating: 1

Chronological Placement Considerations: Archangel seems to be interacting with Iceman and Beast like it was old times...

...suggesting that this takes place after X-Factor #59 when he starts showing signs of his Warren personality again.

References: N/A

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: N/A

Simonson or Starlin?

Oh thanks, gfsdf gfbd. It's Starlin.

This was a weird one. Starlin never seemed all that interested in the X-characters so this feels like it came out of nowhere.

"and falls in love with her suspiciously quickly."
He did the same thing with Dazzler in their limited series.

Wait, what is Beast doing in that second-to-last screencap??

Sure, sure. Guice's art is "just model tracing", like that's a bad thing, but Turner's art in Panther's Prey is "porntastic".

Stop cherry picking, mate.

Considering fnord regularly criticises Guice's art, including singling it out whenever it's particularly exploitative, it seems a bit rich to accuse him of cherry picking when you've picked one of the few reviews where he's gone easy on Guice to post this comment.

I think fnord nailed it. The point was to give Guice pretty ladies to draw, and pretty ladies that he didn't have to swipe from "Playboy" or something. Pretty girls in a virtually non-existent story just as Liefeld and Lee are reaching their peak. I know what I'd rather read a couple hundred pages of.

I think Jean looks very nice here, despite obviously posing and not really dressing in character (although who can tell anymore? :P ) She still looks natural, like she consciously decided to focus on the baby that morning.