Marvel Comics has revealed the members of the X-Men spinoff, X-Factor, will get all-new costumes for the series launch. The title by writer Leah Williams and artist David Baldeón will also add former Alpha Flight member Aurora to the team, joining her brother Northstar alongside Polaris, Prodigy, Eye-boy, Daken and Prestige.
“I hadn’t originally planned on having Aurora be a part of the field team," Leah told Marvel.com. "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," the writer paused, "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," Williams added. "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.”
Baldeón came up with the new redesigns for the X-Factor team, along with a new logo that can be found on their costumes.
"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," Baldeón said. "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."
"So I included it in the designs, and suggested to Jordan [D. White], Annalise [Bissa], and Leah [Williams] that it could be used, in-universe, as the 'badge' of this investigative team," he said. "Lucky for me, they liked the idea… Because I already had designed the whole team around that logo!"
X-Factor #1 by Leah Williams, David Baldeón and Israel Silva goes on sale April 22 from Marvel Comics.