Written by Jim Starlin
Art by Jackson Guice
Colored by Alfred Ramirez
Lettered by Michael Heisler
Edited by Bob Harras
Assistant Edited by Suzanne Gaffney
Editor-in-Chiefed by Tom DeFalco
Published as a 48 page one shot by Marvel Entertainment Group in 1990.
. . .
“Was Synthia nothing more than a hallucination caused by a bad hot dog?”
. . .
Review by William D. Tucker.
You may find yourself walking through the city. You are alone. You are thinking about sex and adventure. Isn’t the city supposed to be a place of sex and adventure? Sure it is.
And here you are . . .
Here’s something I pretty much always like: a superhero who dons a trenchcoat and a hat and goes trudging around the city, collar turned up, hands deep in their pockets.
The Ninja Turtles did it in New York City. Ben Grimm did it in New York City. Iron Man did it in a sweltering hot Southeast Asian jungle-over that damn armor, even!
The Beast does it in New York City, too.
Hank McCoy, X-Man, aka the Beast, you know, the brainy blue-furred guy? Sounds like Fraiser Crane in the live action movies?
Hank’s feeling out of sorts with his fellow X-Men. He gets beat up a little bit during a Danger Room sparring match with Archangel and Iceman. Hank’s head isn’t in the game. Hank’s also feeling jealous of fearless leader Cyclops’ marriage to the beautiful psionic Jean Gray. Hank muses on whether he’ll ever have any kids. You know, maybe it’s just lust, but a pretentious intellectual like him needs to dress it all up so it’s more than just a desire to bust nuts. Antsy as hell, Beast pulls on a trenchcoat and a hat and goes for a stroll around NYC.
As he wanders, Beast monologues to himself. Not like a villain. Inside voice. More like a private eye narrating a film noir. Hank takes in the sights and sounds. He sees people of every color, every age, every gender, every class, every degree of wealth and well-being. Stockbrokers. Homeless people. Drug dealers. A kid bouncing a baseball off of a wall. A celebrity arriving at a pricey restaurant in a limousine. A vast and diverse panorama of humanity. Hank takes it in, and feels all alone all over again because he’s a damn mutie. Of course, for all he knows, there’s mutants all over the place, they just don’t show it like he does with his blue fur. Amusingly, Hank, in the depths of his self-pity, chooses to skate across the surface of things.
The Beast perks up when a blonde bombshell is threatened by a goon squad in an alley armed with knives and a crowbar. This ain’t a friendly training sesh back in the Danger Room. Hank has an opportunity, now, to cut loose on some proper villains. Beast whips their asses, but he takes a blow to the head. He awakes to find himself in an apartment with the blonde bombshell attending to him. Her name is Synthia Naip. And she wants to fuck.
Okay, you know, this is a Marvel Comic from 1990. No crude words are used. Nothing’s explicit. But this story doesn’t shy away from being about lust and fantasy. The Beast is bored with sparring with those other square-ass X-Men. He has a thing for Jean Gray, but she’s already in a relationship. And while he muses about fatherhood, I wasn’t convinced he was looking for commitment so much as he was looking for action. He’s not out in the sticks. He is in New York City which is kinda known for having just about anything and anyone you could desire. Beast is horngry-horny and angry. The city provides. He gets into both a real fight and a quality hump.
Now, if this story was just that, then you could look at it as the X-Men Version of Letters to Penthouse.
Of course, things are not at all what they seem.
Synthia Naip, as it turns out, is a manifestation of a potent cosmic energy being whose true form scans as a mountain of glowing crystal. Synthia’s on the run from an entity known as the Dark One, a grungy biker-looking dude whose true form is a grody tumor monster whatsit from beyond. Synthia is also a sort of energy vampire who seduces Beast to power herself up to fend off the Dark One. She even fucks with Hank’s mind, causing him to see hallucinations of his teammates as monsters. Their fucking also seems to have a narcotic effect upon Hank, who, in the depths of his lust, can’t bring himself to leave Synthia’s lair. She’s a cosmic femme fatale.
But she’s not necessarily a villain. The comic positions her as a being from another reality. Maybe she sees our world like virtual reality or something. Synthia claims she tried only feeding on those allied with the Dark One, but she just couldn’t resist a blue-furred hunk like him. This doesn’t necessarily make her sympathetic, but it’s hard to dismiss her as totally evil. Hank was looking for some transcendent ass, remember? In hindsight, it all seems to stem from a not-so-careful wish.
That’s X-Factor Special: Prisoner of Love. It’s a 48 page one shot whose story skirts the edges of one of those grandiose interdimensional conflicts common to superhero comics but decides to dwell in the realms of lust and forbidden desire. It’s all rather PG-13 in the visuals department, but the ideas are engaging enough. I especially enjoyed the idea of having a superhero comic which could be interpreted as an off-the-wall sex fantasy that manifests in the protagonist’s mind during a lone wander of the Naked City.
You can’t be fighting Thanos every damn issue.
Why not spend a day fantasizing about a cosmically potent fuck?
