I think this run of X-Factor would have had a better chance had the connection to been made clear on the final page of issue 1. But I am not sure PAD knew by then that he was taking Serval in that direction considering started months later than this run on X-Factor. I liked this series, but the first few issues had too much of a slow build for the current market. It didn't feel new and exciting, and it could have with what we found out in the final issue.

Yeah, maybe if they had done that, I'd have stuck around for longer than 6 issues. I already gave PAD a lot of leniency on this series (new series usually have 3 issues to prove themselves), considering I hated the final stretch of the previous X-Factor run (which was one of my favourite comics when it started out), first having the Hell arc where X-Factor are minor sidecharacters in their own series and leaving several characters (M, Polaris, Wolfsbane) in a very dark place and made a needlessly convoluted origin for Longshot and Shatterstar (without having any actual impact on either character).

But the new series did little for me; the pacing is all over the place. It takes us 6 issues before the team is assembled, which would not be that bad if not the main motivation of just about anybody who joins is "Eh, ok, why not.". The fights with villains all end anticlimatically and seem to be added only because its a superhero comic and therefore it must have fights. There is a scene where Harrison's wife confronts Linda for sleeping with her husband, which would be fine later on when those characters had had more development, but at that point we know next to nothing about either character and their relationship to Harrison so the scene has no context. And everybody seems to agree that Polaris has some serious mental issues, but they all decide that they should just watch her instead of actually getting her some professional help. (Though the last thing is pretty usual in comics.)

Nitpicks:
- Wolverine gives Gambit a speech in the first issue which is the exact opposite of the speech he gave him at the end of the previous Gambit series (continuity issue, which doesn't bother me so much, but it's more that here Wolverine is blaming Gambit for never being around and off doing his own things, while at the end of the Gambit series, when Gambit apologizes to him for the same thing, Wolverine waves it away, saying that he a) knew that when he hired him and b) he's hardly in a position to blame others for the things he does himself all the time). The fight with Hoffman was very anticlimatic
- They play Danger joining X-Factor as a suprise at the end of issue 4, but she's wearing the X-Factor uniform on the cover of that same issue.

Upsides:
I really liked the artwork/character design (except for Magus/Warlock, but nobodoy except for Sienkiewicz has done those two right.) and I like PAD's take on Gambit and Quicksilver.

Do you ever have problems with pages that don't load? Sometimes I will read a comic and some pages will not load.

Plus they had a butler.

I like Bendis too, for what it's worth. I like his dialogue, especially. It's very Quentin Tarantino-esque and that's a good thing in my book. It sounds a little like the kind of dialogue that people in the real world actually use, rather than tightly scripted talk, which no-one in real life ever uses. Of course, I could use less of his story decompression, but I see that as an industry wide problem, not something specific to Bendis.

In particular, Alias was amazingly good.

This happens at least 50% of the time when I go to load a comic. Another irritating issue I experience is that it will often bring up comics as free previews even though I'm logged in to my account. The library feature is so slow, it's also unusable. What I did was simply bookmark each series page, effectively making my own library of series using bookmarks and folders. It actually works very well for me using this method. I shouldn't have to do it, but oh well. I have no idea why they haven't corrected the loading errors. I remember sampling Unlimited back in 2007 when they first started and they had the same issues.