REVIEWING: "Madrox: Multiple Choice"

Read the Madrox: Multiple Choice 2005 series from Marvel last night. It's the first series I'd read from Marvel in a while, and the only thing that caught my interest enough to read it was because Peter David had written it. What with reading series he'd done in the past with mostly long-john heroes, I thought this series might be a welcomed change of pace (and it was).

Madrox, you might recall, was all part of the new "X-Factor" team that was introduced later on in that title, replacing old X-Men characters as the team. And, in theis series, we have Madrox, Strong Guy and Wolfsbane, all former members of the old X-Factor ( the latter two play more minor parts in this story) except now they're not in any sort of team, but rather living in a section of NYC called "Mutant Town".

Well, right off, you get the picture. There's different areas of NYC that pretty much contain primarily one cultural group of people, and in this area live mostly mutants. Madrox needs to have some sort of income and starts up a P.I. business. Seems pretty natural a thing to do since he can split his body into multiple copies and send them out to do the jobs, then reabsorb the copies as well as any information they may have obtained into his original self. But..."things" have changed a bit since his X-Factor days.

His duplicates are starting to take on individual personalities and some of them just as well have a life of their own. In fact, the whole story begins where it appears that Madrox has been stabbed and is trying to get back to his office, and it turns out that it's actually one of his dup's. When the original Madrox reabsorbs this copy he feels the pain his dup is suffering as well, which darn near kills him. And he finds that each time he does this trick he's a bit disoriented for a while.

And we as the readers think that this wounded duplicate got that way because he was messin' around with a gangland boss's gal and the ganster stabbed him in revenge...but t'anin't so.

Which is where I'll leave you with this review because you may not have read this series and want to and I don't want to ruin it with spoilers. But the rest of this tale involves trying to find out who stabbed his duplicate and "why". It's well worth the read and different from previous David work. David's writing is well illustrated by Pablo Raimondi in a style that will remind you of many a 1950's film noir detective flick.

Personal Rating would be out of 5 "stars", I'd give it four.