Back when Random first appeared, he was awesome. He was this bad-ass bounty hunter who would beat the [Expletive Deleted] out of you if someone paid him enough, and he was so morally ambiguous that if you were able to outbid his employer, he'd let you go free. The guy just did not give a [Expletive Deleted] .
Then once Peter David left X-Factor, they had to water down the character. Hint that there was a "secret behind his facade." And then along came Howard Mackie and we got the most ridiculously stupid origin story in the history of ridiculously stupid origins -- he was nothing more than a teenage boy made of protoplasm, either created by or experimented on by the Dark Beast. And his whole bad-ass bounty hunter thing? That was just a ruse he created so he could impress Polaris because he had a crush on her.
After Mackie effectively castrated this once-great character, he was relegated to background status. Every now and then he'll pop up, but usually as a non-speaking background character.
What a waste.
I'd like to see Peter David pick this character up again in X-Factor and retcon basically everything that's happened to him since David originally left the book. So that guy who came along with the crush on Polaris and was a pile of teenage protoplasm or some [Expletive Deleted] ? Yeah, make him an impostor created by the Dark Beast and have Random blow his head off for sullying his good name.
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