Artie Maddicks is one of the younger characters who ends up in the middle of a surprising amount of trouble in the early X-Factor stories. He's usually remembered alongside Leec…

Artie Maddicks is one of the younger characters who ends up in the middle of a surprising amount of trouble in the early X-Factor stories. He's usually remembered alongside Leech, but his introduction has a lot going on before that friendship even starts. His father, Dr. Carl Maddicks, wants to reverse his son's mutation. Artie has changed physically and can no longer speak, and his father becomes so determined to change him back that he has Beast kidnapped and experiments on him. Hank becomes the test subject for something that is supposed to help Artie. Those experiments are part of how Beast ends up back in his more human-looking form during this period. Artie is caught in the middle of all of that. He hasn't asked for Beast to be abducted or for any of this to happen. His father makes those decisions around him, and by the end of the story Artie has lost his father and is taken in by X-Factor. That is a pretty rough way for a child to enter the cast. His powers are worth separating out, because there's more to them than the pictures people usually remember. Artie communicates by projecting images. He can show people what he is thinking about or what he has seen, so the artwork itself becomes part of his conversation. Other characters have to actually look at what he's trying to tell them. There is also a stronger telepathic side to him. Early on, he can put Tower into a mental lock, although he can't hold him indefinitely. He can pick up images of things happening elsewhere, too. So he has ways to find out what is happening and pass that information along, even when he cannot explain it in spoken words. That doesn't give him unlimited knowledge or make every image a prediction of the future, but it makes him useful in situations where everyone else is missing something. When Rusty is in danger around the Morlock tunnels, Artie tries to warn Cameron Hodge. Hodge brushes him off. Artie then goes looking himself, leaving a drawing behind so the others will know where he's gone. His attachment to Rusty gets him moving, but it also puts him directly into the Mutant Massacre. He meets Leech down there, and the two of them end up trying to survive with Caliban while the Marauders are attacking. Later, he becomes part of the younger group around X-Factor and the X-Terminators, with Inferno dragging him into another disaster. For a character who doesn't get long speeches, Artie communicates a lot. He notices things, worries about people and tries to help them. Sometimes the adults are too distracted to pay attention, and the story makes us watch him work around that. His pictures can look simple on the page, but there is usually a specific person or situation behind what he's trying to show everyone.