The uncomfortable part of Jamie Madrox's story in X-Factor #71–75 is how quickly the question becomes whether he even gets to be Jamie Madrox anymore.

The uncomfortable part of Jamie Madrox's story in X-Factor #71–75 is how quickly the question becomes whether he even gets to be Jamie Madrox anymore. First there's the dead duplicate. Jamie sent him to answer the door, and now he's looking at a body he can't simply absorb and move on from. That makes him question what he's been creating. If a duplicate has his own experience and his own life, what does it mean to send one out to take a risk for you? Then another Jamie turns up and says he's the original. The team has two men with the same face and powers, both insisting the other is the duplicate. Eventually they accept the wrong answer. The Jamie they've been working with loses the argument about his own identity, and the other one absorbs him. That is a nasty situation to put this particular character in. His friends are trying to resolve a problem, but from his side they're accepting that the person he believes himself to be doesn't really exist in the way he thought. In #75, Jamie reveals that he let the rogue believe he'd won, then took him apart from within. But the question underneath all of this is still worth talking about: how much independence can one of his duplicates have before calling him a copy stops being much of an explanation? That's where Jamie's part of this arc goes beyond the immediate mystery of which man the team should trust.