Uncanny X-Men vol 5 – “The Omega Mutant”
It’s been a long, long while since we checked in with Uncanny X-Men, but that’s because this is a long, long story. The title above may say volume 5, which collects issues #26-31, but the Matthew Molloy arc started back in issue #23, with the “Last Will and Testament of Charles Xavier” issues. And then it overran at the end (which is why issue #31 has a cover for a completely unrelated story).
We should, I suppose, note at the outset the other oddity of this storyline – that the first three issues are billed as an Original Sin tie-in, despite the minor technicality of having absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Original Sin.
Those three issues, you may recall, were billed as Original Sin tie-ins, something which manages the unusual double whammy of being both egregiously mendacious and essentially harmless. “Last Will” is not an Original Sin tie-in by any possible stretch of the imagination. But it does at least feature a hidden secret coming to light, and since most actual Original Sin tie-ins just used the crossover as a springboard to do basically the same thing, I suppose there’s no harm done.
This is not actually a first for Uncanny X-Men – back in the 80s, we had an “Acts of Vengance” tie-in that didn’t tie in to “Acts of Vengeance”. It did have the Mandarin in it, and he was in “Acts of Vengeance” at the same time, but he wasn’t actually doing anything in Uncanny that was remotely connected to the plot of “Acts of Vengeance”. But nobody really cared, because the actual hook of “Acts of Vengeance” was heroes fighting villains they didn’t normally fight, and the story at least delivered on that.
Similarly, Original Sin‘s actual hook was “hidden secrets come to light”, and if you bought most of the tie-ins, chances are you got a story about some hidden secret, with the only actual connection to Original Sin being the plot mechanics of how the secret comes to light. “Last Will” does feature a secret, and dispenses altogether with any pretence of linking it to the plot of Original Sin. It would have been the same basic story even if Bendis had shoehorned the crossover in, so what the heck. False advertising, of course, but it’s hardly Prelude to Schism.
So, the story. Reflecting the lightning pace which we’ve come to expect from a Brian Bendis comic, the X-Men finally gather for the reading of Professor X’s will, a mere 25 issues after he died. The reading of the will is one of those lovely story tropes that somehow keeps hanging in there even though it never happens in the real world, and it’s the sort of thing that you’d think a lot of the public would know from their own experience. But hey, I guess people just assume that somebody out there must be doing it. In Uncanny‘s case, it also provides an opportunity to bring both X-Men teams back together in tense circumstances (which, to be fair, is a reason for postponing it this far down the line – creatively, if not in plot terms).
It’s not exactly a legal masterclass in other ways either. Apparently the entire school was the personal property of Charles Xavier, who leaves it to Scott, whom failing Ororo. You’d have thought he’d set up a board of trustees or a company of some sort. And the story would have it that there’s nothing to stop Scott inheriting from a man he killed, should he choose to accept the legacy. Unless Scott can make out an insanity defence (which, at the very least, has not been tested in court), there very much is, because there’s a centuries-old rule against allowing murderers to inherit, for exactly the reasons you’d expect. But there’s not much point worrying about legal accuracy in these stories; these details are hardly the focus.
The big reveal is that Professor X had discovered an uber-powerful mutant called Matthew Malloy, and had been psychically keeping Malloy’s powers (and his knowledge of them) subdued for everyone’s good. This required him to check in every year or so to renew the psychic blocks, which is obviously a bit of a problem now he’s dead, so his last wish is for the X-Men to drop by and take over. Unfortunately, Malloy’s mental blocks are unravelling anyway (which would have made more sense if there had been a stronger plot reason for the delay in getting to the will, but for some reason Bendis doesn’t go down that line and instead gives us an arbitrary, unrelated flashback to Secret Invasion). The X-Men and SHIELD try to subdue the guy. Cyclops breaks ranks to try and recruit him for the mutant revolution, which leads to SHIELD killing everyone in sight. Eva then goes back in time to hit the all-important cosmic reset button by enlisting Professor X to help go back even further and avert Malloy’s conception. Then she returns to the present, tells Scott what she averted, and basically tells him that his entire revolution is a delusion and a dead end. Scott disclaims the inheritance and shuts down his own school, handing over his students to the mainstream X-Men.
There’s your eight issues, which is more than the story really needs. We’ll gloss over obvious continuity questions such as “this didn’t seem to bother Xavier when he buggered off to the Shi’ar Empire with Lilandra” and “nobody was this worried about Siena Blaze” – there’s no really good answer to these points, but they’re far enough outside the story’s frame of reference that I’m not particularly bothered by them. The use of Exodus as a throwaway ally of SHIELD is very strange indeed, and rather suggests that Bendis was hunting through the Handbook for telepaths on a deadline so tight that he didn’t have time to read the whole entry, but it’s a minor part of the story.
A bigger issue is that Malloy is basically a blank character. The story just isn’t very interested in him as a person. It’s interested in him as a plot point in terms of him being too powerful for the heroes to control. It’s interested in him as a moral quandary of sorts. And it’s interested in him vaguely as a parallel to Scott losing control when he was Phoenix. But it’s not interested in him as a person, and it goes out of its way pretty emphatically to tell us that he’s not acting rationally and there’s no real point trying to talk to him. That leaves a lengthy story with a non-character at its centre, who basically does the same “confused and surprised” schtick as the girl with the plot-advancing portal power from the last All-New X-Men arc. Malloy throws in a bit of random anger, but it’s essentially the same thing. He’s a concept without a human dimension to anchor him.
The moral argument is curious. Scott seems offended by Xavier’s treatment of Matthew, on the logic that it’s denying his identity. But Xavier at least implies that he was only able to do this in the first place by winning Matthew’s trust, and says outright that Matthew explicitly consented at a later date. And none of Scott’s allies support his view, even Magneto or Emma. Magik tags along with him but hardly seems zealous on the point of principle.
So it seems that we’re not meant to take the moral argument particularly seriously in its own right, but instead to see it as a symptom of the story’s real concern, which is to bring him that Scott has had a nervous breakdown and his “mutant revolution” is really a sign that he’s gone off the rails. I suppose Bendis could be going for the idea that Scott is looking to recapture clear, black and white moral principles, and that this inevitably leads him in the direction of zealotry. Except… Scott didn’t start in this direction after Xavier died. We had years of stories about him running Utopia as a mutant nation before that happened.
The idea that the “mutant revolution” is basically a rather sad joke is something I could go with, but it feels like Bendis has ramped up the stakes far too quickly. I think he’s going for the idea that Scott pursues this agenda and gets further and further out of his depth until Eva has to step in, recognise him as a broken mentor, and set things right to give him a second chance. But there’s been no real escalation prior to this point because Scott’s “mutant revolution” doesn’t bloody do anything, other than recruit kids and hide out in a base, which is pretty standard X-Men stuff.
The reset button doesn’t actually bother me, because it does still lead to a change in Scott’s character, and because it’s played up very much as Eva building up worse problems for down the line. So it doesn’t feel like a cop out so much as a case of swapping one problem for another. That’s particularly so because the story came out alongside the Annuals, which establish the stakes for Eva in meddling with the timeline. And this is a good story for Eva, who becomes the first of Scott’s proteges to break ranks and reject him with some real moral authority. Okay, the plotting doesn’t make a lick of sense – if Eva’s solution is to go further back in time and undo Matthew’s existence, why does she bring Xavier to the present day first? But her character moments land, and they’re the strongest thing in this arc.
There are some good bits here. There’s a lovely reunion of Kurt and Kitty (and in fact Kurt’s very well written in the few lines he gets). Bachalo gets to enjoy himself doing large scale chaos. There is a genuine sense of Malloy as the insoluble problem that Bendis wants him to be. And, as I say, the story does make the transition to a reset-button ending without it feeling like a cop-out, which is not easy. But there’s a lot of sprawl, and the story as a whole is trying to pay off a broader character arc for Scott which never really took place, because his mutant revolution never actually did anything contentious beyond the rhetoric. The basic idea of a dark X-Men team who claim to be taking the tough decisions but actually turn out to be just a bit messed up was done far, far more effectively in the last X-Force run.
Still, the end is in sight. Then the greatest hits season commences…
I gave this a shot and gave up after the 2nd or 3rd issue. It was pretty dreadful. Since Bendis can make an 8 issue story span a few hours of “actual time”, my only question is: did Wolverine make it to the end, or did he wander off to die half way through the story?
Maybe Eva messing with time caused wolverine to die… 😉
Also, the marriage to Mystique seemed like an odd thing to just drop in here and then ignore. If the intent was to tie up the plot thread from Battle of the Atom, I’m afraid it raised more questions than it answered. Also, why did their kid claim to be Xavier’s grandson when he was his son? If it was part of a ploy by that Brotherhood to be coy about how far into the future they were from, the other members of the team undermined that plan just being there.
Good point! Wolverine was there in the original few issues, but after the reset button is hit in the final issue, he’s gone and no one says anything. Maybe they’re just too jaded by the idea of X-Men dying and suddenly returning.
@Andy Walsh: There were several writers involved in plotting out the Battle of the Atom, and Bendis later stated he did not agree with some parts, and then got the chance to fix them after the other writers (Aaron?) left.
Only Bendis could write an 8 part story and render it mostly non-canon by the end. It makes it highly doubtful that he’ll do a good finale for his run and effectively wrap up all the loose ends.
“There’s your eight issues, which is more than the story really needs.”
It barely needed 5 issues, but, Bendis.
Gotta love how the resolution featuring a plot-device-as-character is resolved by another plot-device-as-character.
“The use of Exodus as a throwaway ally of SHIELD is very strange indeed, and rather suggests that Bendis was hunting through the Handbook for telepaths on a deadline so tight that he didn’t have time to read the whole entry”
I appreciate the implication that Bendis would have cared enough to stay true to Exodus’ history, if only time permitted.
I don’t even remember Exodus’ story. I know he loomed large in the 90’s as an Acolyte, then we found out he was created by Apocalypse or something, and there was the Age of Apocalypse where he dated Dazzler… and then some Chuck Austen stuff I didn’t read that I think put him in the Brotherhood of Mutants if I heard right….
What a weird dude.
My last memory of Exodus was the Quicksilver/Heroes for Hire crossover, where Ostrander was told he couldn’t create any new Acolytes and had to use a team that was half dead people, forcing the retcon of Exodus being able to raise the dead (which seems like it should be a bigger deal.)
Oh yeah. Marvel is putting a collection of the Heroes for Hire crossover out this month. I just remembered he showed up during the 12 crossover posing as Magneto trying to turn Genosha into a paradise.
What a nut.
If I remember correctly, the last time Exodus showed up prior to this was in X-Men: Legacy back when it was a quasi-Xavier solo, doing his usual schtick as a nominal leader looking for someone else’s ideology to lead him.
It’s worth noting that Bendis has reused two plot devices here — as many superhero comics writers do. We had the “mutant so dangerous the only real solution is to kill/erase him before something bad happens” bit in Bendis’s brief Ultimate X-Men run.
And Scott’s actions being the result of nervous breakdown, with the end result that his grand project turns out to be ? That’s an explicit plot point in the back half of Bendis’s career-making turn on Daredevil, where it was used to explain why Matt Murdock had rushed into a marriage and declared himself the new Kingpin in order to run Hell’s Kitchen himself.
Oh man, Paul. You’ve mellowed in your dotage. This arc was deserving of your most acerbic wit. You did pick up on the bullcrap that passed for lawyering in this. But you missed all sorts of opportunity to tear into this crap.
“Cerebro has detected that Emma Frost, Illynana Rasputin and myself, Scott Summers, have all died.”
I mean c’mon! Cyclops refers to himself in the third person! By both names! Bendis’ writing tics have gone out of control.
More substantively: The problem (apart from stupid dialogue) is the human motivations. Cyclops resignation rings really, really hollow. People have justified it as, “well he was killed because of his approach to Malloy and that upset him,” or “well, he saw how badly he screwed up Eva Bell.” But really, he didn’t see any of that. He heard Bell tell him a very, very thin outline of events that never actually happened. How is that brief, shallow dialogue going to have the emotional impact to change his entire course of action? That’s utterly ridiculous.
Eva’s little speech was hardly an “a ha!” moment. It was tame, and the impact would barely register on a real human. Yes, it indicates she’s morally compromised, and she blames Cyke. But a real person’s emotional reaction is far more likely to be denial than acceptance and regret. First, she’s presented no evidence whatsoever that she did what she said; she gave no convincing details. Cyclops has seen enough history changing moments that he knows sometimes it’s a “lesser of two evils.” He’s hardly going to jump to the conclusion that he did.
Moreover, Cyclops and his revolution have barely influenced Eva. He recruited her as a teen, she ran around with him for two adventures which were not really any different from those adventures every new X-Man goes on, and then she spent years growing up outside the timeline in the company of other people. She’s in her ’20’s now, and has spent, what, three weeks in Cyke’s school? Even if Cyke can see her as morally compromised due to that brief dialogue, how is he going to take that on himself?
I also think Storm’s reaction to Malloy was out of character. She’s not the kind to just rush headlong into suicide. Ororo is a cautious, pragmatic negotiator. She would take the “talk him down” approach, not the “guns ablazing” approach. Bendis could easily have put a hothead at the front of the charge (traditionally Wolverine, but there are others available), and had Storm try but fail to hold them back, and he would have ended in the same place. Instead, he just used the characters haphazardly without regard for their established personalities. Par for the course.
Exodus appeared in X-Men Legacy, I think when Yost was writing it, when he showed up at the Jean Grey school after Schism because… who can remember?
I just got to thinking – which rarely ends well, but we’ll see where this goes – the remark about Xavier not be all that bothered when he buggered off to space. With the longer the comics go on, is it safe to say that there is a degree of time compression involved, and while at the time he was probably gone for some while, looking back it was probably a couple of months at best?
OMatt–which trip to space? THe first or the second?
The first trip only lasted the duration of the X-Men’s “World Tour,” which couldn’t have been more than a few weeks; two months tops.
The second trip looks more like a couple of years. X-Men move to San Fran, fight the Beyonder, Mutant Massacre, Fall of the Mutants, Outback, Inferno, no-team, X-Tinction Agenda. Hard to see all that in less than a year. Indeed, I think there were at least two Christmas issues during that run, maybe three.
But Xmas is a quarterly event in the MU, just as US Presidential elections are annual 😉
I’m happy to have the contrary opinion on this one and say that I absolutely loved this arc (while still agreeing with most of the criticism above). I thought all of the interactions during the reading of the will between the estranged X-Men was very well done, especially Kurt and Kitty’s reunion and the revelation of Professor X’s marriage to Mystique. Bendis really did manage to build the tension further in each issue to the point where the deus ex machine did not seem like a cop-out. Eva has really developed into a fantastic character, and her rejection of Scott’s ideals was a great scene that felt very impactful for both characters.
Sometimes I think I’ve gotten very mellow at my ripe old age of 33 and that I’ve lost my desire to be too critical of my entertainment. All I’m really looking for is something to wrap me up and make me feel something. So this really was my favorite Bendis arc so far! I guess I’ve grown easy to please.
Although that last All-New X-Men arc was total crap, so maybe I’m still the same after all.
Am I a simpleton for enjoying this story? I know it was rubbish, but I did enjoy it. Maybe my expectations are just at an all time low.
Also, did anyone else think that this week’s All-New X-Men was delightful crap?
I forgot all about Original Sin. Did any of the character’s deep, dark secrets end up interesting? Did they ever explain why Thor lost his hammer?
“Then the greatest hits season commences…”
Has there been some announcement about who’s following Bendis or is this just referring to Secret War?
I’m just curious, because I haven’t bought and X-Men comic since the “No More Humans” OGN and, depending on who the creators are, I’d like to know if that’s going to continue on into the future…
I with Uncanny Michael… I enjoy the shit out of Brian Michael Bendis comics. I know it’s not Starman or Watchmen or Sandman or take your pick, but I’ve been having a blast since he took over Avengers all those years ago. Most of the criticisms he gets here are valid and I consider them (like what he did with Noh-Varr…. what was that about?), but the comments here do sometimes make the place look like the not-so-crazy-about-Bendis support group. On the scale of things I think he’s brought a lot to the Marvel Universe.
I guess what I’m saying is…. I know Bendis team books are just candy. But I like candy sometimes.
“Only Bendis could write an 8 part story and render it mostly non-canon by the end. It makes it highly doubtful that he’ll do a good finale for his run and effectively wrap up all the loose ends.”
BAHAHAHAHA!! AHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! YES. THAT makes it “highly doubtful” he’ll wrap up a run for once in his life. THAT was the tipping point. Not his entire body of work failing to wrap up any run ever. HAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHHAHAAA!! I love it!
While you’re right, Scott’s Revolution Uncanny team didn’t really do anything contentious, Bendis’ portrayal of SHIELD as their de facto ‘true enemies’ arranges them as good guys, right? Is this story about the futility of Scott’s idea, the fact that Scott’s idea has no momentum, or what? If Bendis writes SHIELD like the fascists that they are, and they’re propped up as Scott’s enemies, then Scott’s not entirely 100% wrong, right?
This sounds like it’s eminently discouraging??
At this point Scott’s gone beyond just being a grim anti-hero and into outright sociopathy. based on a list of common sociopath traits, Scott has; Glib and Superficial Charm (as a political figure who’s the face of a revolution and puts on the charm to get mutants to join his cause), Grandiose Self-Worth (being the face of a revolution and buying into his own importance, speaking in terms of messiahs and promised lands during AvX), Conning and Manipulativeness (founding a black ops hit squad behind the rest of the X-Men’s backs, threatening the mayor of San Fransisco with secret assassination), Shallow Affect, Lack of Remorse (or at least a monomaniacal commitment to “hard decisions” as his excuse for everything he does), Lack of Empathy (seems fine with treating all his troops as expendable, and actively training teenagers as killers; has given up on any notion that humans and mutants can get along, and now is using a show of force to make mutants more feared than hated and create the flimsy peace of deterrence), Parasitic Lifestyle (leads a mutant army with a lot of focus on dirty work, has troops make horrible sacrifices without getting them adequate psychological support afterwards) lack of realistic, long-term goals (didn’t have any idea of how to lead the mutant race beyond his faith in Hope, currently doesn’t seem to have an endgame to his Mutant revolution), Irresponisibility (tried to control the Phoenix, first by proxy through Hope and then by himself with forced to, currently trying to control the young reality-warper Matthew Malloy through honeyed words), Failure to Accept Responsibility or Own Actions (Xavier, Xavier, Xavier!)
Well put, Neil! I think the way Cyclops has been portrayed really has backed him into a corner, but with Secret Wars approaching, who knows? Besides, Iron Man was quickly rehabilitated after Civil War so it has precedent.
I’ve got a question, though. I’m not reading current comics but I have always had a soft spot for Havok. I read Uncanny Avengers with a bit of hope – Alex taking the lead in a real team? Yes! But … well, my question is: What is his current situation?
I read he was caught in the inversion thing, but then didn’t revert to his heroic form and became something of a 2-bit villain. I hope it hasn’t ruined him. Why can’t Peter David adopt him? Why? Why, I ask?
Seriously, if anyone can fill me in on what’s happening to Alex Summers, that’d be great. I’m thinking of subscribing to the Marvel Unlimited so I can catch up on my reading. Thoughts on that?
The X-books have rehabilitated Magneto at times. I think they can bring Cyclops back after a stretch.
@Ben – Alex did not get reverted at the end of Axis, and was last seen heading to Scott’s Weapon X base. Alex was the leader of the Uncanny Avengers (volume 1); he was married to the Wasp. They had a child too.
@Max – I have no doubt that Scott will be rehabilitated. This entire volume of Uncanny X-Men has been about Scott examining himself as anti-hero post AVX. I have a feeling Bendis will use Alex to help bring about Scott’s rehabilitation since Alex is now ‘evil’.
Okay, so I didn’t realise he’d married the Wasp and had a child. That’s a big change. Wonder what Lorna thinks.
Hopefully both Summers lads will be brought back to the heroic side of things after Secret Wars.
(Thanks Mo)
Besides, Iron Man was quickly rehabilitated after Civil War so it has precedent.
I don’t know if I’d agree, really; writers spent a few years kicking Iron Man around after that in his own and other titles. Thor’s relaunch had an early issue where he beats up Iron Man over the whole “murdering clone” thing. He was also treated as the heavy over in New Avenegrs, where he mostly showed up to obstruct the heroes’ efforts to bring down the Hood.
Then Secret Invasion and Dark Reign had Tony lose his position, end up blamed for the Skrull invasion, and erase his own mind in order to literally “reboot” himself and his memories to a point before Civil War. And then he spent the rest of his title subtly mind-controlled by the Mandarin, losing his sobriety again, and basically having to leave Earth for awhile at the end.
For that matter, Axis leaves him inverted to the point that he’s basically the villain of his own series right now. Like Reed Richards and Proifessor X (and the Guardians over in DC’s Green Lantern books), the trend in recent years has been to depict Tony as far too self-serving and manipulative to be much of a hero. It’s a rather interesting trend, all told.
I should clarify that I mean Thor’s relaunch under JMS after his own title had gone away for several years.
I like a stable status qwo as much as the next guy in my comics but the truth is that is Scott Summers turns back into a goody goody guy again would feel like a huge cop out at this point.
Scott was raised from childhood to be a soldier for xavier and was taught to lead and be an all around nice guy and a boy scout. He got with good girl Jean and they pretty much did their jobs like loyal soldiers. Good guy marries good girl, end of story, they lived happily ever after right?
But then Cyclops gets possessed by Apocalypse. He got introduced to a different way of thinking and even though poky’s influence was (mostly?) purged from his system, he starts to see there is more than one dimension. He returns and starts falling for bad girl Emma. Jean dies and part of him knows that had he not fallen in love with Emma, Jean could still be alive.
Then House of M and “no more mutants” happened. So he became mutandkind’s de facto leader, that’s what he was trained to do. From leader of the X-Men, to leader of all remaining mutants. He had to get tougher, become more calculating and less emotional in order not to be overwhelmed with the responsibility. He tried to revert to his old one dimentional self, a good soldier and a leader but he couldn’t do it. He ended up getting in a war with everyone, the Avengers, the world, the X-men and then got possessed again by the Phoenix. Killed his mentor, the man who took away his childhood and turned him into a soldier, his (abusive) father figure and failed to really feel remorse about it, it was more of a liberating feeling. He did feel guilty for not feeling guilty about killing Xavier so he explained it away by blaming the Phoenix Force.
Can a character like that be rehabilitated? Yes he can but would that be in any way viable in the long run? No. A reversion to a nice guy Scott would be like wasting all his character arc. A full blown, villainous, anti-human Scott would be far more interesting.
One of the failings of current X-books is the lack of any interesting villains. Most of them got defeated or rehabilitated or died or just became too boring to care. Especially Magneto, who can be considered the X-Men’s arch-villain cannot really be considered a reliable villain any more, nor can he work for much longer. If Magneto is to stay, they will have to retcon his past as a nazi victim or explain his unnatural longevity somehow. But a Magneto who did not experience the horrors of the concentration camps defeats the purpose of his existence.
But a human hating Cyclops makes much more sense as a villain we are emotionally attached to and care about. He can become an even better antagonist than Magneto ever was in the right hands. Right now that’s what I hope for.
I am honestly scared about the effect Secret Wars will have on everything I said here. What will be retconed and changed, I have no idea. All I know is that i don’t want to see Scott turning goodie any time soon or if he does it will only be short term and only with ulterior motives
@Leo – I agree. Part of the problem with Bendis’ Uncanny run is the lack of decent villains. He is very focused on the team members fighting amongst themselves. Villainy in Uncanny has been reduced to drivebys at best (and ANX to a degree too).
With regard to Secret Wars, I can see Marvel using it to end/usher out this version of the X-Men. Especially if the Fox properties end up on their own world. The starting point for this potential new world could be any number of X-Men eras in which Cyclops did not become an anti-hero/villain. Depending on what happens during and post Secret Wars I can see a lot of potential storylines.
As leader of Utopia, name one thing Scott did that is not normal for a political leader in the real world to do? (I’m talking about Black ops, spying, machiavellian reasoning etc. rather than firing laser bolts from his eyeballs or travelling via jetpack).
Nobody thinks that Barrack Obama is on his way to joining the Black Panters and becoming an advocate of the Black Supremacy movement just because he has ordered assasinations, bombed civilians, kept Camp X-Ray open etc. Expecting Scott to turn into a villain makes about as much sense.
People have been forgiving far worse from Wolverine, Storm and Cable for decades now.
Why single out Scott?
Wolverine and Cable are those sorts of characters. Storm started out as naive and had a whole character arc about her hardening up to take on the burden of leadership. Scott’s is a fall from grace story, and the higher you are, the farther you fall.
Nobody thinks that Barrack Obama is on his way to joining the Black Panters and becoming an advocate of the Black Supremacy movement just because he has ordered assasinations, bombed civilians, kept Camp X-Ray open etc.
Lots of people think exactly these things. Go to a Tea Party rally sometime.
Keep Cyclops as a villain. It makes sense as the next step for the character and he’s a great replacement for Magneto, who is well past his expiration date.
If Cyclops is a villain then so is Wolverine, Xavier, Storm, Black Panther, Namor, Iron Man, Thor, Jean Grey, Cable, Nick Fury, Batman etc.
I have no idea where people get this idea from but in logical terms, it is somewhat lacking.
Did he fall from grace? You could argue that. But a villain? Pull the belled one.
See, that’s what makes for interesting reading. He’s not a villain. Ideally, both the Cyclops team and the other team *should* have people supporting their view points. This is what civil war was supposed to do but over played its hand but making the pro-reg team actual villains. 2 view points can exist without one having to be a “bad guy”. One side thinks Scott is walking the Magneto path. The other side thinks Scott has a point. Fandom is allowed to fall on either side of this, too. I don’t want to see Scott doing silver age villain crap. The current balance is pretty good, and should be allowed to continue without Scott holding nations to ransom with nuclear weapons or something.
While I agree, and don’t want to see him going more villainous, having Scott do *something* beyond just saying he’s leading a revolution bwould be a nice change of pace too.
Although I don’t see why people were so upset with him in this arc, because he really didn’t do much more than say “hey, about we don’t murder this guy because we’re afraid of him,” which on the surface seems like a sentiment most mutants should be able to get behind.
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Comparing Cyclops’current characterisation to Wolverine and Cable is apt. But it’s worth noting characters like Wolverine, Cable, Deadpool, etc started in that place. Cyclops’ journey has developed to this point (unless you ascribe him to be the equivalent of a silver age Magneto villain).
Could you imagine if Cyke really *was* one of those original Brotherhood types, though? Like Unus or (best of all) The Blob?
Man, imagine a done-in-one 1960’s style issue where Cyke, I dunno, loses his mince and starts giving national monuments the hard stare. In fly the 4 X-Men – led by The Angel – and they have to stop him.
What’s the point of Marvel publishing all this fan-fiction if I can’t get THE CALAMITOUS CYCLOPS? 🙁
//\Oo/\\
As Andy commented on – what the hell was the Mystique revelation about? It seems like it should tie in with the Mystique-as-Moira birth flashback in All-New, but doesn’t go anywhere, and…has been retconned at the end? (Seeing as when She-Hulk reads the time-altered will, all anyone comments on is ‘Scott Summers’ getting the school.)
Is this just more of Bendis having to do rewrites on the fly?
Does anyone have any idea when/how Xavier Jr. and Raze were conceived?
Again we get a time-travel plot, and one where it’s decided that somehow preventing a character’s birth, therefore altering the timeline AGAIN, is preferable to the alternative, because killing would be baaad. Now, there’s a debate to be had there, but the characters don’t have it. Well, we do get Xavier telling Eva she’s either the best or worst mutant, but it’s not enough, imo.
I miss when these comics were fun and interesting for me