Well I said when I felt like writing about it and today is that day but this is going to be more this might be my third shot at this thread but were going to go over the fall and rise of Cyclops. Strap in. https://twitter.com/LoreNut_Nor/status/1300519749093404676
The X-men who's reputation has fluctuated hard with the decades coming to now being the Lead character in the main X-men book right now. You don't see many fans complaining about this despite how for years you would hear he is the most boring X-men or fans hating him.
First when the comics started he was actually seen as the most popular X-men being a kid who was meek but powerful and even with the others. This was when it was the O5 and not the later more popular incarnation fo the team.
When the famous Clarmont run hit he was still pretty popular for most fans, maybe some people liked other characters but to understand why people STARTED to not like him were going to have to talk about Madelyne Pryor
You see a bunch of creators actually like the O5 five and wanted to make a reunion book with them which led to the creation of the book X-factor. This meant that Jean Grey was brought back to life to facilitate it.
Now the problem was not Jean coming back to life, which is a story for another day, but the fact that Scott was married with a kid to Madalyn Pryor and so she kind of ended up with the shaft being kidnapped and turned evil, it was seen as Scott's fault and so fans blamed him
Now before I go on I want you all to understand I'm summarizing a lot here. Scott always had fans but his polarity did take a hit and it really depended on what x-book you were reading at the time. Because Chris was RESENTFUL of the X-factor book and that colored things as well.
in the 90's as well the X-men cartoon also colored Cyclops as well the leader boy who is not as cool as Wolverine. This was in the comics to an extent but worse in the show, it was more limited in comics and the Jean Love triangle while around was never as prominent as fans think
Like go over Wolverine's ACTUAL comics and you will find more prominent love stories for him. The Mariko Yashida arc being the biggest and most tragic.
Like I said it was there but you had to sometimes look for it and despite Chris setting it up he did not do a lot with it before he left the book. Now what started the change? Cause I'm going to go over a lot of comics now.
I would argue the seeds were planted by Morrison with the Emma Frost affair. Say what you will about Grant's run but he was the first writer who broke Cyclops from the Jean Grey focus for the first time. This also caused the X-men shipping community to look at him different.
Instead of Scott being the boring one, he was the one who caught in a relationship that asked a lot of him. Jean was becoming the Phoenix again and she was growing distant and him starting a psychic affair..made him a interesting to some creators.
Now Joss Whedon came in with his Astonishing run, and gave Cyclops a spine, and his run cemented him as a superhero leader type that could be on par with Captain America. Even Wolverine was starting to respect him and this where Wolverine starts to get some bumps himself.
See fans started to turn on Wolverine, like he was always popular but there were a lot of stories at the time that tried to make HIM THE CENTER of the x-men franchise, including a miniseries that tried to retcon that he WAS THE TRUE first X-men. Everyone ignores it.
Doesn't help for a while it seemed like he was everywhere. It started to take away from his mystique as the cool one and get him tagged as a marketing tool. So fans just didn't like this version of Wolvie who was everywhere.
It doesn't help that Wolverine's own comics are inconsistent about things, one problem with Wolverine is how kill happy he is vs other comics, some comics he's very reluctant on the other side he and the Punisher are about as blood thirsty as each other.
Schism is the first time you notice that fans just didn't side with Wolverine out right, most fans saw Cyclops as more in the right about kids being trained and him trying to protect people vs Wolverine's actual very hypocritical stance.
You see the comics at the time were trying to make a new Magneto vs Xavier conflict only this time it's Wolverine vs Cyclops with Scott as Magneto. Problem was Scott had the better and more interesting writers then Jason Aaron whose run is basically a Wolverine bj.
Okay I like aspect about Aaron's Wolverine and the X-men but you can see his worst traits start to fester in it. One problem is he tries to make Wolverine kind of right all the time and it comes off like a Wolverine fanboy finally SHOWING SCOTT SUMMERS what for...which is cringe.
This Brings up to Avenger vs X-men where under the influence of the Phoenix force he kills Proffesor Xavier but also the Phoenix allows mutants to be born again...and then we have the creation of the Cyclops defense force.
Professor X is one of those case where writers thing making him morally ambiguous is a good idea when for decade stories about him being caring were the norm. The problem come in when fans started to hate Chuck and when Cyclops killed him it wasn't really a going to far moment.
Plus when the Jean Grey Phoenix killed people she killed a billion people. To a lot of people Scott was in the right ultimately because he only killed Chuck who writers for years were making more evil anyway. It meant that he was not really bad.
You can also blame X-men creators for putting much more worse people on the team. Sabbertooth and Mystique were both prominent members for a couple years so again Scott just does not seem that bad by comparison.
Point being Cyclops now had a bunch of cool moments, great character work all over, Wolverine wasn't the sacred cow he used to be anymore, and the truth is writers just wrote him as heroic most of the time. Even Bendis just made him sympathetic and man is his run nothing burger
Cyclops in the O5 was also the most popular of the team it seems if judging by the fact that he was used more then Jean who was the one who was pegged as the popular one. Things...happened that made her not so popular.
This brings us to Inhuman's push which is the secondary objective of this thread. So We all now know this was an attempt by Marvel to make them the new X-men and various writers admitted this. It was transparently obvious.
Now the Inhuman stuff wasn't doing to hot unless you distanced yourself from it hard like in case like Ms.Marvel. The reasons boil down to a couple factors. Let's be fair to the Inhumans fans.
The Inhumans did have a fanbase they were Jack Kirby characters you know, they also had a couple critically acclaimed comics. What fans wanted was a comic that focused on the political intrigue or a Kirby throwback book but not X-men light.
But Inhumans were turned into a mutant metaphor and with that meant that Marvel had to figure out a way to make mutants less prominent so let's kill two birds with one stone and have the gas that gives inhuman's power start to affect them.
See unlike the FF the X-men couldn't just go away, and even then not all of the FF, the X-men are just too popular, and X-men thrives on drama anyway right so this could lead to some stories to coast by....oh god no.
See the big problem was the time skip where they had an idea of what they wanted.
*Cyclops did something bad, enough to be Hitler
*X-men are desperate fighting for survival
*nothing can be done about the cloud.
*we ca fill this in later.
It does''t help that it was obvious the writers didn't think things through
I hate doing this
https://www.cbr.com/x-position-charles-soule-x-men-inhumans/?view=list
but a writer compared the Cloud to a peanut allergy, you know the cloud that cause death and sterility a peanut allergy. Yup.
I also just have a theory that some writer were just deliberately sabotaging the whole but this is just my speculation I mean this piece of art is rather infamous and let's be honest, this was starting to turn the Inhuman's into a bunch of heels from the fans perspective.
The truth is the Inhumans were not set up well for this because the truth is they treat the cloud as sacred but it's not necessary for there survival, they don't need it to live and it was killing X-men.
Minor aside because I have to get this out. Please writers stop killing Madrox to show how high the stakes are because you think you found a way to kill him off. You didn't, Peter David has already built in a way to come back and any writer can pull on it.
Anyway the whole story was meant to make Emma a villain and kill off Scott but this story did not do well at making the Inhuman's good people and Emma using Scott's image save what mutants she could, this meant that the Inhuman's to the fans were now just the bad guys.
To give you an idea this also hurt the popularity of Ms.Marvel, there was poll ran on twitter at the time where she was pitted against Magik who ended up winning the poll by a landslide.
The story ended and Marvel realized that this was not working and the Inhumans just were not doing well anywhere, so the writer ended the storyline and started to fix up the X-men and one day I will cover the Inhuman's side more in full but Marvel has since stopped using them.
Cyclops was not brought back right away, but one comic tried to shit on him in the meantime, the comic that brought Jean Grey have Scott returned for a moment and it did not go over well. This was the Rosenburg era and man if you want to see someone cover go look up Perch's video
This is to say that Cyclops is a case where writing and perception didn't match up, and fans likes the Idea of Cyclops, when he was brought back John Hickman made him prominent in his run and I'm not going to cover it here. It's not over yet and we can wait.
So we end here, Cyclops is MY favorite X-men, I always found him appealing for whatever reason. I'm not a guy who hates Wolverine either, but Cyclops has a lot of great modern stories now, while there are problems with these runs you can find a lot of good Scott Material.
While the X-factor stuff starts off rough it's only five issue of rouge and a very good run of comics after, from him accepting his issues and doing his best for his team. X-factor while it has problems is a good series.
His Astonishing X-men stuff is good, and honestly is the only real Whedon stuff I stand by anymore, for one there was no actresses involve.
Gillen's run is great and man his X-men was on point.
and that's where Cyclops is there are many more good moments and one day maybe a history of various incarnations, but right now if you think he is still the stick in the mud find but there are many more good takes on him then you realize.
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