Uncanny X-Men Annual #1 (2019) Preview

When first announced I had no plans to even get this issue. It's not that I don't like Cyclops. It's that I liked Cyclops as he was the first thirty-five years of his existence. The 'boyscout' as some unfairly call him. But he was always more complicated than that.

Then Grant Morrison gave him a 'psychic affair' with Emma Frost, and began to turn both characters from people I liked into people I increasingly did not. By the time of the 'Right-clops' era I'd had my fill of the character. He'd gone, if not from hero to outright villain, then certainly from protagonist to antagonist. Countless characters were sidelined, limbo-ed, killed, or written terribly to facilitate it. If you were a fan of those characters, it became easy to hate Cyclops.

He alienated his friends and ignored their counsel. He surrounded himself with former villains who echoed his reasoning. Magneto kneeled to him and with it passed the torch of antagonist/villain. He made demands of a mayor and said if they didn't comply, he would killer her and destroy their city. He called Utopia "Iraq with actual WMDs" to threaten the world. He vicariously enjoyed the sense memory of a serial killer engaging in cannibalism. He killed his own mentor and father-figure, Charles Xavier.

How do you walk that back? I didn't see how anyone could even make me like Cyclops again. Well... this issue did just that. It does it not by erasing his recent past but by reminding both the readers and Cyclops himself of the good guy he use to be, and finding his way back to that.

That's not to say people didn't like him as Rightclops. Rightclops has fans who hated the 'boyscout' with a passion. Who will justify anything and everything he did. There is a large volume of them right now posting about this like mad on CBR, bemoaning the loss of their Rightclops. One actually had the near-insight to wonder how if Cyclops as 'Rightclops' was a monster, what did it say about him that he loved the monster?

A better question would be: What does it say about a forum where it often seems the majority of X-Men fans view, in the decades-long story of the X-Men, that Magneto was the hero and Xavier the villain? That identify with mutants so strongly they call humans characters 'flatscans', a pejorative? That watch the Gifted and root for the villainous Inner Circle as the 'true heroes' of the show? Who prefer Octavius to Peter Parker as the 'Superior' Spider-Man, who never liked Steve Rogers until he became 'Hydra-Cap'? Who never liked Scott Summers until he became the militant 'Rightclops'?

I don't know what the answer is, but I'm sure it's nothing good.

The Scott Summers I knew for decades would have kicked 'Rightclops's' ass. This issue is probably as close to that as I'll get, but I'll take it.