Cyclops #1: Head Trauma

Cyclops #1 is the iconic mutant frontman’s first solo series in over 10 years since his run in 2014 that ran for 12 issues. The longtime leader of the X-Men has, naturally, not had a lot of time for solo adventures, as he’s too busy leading the X-Men, X-Factor, or trying to save mutantkind.

Cyclops himself, aka Scott Summers, was once one of Marvel’s most popular and beloved characters. However, after years of big-budget films that sidelined the character, his star had fallen somewhat. But with the recent success of the X-Men ’97 animated series and the hype built around the trailers for Avengers: Doomsday, the mutant leader has once again been pushed to the front of the line.

Spoiler Warning: This review will contain a small amount of spoilers for the first few pages of Cyclops #1 by Alex Paknadel. The limited spoilers are necessary to discuss the issue for this review.

The setup for this first issue is simple. After a chaotic mission with the Alaskan X-Men, Cyclops has to leave their factory base in Merle, Alaska, to meet up with an old acquaintance from his childhood. Before we get into the story of the limited series itself, the issue already assumes that readers will have at least some familiarity with the ongoing X-Men run, which can lead to new readers feeling dejected from just the early few pages.

That said, Alex Paknadel doesn’t linger on the team dynamic of the Alaskan X-Men much and uses this opening to separate the X-Men’s leader from his team for this short run. On the other hand, once we leave the X-Men behind, we are met with a character from Cyclops’s past, Dr. Robyn Hannover, who debuted in Classic X-Men #41 in 1989. This also assumes the reader might have some preexisting knowledge of Cyclops’s past, as Scott and Robyn discuss his time at the “Essex State Home For Foundlings” in Omaha, Nebraska.

The specific characterization of Cyclops is executed with an impressive amount of subtlety in issue #1. As mentioned above, after a mission with the Alaskan X-Men, he goes to meet Dr. Hannover, a woman who cared for him at the Essex State Home orphanage and regrets never having helped him escape. The effect this conversation has on Scott isn’t explicitly shown to the reader, but it’s what’s between the lines of dialogue that shows us years’ worth of unchallenged trauma and buried memories of abuse.

All of this comes to a head in Cyclops’ fear of his own superpower, the unstable lasers he can fire from his eyes. That fear comes rushing to the surface of both the character and the storyline itself in the issue’s late-page setup incident for next month’s Cyclops #2, which I won’t spoil here.

Rogê Antônio’s artwork in this issue is excellent. The issue features pages split in half and panels stacked at awkward angles to enhance the chaos of the action and the sudden bursts of motion that happen when a fight breaks out or a flight breaks down. Antônio’s art has a cinematic quality that makes the issue move faster than most. It’s the kind of artwork a reader can’t slow down with; you just have to let it take you for a ride.

Fer Sifuentes-Sujo’s colorwork deserves its own section of this review. Throughout Marvel’s long publication history, there have been many legendary pages or panels. And a number of these pages have come from the X-Men, such as issue #8 of 2004’s Astonishing X-Men, where, after Scott removes his visor, half of the page is blank red, showcasing the massive range and overwhelming power of his optic blasts. Now if issue #1 is any indication, this is the kind of coloring that Sifuentes-Sujo has brought to Alex Paknadel’s 5-issue run. There is a page in the first half of the issue where Cyclops’ beams cut through the page at multiple angles as they ricochet from wall to wall. The texture of the beams themselves is more than just red lines painted lazily across the page; they have dimensions, as the center of each beam is brighter than the rest and the edges are more frazzled.