Cyclops saves the kids from Troll Hordes in Champions No. 5
By Alex Widen
Image by Marvel Comics
He’s Got the Touch! He’s Got the Power!
Pinpoint, the team’s teleporter, is exhausting himself zapping Champions back and forth across the globe. He wilds up ferrying Power Man from Florida to New York to drop off some medical supplies to survivors in Queens. Those survivors find themselves under the protection of the X-Men, led by a newly adult Cyclops. X-Men members Havok and Multiple Man haven’t even heard of the Champions, but Cyclops sure has. Seeing footage of Ms. Marvel being overwhelmed in Australia — ironically, an area the X-Men used to be based in — Cyclops leads the cavalry!
With a few bold lines and steady optic blasts, Cyclops quickly turns the tide and rallies the Champions together to drive off the Trolls. Yet this is only a short term skirmish, as the Trolls are sure to return with superior numbers. Having never met the “adult” Cyclops, Ms. Marvel only has rumors of his aggressive reputation to go with. Thanks to years of bad writing stemming from Schism to Death Of X, Cyclops was unfairly branded a terrorist and morally ambiguous.
Image by Marvel Comics
Back when the teen Cyclops joined the team in 2016’s second issue, this column speculated that Marvel was doing to him exactly what it did to Iron Man from 1995’s The Crossing to 1997’s Heroes Reborn: The Return. In a nutshell, Tony Stark had been “revealed” as a villain, replaced by a teen version of himself from the past, killed off, replaced by the teen, and ultimately “merged” with the teen incarnation in a return to the status quo. This is precisely what has happened to Cyclops, with the key difference being Marvel was willing to drag it out five years instead of two.
Image by Marvel Comics