I’m going to take a break today from the usual round of “Stupid People Tricks” and “Mr. Sock Puppet Goes To Washington” (redundant, yes, but so it goes…) and instead address one of the most important subjects in media today: The constant references to Cyclops of the X-Men as a self-absorbed whiner.
(Non-comics-geeks and anyone who wants to pretend that they have a life may be excused, now.)
It has become fashionable among writers (both pros writing in Marvel’s X-Men titles, as well as fanboy bloggers) to regularly harp on Cyclops’ alleged self-pitying ways. Generally this seems to be a variant on Gilbert Gottfried’s comments on his role as “Iago” the parrot in Disney’s “Aladdin”. He pointed out that the plan seemed to be “whenever the movie slows down - hit the parrot!” In this case, whenever the story hits a lull, have Wolverine make a snarky comment about Cyclops’ whining. This seems to have been picked up by the fan writers as a sort of “everybody does it” kneejerk.
When a pro writer does it, s/he is (we will presume) having a character expressing the character’s opinion, and not necessarily the writer’s. When the fans do it, in my opinion, they do it because “Wolverine does it all the time and Wolverine is kewl…!”In short, they are actually taking a fictional character’s opinion as fact.
(Which is sadder: that they are doing this or that I’m using time and bandwidth to point this out?)
(Well; it’s not like
I ever claimed to have a life…!)
So, in defense of the much-maligned Mr. Summers, let’s look at the facts. (“Facts”, here, being defined as more-or-less canonical events in the stories of the X-Men characters, as well as those things that occur in the world that exists outside of the pages of four-color publications.)
Defense Exhibit A: Meta-InformationOutside of, say, Deadpool (who is certifiably crazy*), name a single other costumed Marvel protagonist who
ISN’T a whiner! Is there a
SINGLE BLEEDIN’ ONE who doesn’t go on and on about his or her lost love/partner/parent/sibling/chance for a normal life/hamster/etc. for ten pages out of a twenty-two page story? Characters whining about how much having god-like powers have screwed up their lives are the very things that have
MADE Marvel’s fortunes since 1961! That being the case, Cyclops’ mooning over Jean Grey is pretty much par for the course! (And, in my opinion; nowhere
NEAR as annoying in that respect as the Lee/Ditko Spider-Man!)
* - For purposes of this analysis, we will accept without comment the idea that someone who chooses to go outdoors in Technicolor(tm) Spandex(tm) expecting to be taken seriously as a threat/authority figure could actually be sane in the first place. They are. Of course they are. It says so, right here on the package.
Defense Exhibit B: “Scott Summers; This Is Your Life!”Having established how Marvel Comics has made its collective living off of selling damaged goods as role-models for over 40 years, let’s look at the life-story of Scott Summers.
Initially it was established that Scott was brought up in (at least one) orphanage, his power manifested in his mid-to-late teens, and he was the first mutant that Charles Xavier recruited for his school/team of heroes. Adding in later accretions, the formative events in Scott’s life can be listed as follows (Note: ages are approximations, but are, I think, defensible):
Age 12: Scott and his younger brother Alex (8, 9, 10?) are strapped into a single parachute and pushed out of their parents’ airplane shortly before it is blown up by aliens. The parents are killed. (Actually, they turn out to have survived, but we are looking at this from Scott’s experiences as they happened. As far as formative events go, his parents were killed in an airplane explosion when he was a pre-teen.)
His mother’s last words to him are “Take care of your little brother.” The brothers are separated in the orphanage system. Through no fault of his own, Scott has failed in fulfilling his mother’s dying request. Is this an unreasonable and unfulfillable responsibility to dump onto a 12-year-old…? Of course it is, but that fact won’t change how he feels; he’s failed his dying mother.
Oh... And how many times does he try to explain that his parents were killed by space aliens before he gets a rep around the orphanage?
Age 15: His developing mutant ability manifests first in the form of migraines that can only be eased by shading his eyes with special ruby-quartz lenses.
Great! From being the geeky kid who gets headaches all the time, he becomes the one who always has to wear the dorky glasses! Right at puberty, when the need for social acceptance is arguably at its highest! And did the orphanage kids have to go to the local public schools? Oh, yeah; great!
"The dork from the orphanage…? Y’know; the tall, skinny one with the doofy-looking glasses…? "And just exactly how much do sunglasses made of optical-quality ruby quartz
COST, anyway? This is
NOT the sort of expense that orphanage administrators like to see their charges racking up. (And thinking about the “tall-skinny-orphanage-dork-with-the-doofy-glasses-at-the-public-school” thing; you just
KNOW that they had to buy replacement pairs! Possibly even a
LOT of replacement pairs! (Maybe this is where Scott learned to fight and become the tactician that he did.)
Age 17: His optic blast finally manifests itself. Of course (being that he’s a Marvel character), it manifests at just about the worst possible time, causing a crowd of people to believe that he was attacking them. Need I add that it was only the resulting angry mob’s full complement of teeth and the lack of torches and farm implements that kept this from being a perfect remake of the classic “Frankenstein” scene? He goes on the run and, for a time, becomes a criminal’s unwilling henchman.
Age 18: Found and recruited by Charles Xavier, Scott meets and falls in love with Jean Grey. His potential rivals for her affections: a genius athlete and a gorgeous-looking millionaire (with wings)! Perhaps surprisingly (or perhaps not), for a telepath Jean turns out to be as inarticulate as Scott is and it takes them a number of years before they both figure out that they each want to jump the others’ bones.
Age 25: The bone-jumping begins.
A new group of X-Men is recruited, which includes an antisocial, psychotic berserker named Wolverine who: (A) has the hots for Jean, (B) resents anyone in authority (like, say, the leader of the team), and therefore (C) runs him down publicly at every opportunity.
Age 26: Jean dies. (Another aircraft disaster… So much for that
“statistically, it’s the safest form of travel” crap!) Scott grieves.
Two minutes later, she is resurrected as a grossly-powerful cosmic entity.
Jean, the grossly-powerful telepathic cosmic entity, has her mind taken over by a third-rate illusionist, turns on Scott and becomes E-e-e-e-vil.
She gets better.
She gets killed again.
Scott meets a clone of Jean (created by an evil scientist), falls in love with her; they marry and have a son.
Age 27: Jean comes back again.
The Jean-clone turns E-e-e-e-vil and tries to kill Jean, Scott and their son.
The Jean-clone dies in battle with Jean and Scott.
Jean and Scott raise Scott’s son, until they have to abandon him by sending him into the future in order to save his life. (Scott probably should not have taken his parents quite so literally as role-models!)
Age 29: Jean dies again.
Age 30: She comes back again.
She dies again.
.
.
.
To heck with whining; frankly, after a life like this, I’m amazed that Scott doesn’t just slit his wrists and be done with it!
I think that the guy has
EARNED the right to feel just a little bit put-upon!
Defense Exhibit C: The AccuserAll of this “Cry-Baby Summers” crap started with Wolverine. Perhaps we should look at his background a little more closely.
Wolverine is apparently born in the late 1800s in the Canadian plains. He is a frail, sickly boy, so his father has a girl brought to take care of him and teach him. The attendant, Rose, is a few years older than he, and is a striking redhead. (She looks, in fact, remarkably like the as-yet-unborn Jean Grey will look!) James’s (Wolverine’s) powers first become evident after an altercation between his father and the estate’s handyman, Thomas Logan, who kills the future-Wolverine’s father and is in turn killed by Wolverine as his natural claws extend for the first time. Forced to leave home, with Rose accompanying him, he ends up in a mining camp in the Northwest Territories.
A few years along, an older man wants to marry The-Boy-Now-Known-As-Logan’s “big sister”, Rose. As he’s helping the two get ready to leave, Logan is attacked by the son of his late-father’s late-handyman and, during the fight, Rose is killed. Logan runs off into the woods and more or less disappears for a number of years. His now-active accelerated healing factor allows him to survive almost any wound and illness and seems to retard his aging. Eventually, he is asked by Xavier to join the new set of X-Men, where he takes an instant dislike to Scott and an instant LIKE to Jean.
During this period, we learn that Wolverine appears to have few reliable memories of his life before the last few years and none at all of his first twenty or thirty. He apparently spent time as a Samurai in Japan, fought at Monte Cassino during World War II, got an unbreakable Adamantium sheathing grafted onto his skeleton, led a Canadian super-group called Alpha Flight, was… Wait a minute… “…got an unbreakable Adamantium sheathing grafted onto his skeleton?!!?”
Yeah.
Okay… so now he’s virtually unkillable AND unbreakable, with animal-like senses and a berserker instinct.
True, he has a hefty case of amnesia, and I’m willing to assume that that would not be a fun thing. But here’s the thing:
In the early days of the new X-Men, he
FRICKIN’ WHINES ABOUT IT INCESSANTLY!!! HE NEVER BLOODY SHUTS UP!!!So this is the guy that keeps ragging on Scott Summers about being a whiner: He whinges about his amnesia, he moans about the fact that he’s cursed with abilities which make him as close to immortal as makes no never-mind, he throws deadly tantrums,- ripping things apart with his now-unbreakable claws - whenever he’s frustrated, he has internalized and goes by the name of the man who killed his father, and he’s pissed that he can’t get anywhere with the woman who resembles his surrogate mother, who died 130 years ago! (I wonder if Logan can spell “Oedipal”?)
Frankly, I’d say that Logan shows definite signs of what psychologists refer to as “projection”, where we accuse another person of traits that we don’t want to admit that we see in ourselves.
Either that, or he is just bugged by the fact that Scott is a whole foot taller than he is!
And THIS is the kewl, tough stud that the fanboys are copying when they repeat the “whiner” tag about Cyclops…
I think that it’s time that that little canard was put to rest.
