The Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix

True story: when I was 12 (or maybe 13), my birthday present was a tour of Marvel Comic’s office. They did tours back then—don’t ask me how I knew about this, or how my father found out how to schedule one. But it was me, three or four friends, my father, and few strangers who scheduled their tour on the same day. Two of my friends, Ryan and David, were not comicbook readers in the slightest. In retrospect, that two ‘tween boys would agree to spend a few hours walking around a comicbook studio is a testament to how deep our friendship was, although such selflessness was lost on me at the time. But my point is this: at the beginning of the tour, the tour guide asked everyone which Marvel Comics they read. And to a person, everyone, no matter what other titles they mentioned, said they read The X-Men. Even my friends, who did not read comics but obviously knew how to follow the leader, said they read The X-Men.

It feels a bit early to talk about the X-Men—I’m some 23 letters and 6,000 comics away from reaching that eponymous title. But the X-Men weren’t just a comicbook, they were a black hole. You could not read Marvel comics and escape its pull. And once they sucked you in, you were done for. Exhibit A for the prosecution, your honors: The 1994 mini-series The Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix, wherein we join the titular characters as they spend their honeymoon. Only, being “an X-Men Book” (as the cover so helpfully explains, lest an X-fan turn their nose up at a lowly non-X-Men book), this isn’t just a cute little rom-com about a one-eyed guy and his bird relaxing on the beach. No, no; as the tile says, this is an X-Men book, which means we need a story of how Scott “Cyclops” Summers and Jean “Phoenix” Grey are transported 2,000 years in the future, by Scott and Jean’s daughter from a more closer future time, so they can raise Scott’s son (from a prior marriage to a Jean Grey clone), who is destined to become the time-travelling mutant Cable, whilst simultaneously joining the revolution against the mad mutant/demi-god, Apocalypse.  Welcome to the world of the X-Men circa 1994.

Truth be told, this series wasn’t half as terrible as I was expected.  I hadn’t read this thing since I first bought it, and considering this came out around the time I was ready to give up on X-Men comics (I quit just before the whole Age of Apocalypse storyline) I’m not quite sure why I bothered buying it in the first place. Clearly the black hole was continuing to have its affect on me. Reading it now I found it . . . tolerable. Don’t get me wrong, this is not a particularly well-constructed story. Writer Scott Lobdell’s narration is downright purple, and half the story is exposition.  But I found the way Lobdell wrote Scott and Jean to be fairly endearing, that sort of “perpetual honeymoon” couple that stay clearly in love with one another even after so many years together. For all the problems this series has, the one bright spot was the way Lobdell was able to give these characters a palpable sense of affection and partnership.

Of course, that’s about all these characters have going for them. This series is ostensibly about Scott and Jean raising Nate, but the family dynamic is only given lip service. Despite several pages of Scott professing his love for his son and his determination to be a father to the boy, we only ever see Jean doing any parenting—if you can call teaching someone to telekinetically transform their organic metal into natural-looking skin “parenting”.  In fact, beyond their relationship to one another, there isn’t any real definition to their personalities. Scott gets to play the conflicted father card, but Jean is a total cipher: she loves Scott, she loves Nate, and when needed she can blow up things with her mind or shield people from those pesky mental probes that keep popping up whenever Lobdell realizes he’s got to give Jean something to do.

For comic that they headline, Scott and Jean actually secondary characters—the real action concerns keeping Nate away from Apocalypse’s cronies and the one character with a definable arc is the character, Ch’vayre, a henchman of Apocalypse that gradually comes to rebel against his master, and aids the Scott, Jean, and Nate as they defeat Apocalypse (in the most anti-climatic way possible, I might add). And when the techno-organic virus (don’t ask) threatens to kill Nate, it’s his half-“sister” Rachel that helps him at the critical moment. Really, the whole point of the series is to throw in the cutesy idea that Scott Summer’s son was actually raised by Scott Summers. There’s no reason this couldn’t have been The Adventures of Cable When He Was a Boy and have two brand new characters take the role of his parents.

I do need to spend a moment to talk about Gene Ha, the series artist.  This was one of Ha’ earliest work, and it clearly shows. Just look at his grotesque first-issue cover—Jean looks like the most ripped anorexic ever; Scott looks twice the size as Jean and the rendering and positioning of his “gun” is just perverse. Yet despite some awkward rendering of people, when allowed to render the exotic landscape of 41^st century Earth, Ha excels. Ha’s strength as an artist is in the ability to convey atmosphere, and he makes the future alien and foreboding as any extra-terrestrial planet.  Even his macabre designs for Ch’vayre and the resistance-fighter Turrin are strangely compelling.  Ha would improve greatly by the time he ended up drawing Alan Moore’s Top Ten in 1999, and reading this comic was the perfect mix of seeing what makes him such a talented artist—and also how much further he had to go before earning that reputation.

Yet for all it weaknesses, I (mostly) enjoyed this story. Lobdell’s dialogue is strong, and as I said before he wrote the banter between Scott and Jean convincingly. I enjoyed the first issue’s initial sequence as the couple, temporarily powerless, fight off Ch’vayre and his cronies. As “check your brain at the door” stories go, this one manages to make the caveat worthwhile. Yes, it all falls apart when you think about it, but as long as you’re familiar with the major players and enjoyed previous stories that were more successful at making these characters people worth caring about then the memory of those better stories will see you through this one. I realize that’s damning with faint praise, but given how unreadable the X-Men comics were becoming at the time, that this story is only pointless and not outright horrible is about as close to a success as you could find.

Next Issue: We return to Metropolis and see whether the Adventures of Superman hold up better than those issues of Action Comics did. I don’t have high hopes for the writing, but on the bright side, we’ll have plenty of Tom Grummet artwork to admire.