Classic X-Men #34: "Power Games"

Classic X-Men #34's backup is a short interlude with Emma Frost and a n00b servant at the Hellfire Club, where Emma explains why she is not a sexist character. She may as well be talking directly at the reader.

I tend to agree with the case for the defence. Frost is a fantastic, complex, well-drawn character. How she chooses to dress and behave, and the contradiction between the tools she has learned to use and her sincere desire to teach is a vital part of that. That's the point of her, after all.

Which is not to say that what Frost says here isn't bullshit. Again, that's fine: it's exactly the sort of nonsense a character like that would say.

"There's no such thing as sexism, unless you give them power."

Look, it works for you, Miss Frost, that's fine. But you are a upper-class white woman with mind control powers. Check. Your. Privilege. If you can use sexuality as a weapon, to get ahead in a sexist world, fine. But it has its limits, as Rocket finds out in Sucker Punch (another thing that people who weren't paying attention wrongly think is sexist). I think that's a good examination of the sort of attitude spouted here by Frost. Valtyr writes of it very well:

Babydoll is dancing to distract men, and the other women are stealing items from men undercover of it, and this is terribly fucking dangerous. Sexuality is the only weapon that has been left to them, and it's a dangerous weapon to use because the second the men realise it's being used, it's over. When the music fails and the dance stops, the man notices what's happening; it's over. The music starts again, but it's too late. A woman dies. Again, later, a man is surrounded by all these beautiful women in scanty clothes; their sexuality can't save them, it's a weapon they're allowed. Women die. Babydoll can dance; Blue's got a gun.

The unnamed new hire realises this too. She knows the only way for someone like her to survive the Hellfire Club is to quit. So she will. While Emma continues living in the spaces that men allow her, even though she could do so much more.

Classic X-Men #26: The Tony Slattery of Mutants

Who is Tony Slattery, you might be asking? And what does this have to do with Classic X-Men #26.

I grew up, as I think I've mentioned before, in a telly-obsessed middle-class family in the English Midlands in the 1980s and 1990s. We used to watch a lot of panel shows. The British culture of panel shows is a thing of particular uniqueness. Sure, other countries might have a panel show or two or three, but they likely don't have a panel shows circuit. When I was was growing up we would watch A Question of Sport, Have I Got News For You, Never Mind the Buzzcocks, They Think It's All Over, Whose Line Is It Anyway, Vic and Bob's Shooting Stars, and (if school was out) Call My Bluff. Different in content and tone, but likely to have much of the same sort of guests. HIGFNY is still part of my adulthood (I watch irregularly, if I remember, and go to a recording every couple of years - last time I hit the jackpot by getting the one with Nigel Farage and Harry Shearer), supplemented by a bit of Mock the Week; and a smidgeon of QI, although I tend to find that too smug.

Now, you may be very well be wondering what this has to do with X-Men. And you would be right. So perhaps I had better cut to the explanation: Tony Slattery was an actor and comedian, and a regular on many of these so-called "panel shows". He was on quite a lot of them. And I mean that in the English sense of "quite", which is to say a metric fucktonne. Sometimes you would be watching Tony Slattery on a panel show and change channels and then there he was on another panel show.

In other words, Tony Slattery is a lot like Wolverine.

In this backup story from Classic X-Men #26, it is revealed that Wolverine is more ubiquitous than previously implied, and he used to know Sean Cassidy back 20 years ago, and this just hadn't been mentioned before. This is part of a new wave of plot development, in which Wolverine will be given a secret history with every named Marvel character, including those he probably shouldn't, like prominent Avengers such as Captain America.

Mr. Slattery vanished from our screens in 1996, and people, who had previously made jokes about his omnipresence, were worried. It was eventually revealed he had a breakdown. He got better.

Hope the same thing doesn't happen to Wolverine. He's on every team going now, after all, and the load is surely going to get to him. Although this is often attributed to cynical sales-grabbing, I think he works well as a character in environments where he's out of his depth a bit. Since he is unbeatable in combat, he therefore needs to be presented ethical or social problems he can't solve simply with his claws. And some of the criticism I've seen of this is just straight facile nonsense, as if it a character saying one thing ("I'm a loner") but doing another (join all the teams) was incomprehensible, rather than, you know, a basic literary technique.

Meanwhile, Britain's addiction to panel shows continues unabated. Red Nose Day 2011 saw a 24-hour panel marathon in which David Walliams took part in all 19 shows. It can only get worse.

Classic X-Men #19: Magnetokinesisgenesis

Classic X-Men has already fleshed out the details of Magneto's origin story regarding Magda and Anya. But clearly, he didn't suit up in the red and purple immediately after that. There was an interlude, during which we saw him battle Nazis with Xavier. Something happened to finally flip him. What was it?

The backup in Classic X-Men #19 gives us our answer. The problem is: it's not very good. He was hunting Nazis on behalf of Mossad, only he hunts the wrong Nazis and the CIA get mad at him. They murder his loverdoctor Isabelle (note: the difference between Charles and Erik is that Xavier has sex with his patients but Magneto seduces his doctor), right in front of him, and then are surprised that he he's a little bit unhappy with that. He proclaims himself homo superior etc.

As I say, this doesn't work. It's a third personal tragedy for Magneto, but it pales in comparison to the other ones. Either he needs to go down that path through simple logic, or something with emotional resonance needs to happen to him. And fridging someone we've never met before just is not enough, not given his previous history. X-Men: First Class got this dead on.

Classic X-Men #16: How I Met Your Mother

Classic X-Men #16 reprints X-Men #109 (which shows us Sean and Moira getting it on), backed up with a new tale of how Sean met Terry's mother. I'm afraid we'll have to wince through Claremont's Ireland. First up, he describes the Partition:

Sixty-odd years ago, the island was split by treaty into the Irish Republic and Ulster -- the five counties of the north, which remained part of the United Kingdom (of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.)

Either someone involved in the making of this comic has made a very basic mistake, or County Fermanagh is part of the Republic in the Marvel universe! Let's go with that latter one. So, a young Sean Cassidy is being harrassed by the Royal Ulster Constabulary's finest. He is returning home to Mayo after having gone to a concert in Derry. Presumably a county and western concert, given his established taste in music. This is described as a "long way off his patch". He says he missed the last train. Given the journey he's making, possibly by several decades.

Anyway, while the RUC are harrassing our Sean, a passing motorcyclist rescues him. The situation quickly degenerates, and the RUC follow Sean in hot pursuit over the border. They lose the motorcycle, fall, and Sean demonstrates his mutant abilities by flying them back to the castle.

There he is surprised to discover that his new associate is an attractive young woman - Maeve Rourke (Terry's mother). They are soon taken with each other. His cousin, Tom, attempts some cockblocking and provides a third point in a love triangle, which possibly is the cause of their longstanding emnity.

The story stops rather abruptly.

Classic X-Men #15: The Secret Life of Chris Summers

Classic X-Men #15 reprints #108, with a backup story about the Starjammers. #108 wasn't their first appearance, but it revealed to us that Corsair was Scott's dad.

Here we find out about the origins of the Starjammers, which started as a slave rebellion. Corsair is motivated into action by Hepzibah, which makes sense, and he volunteers to be a pilot, in the *Starjammers transition from a planet-bound slave revolt to space pirates. We also learn that "Corsair" was Major Summers's callsign back on Earth. Which makes him really stupid - going by the callsign that his son knows and then expecting the detail of his identity to remain secret. Sure, we can make up an explanation that Cyclops didn't know because of the braindamage, but that doesn't explain why Corsair thought it was plausible.

Not the best backup in Classic X-Men, but serviceable enough.

Classic X-Men #12: Magneto: Not All Evil, Then

If I had to rank the things that Chris Claremont did for the X-Men in order, at number one would certainly be Magneto's backstory. Lots of stuff is written about the attempt to rehabilitate Magneto in the here-and-now: a little less about how Claremont has seamlessly worked in a set of motivations for his historic pattern of behaviour, and gave him a rivalry with Xavier that predates the start of the series. It's an integral part of who Magneto is now: they even made a film about it, eventually. A Magneto-without-the-holocaust is inconceivable now, even though it's becoming increasingly implausible chronologically. It's a rare thing indeed for a writer to come along 20 years later and do that to an already well-established and iconic character: it's as substantial a re-work as "The Anatomy Lesson".

Some people say they can discern elements of this in the Lee material: my colleagues at Children of the Atom say that Magneto and Xavier's telepathic battle in #4 is hinting at it. I can't agree, as Lee's run was simply not that subtle, and it wasn't shy of giving backstories when it wanted to: see the Juggernaut, Lucifer, and so on. But I will agree that Lee/Kirby's depiction of Magneto was certainly conducive to what Claremont later did. It worked out fabulously.

Let's see what we've had over the years.

Issue	Backstory
X-Men #4	Magneto rescued Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch from a mob in central Europe.
X-Men #125	Magneto had a wife called Magda, whereabouts unknown. No mention of children.
Avengers #186	A woman named Magda fled to Wundagore after her husband manifested powers and proclaimed his superiority to normal humans, where she gave birth to Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch.
Uncanny X-Men #150	When Magneto manifested, he was avenging his and Magda's murdered daughter, Anya. He had been an inmate at Auschwitz.
Uncanny X-Men #199	Magneto saved lives during the Holocaust.
New Mutants #49	Magneto survived a firing squad that killed his parents, (by use of his magnetic powers?)

This is all skillfully woven together in this in Classic X-Men #12. The framing story is set just after the events of X-Men #104, in which Magneto is not so much defeated by the X-Men as abandoned by them. Magneto recuperates in a hotel room, and remembers his life with Magda. They had escaped from Auschwitz soon before the war ended (dovetailing with the end of Magneto Testament), survived, and when the war was ended moved to Ukraine, with the idea that Magneto might go to university. Unfortunately, unscrupulous gangmasters kept taking commission and Magneto got angry. Crowbars were flung. Magnetokinetically. Oops. He then went back home, noticed his house was burning down, and is arrested while he would quite like to save his Anya, please. He lashed out, burning everyone, much to Magda's horror. She ran off, while he went on to become a mutant terrorist.

Except: in the present day, he's watching a house burning down with a mother and daughter inside.... He saves them. Not all evil then.

There's not much here we didn't already know, but it's still nice to actually see it happen, and the framing story sets up his later reformation. Yet, he's still going to act like a Silver Age villain for a few more encounters with the X-Men (in the reprints: he's already well on the wagon in the 1987-current comics). He needs time to work things out.

Classic X-Men #11: Chris and Ororo

Classic X-Men #11's original backup, "Hope", is a story about a writer. That always gets my attention. He's called Phil Halloran, he's late for a deadline, and he thinks everything he writes is garbage. He has facial hair carefully trimmed in a particular way. I don't think I'm being too adventerous in saying this is a representation of Claremont. And not the kind of joking cameo that we have of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, but a more sigificiant instrospective sort.

He meets Storm - one of Claremont's favourite characters - at the top of the GPO Tower, where he'd possibly gone to commit suicide. She takes him flying and there is Adventure. The standard format of stories like this is that the guy is left happy and inspired, but this instead has a far more ambiguous ending. It's his life, to do with as he pleases, he says. Unexpectedly honest stuff for an authorial self-insert, if that's what that is.

Classic X-Men #8: Jean and Phoenix

Classic X-Men #8 presents Chris Claremont his first opportunity to say what really happened with the Jean Grey/Phoenix thing, in a backup story set during 100 and 101, comics he wrote eleven years ago, with no idea of what controversy might later erupt.

His version, as you might expect from what he's done to rehabilitate the Phoenix force by having it manifest in Rachel, emphasises the continuity between Jean and the Phoenix. His Phoenix is the real deal, but the old Jean is left as a kind of backup version. And his Jean consents to having her body and mind taken by the Phoenix, rather than having them ripped away, like the original version in Avengers/Fantastic Four implied.

Classic X-Men #7: Shaw and Frost

It's not always obvious what Classic X-Men's back-up strips are trying to do. Some of them provide characer moments that fill in gaps (we've had the lovely Scott/Jean silent backup in #6, and Thunderbird's funeral in #3). This one seems to be more for the continuity wonks, as it provides some backstory for how Sebastian Shaw and Emma Frost took charge of the Hellfire Club; and how Michael Rossi came to be alive to turn up in New Mutants.

But that's not all that's going on. In the main books being published in 1987, the X-Men are on the verge of an alliance with the Hellfire Club, and therefore Shaw and Frost's reputations need to be repaired. This story shows therefore how they were taken for mugs by the original Black King Ned Buckman, who is the real evil mastermind behind using the Sentinels to kill all mutants. Shaw and Frost had merely wanted the Sentinels to give them a good going over, or something, in some odd scheme to identify the X-Factor.

Shaw and Frost are betrayed by Buckman, and use that as the excuse they need to assassinate him and his cronies, and install themselves as the new Lords Cardinal.

I'm not sure this ultimately works. They're still too closely associated with the Sentinel program after this is supposed to be set for it to be blamed entirely on Buckman. But at least it's going in the right direction.

Classic X-Men #17: "A Taste for Vengeance"

So, remember how I said that the last story, issue #111, was all the better for opening in medias res, without bothering to explain how exactly the X-Men got captured and brainwashed by Mesmero.

Guess what the back-up story in Classic X-Men #17 does? It shows us that.

The way in which Mesmero managed to bring Jean Grey under his thrall was by... walking up to her on the street. That's it. He may as well be bloody Hypnotoad. Then, he decides to see what else he can do other than get her to wait on him hand and foot. Because what Jean Grey totally needs here at this point in her arc is an attempted rape story retconned in. It's made clear on panel the attempt never gets further than the mindcontrol failing. Annoyed at that, he gets Jean to tell him where the X-Men live, and goes to pay them a visit.

There he goes and Hypnotoads them, one by one. Wolverine is the last to hold out, but he falls in the end. And then, Mesmero has effectively won. He's succeeded where many have failed before: he has defeated the X-Men utterly. And he's bored. So, then he gets the idea to set up the circus.

Classic X-Men #2: First Friends

As noted previously, in X-Men #94-#95, we saw the team become less diverse ethnically. We also saw it become more male. There were 2 female X-Men in the pre-Giant Size #1 team, but both Lorna and Jean leave, leaving only Ororo. She could therefore be seen as doing double duty as the token woman and the token non-white character; and it means that it's not going to idly pass the Bechdel test without trying...

The backup feature in Classic X-Men #2 sorts this out by giving Jean and Ororo some interaction. Ororo visits Jean's new apartment (which she's sharing with Misty Knight, who by a strange coincidence is also a superhero - we'll come to that later).

Jean immediately takes Storm shopping. Because of course she didn't think to bring any civilian clothes, only her superhero costume (?).

Among the things that Storm does not properly understand are large metropolitan areas and the nudity taboo. I'm not sure I buy much of these, given her later backstory. You don't grow up in Cairo and then be massively astonished at the size of New York City. Not even Cairo in 1975. The wealth of it all, perhaps... And the clothes thing, just honestly...

We get a nice comparison between Jean's telepathy and how she can feel with all those voices, versus Ororo's claustrophobia. But I'm not sure it makes sense to dump that to us several issues early... Obviously there's a limit to what they can do in these backup strips, but still, it's a bit of a waste of a dramatic revelation later. Having said that, it looks like it's structured to assume you already know? Neither one thing nor another, these.

the non-origin of Jean Grey

X-Men #57 has our by now regular backup feature in which a member of the X-Men breaks the fourth wall and shows off their powers. This issue, it's Jean Grey's turn, in five pages written by Linda Fite (and pencilled by Werner Roth), who thus becomes the first woman ever to write for X-Men. It wouldn't exactly pass muster today (or even ten years later), but it's a bit of inconsequential fluff rather than being deeply problematic.

Next issue, #58, we would expect to see the start of a short backup serial regarding Jean Grey's origin and how she was recruited by Xavier to be part of the X-Men. This does not happen. Instead, the main story goes back to being 20 pages, for the first time since #37. This is what's really telling. I've seen it claimed that this happened because Jean didn't need this treatment - she was already shown arriving at the mansion back in #1. This strikes me rather as clutching at straws. Yes, X-Men #1 has her arriving at the school not knowing anything about it (having received a message from the Professor somehow, maybe he sent an owl or something). But this is Xavier here we're talking about, who is a little trigger-happy with the mindwipes and, in that same issue, claimed to have lost the use of his legs in a childhood accident.

And clearly, there is an interesting backstory for Jean Grey that could be told. We know this because Chris Claremont would tell it twelve years later, in Bizarre Adventures #27. We learn of Annie, Jean's childhood friend, who died in a car accident when they were young, and Jean's subsequent shutdown when a part of her telepathically sensed Annie's dying moments. It is quite dark stuff for comics - a deeply lasting childhood trauma versus Scott's romanticised orphanhood, and Hank and Bobby's painful but ultimately consequence-free outings. It certainly could not have been told in X-Men in 1969.

The story has been revisited from time to time. 2008's X-Men Origins: Jean Grey (Sean McKeever/Mike Mayhew) and the 2011 Marvel Girl one-shot (Joshua Hale Fialkov/Nuno Plati) both look at Annie's death in the context of Jean coming to terms with it early in the O5 period. Marvel Girl weaves into this a rather wonderful plotline about Jean discovering a supervillain who is trapping people in their pasts, only for her to realise that's just what happens to some people... If the 1960s had been a little less sexist, and we'd got our Jean Grey origin backups, we'd be denied a place for a powerful story of loss.

Avenging Angel

The Origins of the X-Men backup turns its hand to Angel from X-Men #54 to #56. We already know Angel is a rich kid (although quite how rich is only gradually becoming apparent), and in #14 he told us his wings sprouted at a military school, which he left to avoid a physical.

Now, in #54 we find he was sent to the "best" private school specifically because of his habit of jumping off things, where he did well at sports, academics, and gets bullied for the size of his shoulder blades. One day he notices a suspicious feather on his bed and then quickly realises he has... wings! He's worried about being found out, and he's rich and secure enough that making himself unpopular seems like a viable option.

One day there's a fire at the school, and he evacuates through the window, discovering he can fly. He realises that there are others to save, and gets them - first dressing up in an Angel costume scavenged from the school theatre's storeroom.

There's a little bit of a disconnect between that last panel of the first part, where Angel's schoolmates vow to find out who the mysterious Angel figure was, and the next issue, which sees Angel having left the academy (or possibly just on summer break), and having set himself up as an independent superhero, the Avenging Angel. He's trying to make a name for himself, but it's rotten luck when one of the criminals he foils is a "known liar" and not believed.

Meanwhile, the X-Men have detected a new mutant. A good mutant or an evil mutant? In a surprising acknowledgement of moral complexity, Xavier says "we do not live in a world of lucid blacks and whites, Bobby... [...] Right now, whether that mutant we've located uses his power for good or evil may well depend on us". The X-Men (being Scott and Bobby) turn up and try to recruit him, and exhibiting all the people skills we've come to expect from them rapidly get in a fight with him. After learning the value of teamwork, he signs up. His moral choice was never in any real doubt - his brief wonkiness was simply result of technobabble. Warren has had as far as we know no traumatic "with great power comes great responsibility" moment, he just got powers one day and then decided to help people because that's the right thing to do. Truly an Angel.

A Boy Named Beast

From X-Men #49, our backup strip focuses on Henry P. McCoy, a.k.a. The Beast. We've seen a brief origin for him before, in issue #15, which says he was born mutated due to his father working in atomic plant. #49 covers that in more detail. His father, a Norton McCoy, marries Edna Andrews. Soon after their wedding, McCoy is forced to don an imperfect radiation suit to stop a meltdown.

The doctors are worried that the baby might be a mutant (the possibility of a miscarriage is Rather Too Much for comics the late 1960s), and they're not wrong. Young little Henry has gigantic hands and feet. Despite his athletic abilities, he becomes a bit of a bookworm until he is press-ganged onto the varsity football team, and leads the side on a winning streak, reversing their fortunes.

When some criminals try to hold up the box office, Hank stops them (on live television), and in doing so attracts the attention of two mysterious figures: Chico and El Conquistador. They kidnap him, and his parents. El C blackmails Hank into helping them steal an experimental solar generator.

Meanwhile, Xavier has sent Iceman to investigate a new reading on Cerebro (quietly retconning away part of the story in #15), and found evidence of the abduction. Bobby reports back, and Professor Xavier is unable to locate McCoy more precisely. He unveils his new prototype mutant-detecting machine Cerebro, and uses that instead. (It may not surprise you to learn there was an issue break somewhere in the middle of that! I can't blame First Class and the other later implants for not getting Cerebro's creation right if original material forgets that it has already been introduced in the very same story it is later presented as a new invention in!) He dispatches the full team of X-Men - Cyclops, Iceman and Angel (whose backstory a footnote promises will be explained later). They rescue him. Etc. Xavier fixes everything with a mindwipe. Whether Beast's parents remember anything at all is left unclear...

Beast's origin story would get revisited in X-Men Origins: Beast in 2008 (released to coincide with the Wolverine movie of the following year). This story, by Mike Carey, who has form for revisiting X-Men continuity in his run on X-Men: Legacy (particularly the immediately post-Messiah Complex stuff, which deals with more than its fair share of Xavierdickery), keeps the basic structure of these backups intact. The details are changed - Beast rescues himself, and the Conquistador, although kept, now becomes the subject of in-story mockery from heroes and minions alike. But the real difference is the making clear of Hank's emotional journey, from trying to keep his head down, to finding a place to excel - and his decision to leave his old life behind, something implicit in the original material but never clearly expressed.

I feel the need, the need to freeze

The backup Origins of the X-Men feature continues again from X-Men #44, with a story about Iceman's origin, running through to #46.

It's 1963 (apparently, the sliding timeline had not yet been invented, although Bobby only just turned 18 last year, I dunno), and Bobby Drake is a fun-loving teenager in a small town in Nassau County, New York. He knows he has ice powers, and his parents do too. On a date with Judy Harmon, he feels forced to defend himself against a bully. With his ice powers. This proves a mistake, as rumour quickly spreads, and he is arrested.

Xavier finds out about this from reading the paper, and sends Scott there. Scott breaks Bobby out of jail, which just escalates matters, as the townspeople form a lynch mob and declare the sheriff, who is protesting there must be due process, to be a "mutant lover". Xavier saves the day with mindwipes all round, including of Bobby's parents (as was typical back in the single digits), and signs Bobby up as the second student at his school.

There is no subtlety here. The X-Men, which started as a fairly innocent piece of science fantasy, is now an analogy for the civil rights struggle - not something that can be read into it, but the clear authorial intent. Gary Friedrich may only have had a short run on the title, but his influence is profound.

Forty-two years later, this story gets retold by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Phil Noto as X-Men Origins: Iceman. It hews closely to the original. Plotwise it varies a little, as Xavier enters sooner, preventing the situation from escalating as badly as it otherwise had, but it presents those same events, down to an explanation for why they'd seen "West Side Story" that night. But it doesn't need to be changed to be a coming out narrative, as it already was one, back in 1968.

Cyclops, how does he work?

X-Men #42 suspends the "Origin of the X-Men" backup briefly for a five-page feature which goes into rather a lot of detail about Cyclops's powers, in respond to readers' requests for information.

It provides a technobabble power source for the optic blasts (absorption of solar energy, likened to photosynthesis), which I think is new, emphasises that they are force beams, not heat (something that is forgotten by the writers half the time then and now - I suppose drawing them as red blasts doesn't help there), and explains how the visor works. For the first time the little buttons in his gloves that can open the visor without him reaching for it are made explicit.

It closes on a panel refusing to answer that perennial question: "could Cyclops beat Thor or the Hulk". Some questions really are eternal, although now they tend to be asked and answered on Tom Brevoort's formspring page rather than in the pages of comics magazines themselves...

All-in-all, it's an odd little feature. I hope their mailbags decreased in size for their trouble.

X-Men Origins: X and Cyclops

From X-Men #38 there's a five-page backup strip, called "Origins of the X-Men". It starts off with Xavier reading in the newpaper public revelations about the existence of mutants and the consequent FBI investigation. He's been a recluse, he says, since his step-brother's death (although clearly since he's in the wheelchair the stuff with Lucifer has happened in between), but decides to go to Washington to do something about mutant rights. Uncannily, he finds it quite easy to get past security and into the FBI building.

There we, and Xavier, see some footage of a stray air-conditioning unit being destroyed by an optic blast from a young teen. He suggests to the Feds that he be allowed to act as an agent of the government in contacting the mutants they have leads on. One of the Feds here is Fred Duncan, as seen in issue #2. It's interesting to see here the series making such tight continuity links in an era when comics were still mostly ephemera - it had been four whole years since then.

From issue #39 to #42, we focus on Scott's story. He's not the first X-Men to be given an origin story (Hank and Warren had brief treatments earlier on), but nothing this extended has been attempted so far. The action picks up as young Summers destroys the aircon, outing himself to a hostile crowd. He quickly runs away, and decides not to go back to the Sunset Orphanage, instead going freighthopping. Xavier and Duncan discover Scott has gone missing, and interview his optometrist who had filed a report to the FBI on him.

Apparently, Scott had mildly glowing eyes, and recurring headaches, for which he was prescribed coloured lenses (which is in fact a perfectly good thing to give migraine sufferers). It was either good fortune that he was wearing the ruby lenses when his powers manifested today, or perhaps an indication of something more sinister. We finish as Scott flees from some hobos who tried to rob from him.

He enters a nearby cabin, and finds another mutant, Jack Winters/Jack O'Diamonds/Living Diamond. Winters has a very confused set of powers (we see him teleporting, have diamond hands, and using telepathy), which seems to be science-accident in origin rather than a traditional mutant emergence. Anyhow, Xavier rescues Scott from him, and takes him off to be the first student in the school, where he gives him his early costume, a visor, and his mutant name: Cyclops.

Later, much later, we'll learn more about the orphanage that Scott was in, and how he came to be there, but for now it's just a cigar.