The thing that I like most about the Whedon/Cassaday run on Astonishing X-Men--aside from the beautiful John Cassaday artwork and Joss Whedon's spot-on, loving characterization--is the fact that Whedon has made me like Cyclops for the first time in my 20+ years as a comic book reader. I've always hated Scott Summers. He's bland and uptight, and I've always thought Storm was a much better leader. Besides that, the guy's a total dick. Reach back into your long boxes, true believers, and you'll see what I mean.
To wit: At one point during the Claremont/Byrne run, the X-Men were lost in the Savage Land, with Cyke believing his longtime girlfriend, Jean Grey, was dead. Shortly thereafter, Summers meets Colleen Wing, and immediately tries hooking up with her. Once he discovers that Jean is in fact alive, Cyclops dumps Wing and runs back to his girlfriend. Shortly after, Jean, having been driven mad by her Phoenix powers, dies in battle on the moon. Her body is barely in the ground when Scott quits the X-Men and gets a job working on a fishing boat captained by a hot blonde named Lee Forrester. Guess what happens next? Scott becomes romantically involved with Forrester for a brief time. (So much for mourning, eh Slim?) (And yes, I know, it wasn't really Jean who died. Shut up.) It gets worse from there, in a "segment on Maury Povich" kind of way, as Scott later meets Madelyne Pryor, a woman he soon marries solely because she looks exactly like his dead girlfriend, Jean. They have a baby together, but as soon as the little rugrat is born, it is revealed that Jean Grey is alive. So what does Scotty do? He abandons his wife and newborn son and runs back to Jean. The two eventually marry, and live happily together for a few years, until Cyclops merges with archvillain Apocalypse and goes missing for a while. (Don't ask. It's a long story.) Cyclops is soon found and freed from Apocalypse, and returns to his wife, though he becomes distant from her. So distant, in fact, that he becomes involved in a psychic affair with fellow X-Man Emma Frost. Cyclops would claim that his emotional detachment from Jean was caused by the impact of having his personality merged with the purely evil Apocalypse, but really, he was just being a dick.
But in Astonishing X-Men, Whedon has taken great care to develop Cyclops to his full potential, revealing that his inability to control his optic blasts stems from a subconscious need to feel in control of something following the loss of both his parents during his childhood. It's an ironic and interesting twist that finally gave me a reason to sympathize with a character that had until that point been largely unsympathetic.
This issue is what really made me a fan of Cyclops. Last issue, as the X-Men fought in deep space to keep both the Breakworld and Earth from being obliterated, Cyke sacrificed himself in order to give his teammates a chance to escape alien despot Kruun's forces. As this issue opens, Cyclops has been brought back to life by Kruun and is being tortured for information about the X-Men's mysterious secret weapon, Leviathan. Ater a few moments of intense torture, Cyclops becomes a total badass, revealing to Kruun that Leviathan is merely a ruse, and that his noble sacrifice last issue was simply a way of getting up close and personal with Kruun. Cyclops then proceeds to blast the holy hell out of Kruun with his optic blasts (which had been inactive for a while), and, on the final page, in an image that rivals (if not surpasses) the much-heralded scene of a pissed off Wolverine swearing vengeance against the Hellfire Club at the end of Uncanny X-Men #133, stands tall over his battered foe and rallies the troops for next issue's climactic battle. It's one of the best sequences in a series full of great moments, thanks to clever plotting by Whedon and intensely dramatic visuals by Cassaday, and if it doesn't get you excited about the next issue, you probably shouldn't be reading X-Men comics.
