Review: Uncanny X-Men #31 – How Scott Summers (Potentially) Gets His Groove Back

Uncanny X-Men hit the shelves today, and if you follow Brian Michael Bendis on Tumblr (as you should), you know there’s a jaw-dropping ending to this issue. I won’t spoil it here, or after the jump, but suffice it to say it marks a serious turning point for the book.

Read more about it, spoiler-free, after the jump.

Scott Summers has been through a lot in the last 20 or so years. He got possessed by the disembodied spirit En Sabbah Nur. When he was finally retrieved, having won the battle for his body and soul, he was not the same man. Grant Morrison, who once compared Cyclops to Norman Bates, explored this shift in his personality. In Morrison's stunning run on New X-Men, Scott becomes cold and distant from Jean, and eventually has a “psychic tryst” with Emma Frost, whom he would enter into a relationship with after Jean, well... you know (too soon, give me a minute).

Joss Whedon then took the ball and ran with it. In the pages of Astonishing X-Men, Cyclops shook it off Taylor Swift-style and became the leader he has always been groomed to be. He single-handedly blasted a Sentinel off his lawn, overcame some deeply-buried psychological trauma, and even died for about an hour to get his team where they needed to be.

And then… I don’t know. It seems like nobody’s really known what to do with Cyclops for a while. I can’t say if this has been intentional, but it feels like Cyclops has been going through a midlife crisis. He’s spent the last few years making really dramatic decisions – he moved the team to San Francisco, then to an artificial island off the coast of San Francisco, and then he and Wolverine had their ideological schism, the team split, and Raptor Cyclops killed Professor Xavier.

It's not that these were bad books. Far from it. Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, Jason Aaron, freaking Warren Ellis – these guys are not hacks. But there seemed to be something off about Cyclops, a vibrancy that went missing in the years following Whedon's run. He wasn't fun, or even very interesting anymore.

Then Brian Michael Bendis came along. Suddenly Cyclops was flailing, and flailing wildly. His powers were all out of whack, he was starting a revolution, creating a secret base in the old Weapon X facility, and picking fights with the government. The guy was off the deep-end, and it was a glorious train wreck to behold. But it looks like it may be coming to an end. In the wake of the "Last Will and Testament of Charles Xavier" storyline, characters are pushed to take extreme measures. In the end, Cyclops makes a decision that will have tremendous ramifications on every X-book going forward. If you weren’t reading Uncanny X-Men before, the next issue may be your best jumping on point until Bendis leaves the title with Issue 600 in May.

I don't know what's next for Scott, but I can't wait to find out. Now where the hell is that Eva Bell solo series?

Uncanny X-Men #31, written by Brian Michael Bendis with art by Chris Bachalo, is in stores now.