#nathan christopher summers

Double oof. This is absolutely heart wrenching to see X-Factor forced to give up their kid. This had me legitimately stressed out, thinking about holding a dying child and having to decide in an instant whether to give him up to a stranger from the future who may or may not be telling the truth, not knowing if you’ll ever see the kid again or even if you’ll ever know what happens to them. And then I remembered that we do find out what happens to him. He turns into Cable. And then I stopped caring so much. Cyclops sure doesn’t seem to care. Take a second to think about how you would feel after doing this, and then compare it to how he behaves.

He doesn’t give a shit! “Well I guess it’s back to Earth then. Gonna have a lot more free time on my hands now that I don’t have to care for that baby. Maybe I’ll start watching Frasier.” (X-Factor #68 – July 1991)

Oooook… Apocalypse basically breaks apart like tinfoil when Cyclops shoots him now. Seems legit! I’m sure that was the real Apocalypse. No reason to check the debris and make sure he’s dead.

Studying him my ass. (X-Factor #68 – July 1991)

Oof I gotta tell ya, as much as I hate Cyclops, and as much as I hate Cable, it’s hard to hate Nathan-Christopher, because he’s just a baby, and it sure is hard watching him die at the end of this comic. Like he gets infected with some kind of techno-organic virus that starts eating him alive. Pretty creepy. I don’t really understand why Apocalypse is doing this, when he could just kill him, and all of X-Factor, just by punching them, but I suppose it’s got something to do with absorbing their powers and making himself stronger. But if not, seriously this is a convoluted way to kill a baby. (X-Factor #68 – July 1991)

I can hardly believe that this “The Twelve” storyline, about 12 chosen mutants who are destined to shape the future of their species, is serviced in this way. After being apathetically introduced ages ago in X-Factor #14 (54 issues ago), it hasn’t been mentioned again until now, and I’ll be fucked if I have any idea if it’s addressed again until nearly a decade later when the whole thing is finally resolved in Uncanny X-Men #376-#377. Which I’m told is absolutely dreadful. That is what I would call, a failure in storytelling.

It doesn’t sound uninteresting on its surface, if you can suspend your disbelief and accept that Cyclops is one of these special, chosen mutants. A little open ended maybe. I bet Claremont introduced the initial setup for this story without having much of a payoff planned out, which is the worst possible way to go about telling a story. That’s how we end up with shit like the new Star Wars trilogy. Is it too much to ask that people actually write out a whole story before they start telling it? (X-Factor #68 – July 1991)