The X-Men are one of Marvel’s greatest teams, and some would argue they’re the greatest. The Fantastic Four was first and the Avengers are considered the big leagues, but the X-Men have always been something unique and special. They protect a world that hates and fears them; they’re superheroes who fight for the people who very often want them dead. The X-Men have been Marvel’s most popular team for most of the last 40 years; the Avengers had their spike of popularity in the late ’00s to the ’10s, but they’ve faded, with the X-Men ascendant once again thanks to Disney getting the property’s film rights back for Marvel. What really makes the difference for the X-Men are the great characters fans have been introduced to. Even among these amazing characters, Cyclops is considered something special.
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Cyclops has been with the X-Men since their beginning, chosen to lead the team by Professor Charles Xavier. For years, Cyclops was looked at as a boring leader, too uptight to ever relax. While this true to an extent, there’s much more to Cyclops than all of that. He is the perfect X-Man, a soldier for mutant survival unlike any other. It’s actually pretty easy to make the case for Cyclops as the best X-Man. These seven reasons show why Cyclops is the best, proving he’s the ultimate X-Man.
7) Cyclops Has the Best Costumes
Having the best costume might not seem like it should matter very much about who’s the best X-Man, but it does. The X-Men are probably the best dressed heroes in comics; if you’re going to be a member of the team, you need to be as sartorially gifted as you are genetically gifted. Luckily, Cyclops understood the assignment. Cyclops has had some of the best costumes in Marvel history, and that’s all there is to it. It’s basically impossible to pick a truly bad Cyclops costume; the worst thing you can say about them is that they aren’t as good as some of his old costumes, which makes them better than 90% of superhero costumes ever. Cyclops just looks like a leader, and his costumes have set the standard for how great the X-Men’s costumes are.
6) Cyclops Is an Excellent Fighter
When most people think of Cyclops in combat, they think of his optic blasts and there’s a good reason. Cyclops’s optic blasts can be devastating, but they are far from the only weapon in his arsenal. Like the rest of the X-Men, Cyclops has been training in combat since he was a teenager, and has become a pretty proficient hand to hand fighter. Cyclops has trained in several martial arts, and is very, very strong for a normal human. He’s also a pretty good acrobat. Cyclops may not be on Wolverine, Psylocke, or Gambit’s level when it comes to hand to hand combat, but he’s very, very good. He’s learned to mix his use of his optic blasts with his hand to hand skills, making him an even more dangerous fighter than he would seem. Cyclops has trained himself into a well-oiled machine, a weapon to use against anti-bigots, and he can keep the fight up whether he has his powers or not.
5) Cyclops Has Been Fighting for Most of His Life
Cyclops has had quite a life. His earliest memories involve being thrown out of a plane with a parachute and his younger brother Alex. After a head injury that would mess up his mutant powers, Cyclops found himself in an orphanage under the not-so tender care of Mister Sinister. Eventually, Professor X found him and brought him to his school, where he began his life as what amounts to a child soldier. Cyclops has been fighting the good fight for mutant ever since. Cyclops is often called the “first X-Man”. This is only technically true (Jean Grey was Xavier’s first official student, and he worked with several other mutant before he met Jean), but it’s something that has helped define Cyclops. His experience with the X-Men has taken across all time and space, from the far off Shi’Ar Galaxy to the Savage Land in Antarctica to the country of Genosha. Cyclops has led the team in battles against basically every kind of enemy you can think of, from supervillains to robots to gods. He’s battled enemies like Mister Sinister and Apocalypse completely on his own. Cyclops isn’t the most experienced X-Man, but he has more experience than almost everyone else. This experience has served him well over the years, his ability to survive anything thrown at him developed over years of experience with the team.
4) Cyclops’s Optic Blasts Are Absurdly Powerful
Cyclops’s powers might not seem like much compared to some of the other mutants out there. There are mutants who can control magnetism, the weather, even reality itself. Eye beams aren’t much compared to all of that. However, Cyclops’s optic blasts are one of the most devastating offensive powers in the Marvel Universe. Cyclops’s optic blasts were rendered uncontrollable thanks to brain damage from falling out of his parents’ plane, forcing him to either keep his eyes closed or wear special ruby quartz lens to keep from blasting everything around him. They aren’t a laser, but a type of kinetic energy (and no, they don’t come from the punch dimension) and they can pulverize just about anything. With his visor, Cyclops can fire wide blasts or fine lines of energy, allowing him to use it in different ways for different problems. At full blast, he can destroy just about anything in front of him that isn’t made of adamantium or vibranium, and he can use it like a retro-rocket to slow him down in freefall, as seen in X-Men ’97. Wolverine once said that Cyclops has “a nuke in his head” and that’s pretty valid. Cyclops can also bounce the blasts off objects, able to do the calculations in his head and hit anything he wants. Cyclops’s powers aren’t the most powerful on the X-Men, but they’ve allowed him to lead the team in battle against everyone out there. Anyone who fights the X-Men knows to do their best to stay out of Cyclops’s vision, because if he can see you, he can hit you.
3) His Entire Life Has Been the X-Men
There are very few X-Men who are more committed to the mission of the X-Men than Cyclops. Cyclops came to the team with nothing; he hadn’t seen in parents in years and his brother Alex had been adopted away from him, so Sinister would be able to do whatever he wanted to Cyclops and no one would care. Professor Xavier saw a damaged young man who couldn’t control his powers and he knew that he was dealing with someone who was standing on the edge of a knife. So, Xavier gave him the X-Men and gave him something for. Since then, everything good in Cyclops’s life has come from the X-Men (of course, that said, everything bad came from it as well), and Cyclops has devoted himself to both Xavier’s dream and keeping his people safe. No other X-Man has the commitment to the team that Cyclops has. He’s been the leader of the X-Men since he was little more than a child, and he has given his life, sometimes quite literally since he’s died more than once in battle, to make sure that the X-Men triumph. Cyclops will and has made any sacrifice for the X-Men and he will continue to do so until there’s no one left to fight. In a lot of ways, Cyclops is the X-Men, and there is no other member of the team that loved the group and its mission like he does. Even Xavier’s commitment to his own dream isn’t as strong as Cyclops’s.
2) Cyclops Is a Master Tactician
The above image is from the Astonishing X-Men story “Unbreakable”. The X-Men were captured and taken to an alien planet called the Breakworld. They had to figure out how to defeat an entire planet of hostile enemies. Cyclops was without his powers thanks to some psychic damage, but he still had his greatest weapon — his mind. Cyclops was able to come up with a strategy to trick and defeat his foes with little more than the clothes on his back and five other X-Men. We say Cyclops is right a lot, but what we should be saying is, “Cyclops wins”. Captain America is usually known as the best tactician in the Marvel Universe, but anyone who has been reading X-Men comics knows that it’s Cyclops. Cyclops can walk into any situation and figure out a way to walk out the other side with a win. Everyone knows how tactically proficient Cyclops is, because they’ve watched him beat everything in his way. When the X-Men are down and out, they know that as long as Cyclops is on the field, they have more than just a fighting chance; they have the tools they need to win battle locked inside his highly analytical brain.
1) Cyclops Is an Amazing Leader
Cyclops has been forged into an amazing leader. There’s some argument about whether he’s the best X-Men leader (and honestly, the only reason there’s an argument is because people like Storm more), but one can’t deny just how good he is at his job. Cyclops has the kind of steely resolve that a leader needs; Cyclops doesn’t give up and that rubs off on the people around him. Cyclops has a voice that command goddesses, super soldiers, and cosmic beings, and knows his team inside and out. He can formulate the right tactics in a heartbeat, and wouldn’t order anyone to do anything he wouldn’t. Cyclops is the best and even Captain America could take pointers from him on how to run a team.
Do you think Cyclops is the best X-Man? Sound off in the comments below.
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image courtesy of 20th Century Studios
