{"id":26175,"date":"2022-07-16T08:00:22","date_gmt":"2022-07-16T08:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/?p=26175"},"modified":"2022-07-15T17:55:50","modified_gmt":"2022-07-15T17:55:50","slug":"cyclops-volume-1-starstruck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/2022\/07\/16\/cyclops-volume-1-starstruck\/","title":{"rendered":"Cyclops volume 1: Starstruck"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"
\nBy Greg Rucka<\/strong>, Russell Dauterman<\/strong>, Carmen Carnero<\/strong>, Terry Pallot <\/strong>& various (Marvel)
\nISBN: 978-0-7851-9075-2 (TPB\/Digital edition)<\/p>\n

When mutant genius Henry McCoy<\/em> learned he was dying, he used time-travel tech in a last-ditch attempt to give his life meaning. Seeking to prevent an inter-species war, he brought the young, naive X-Men<\/strong> of his own youth into the future to reason with his radicalised former comrade Scott Summers<\/em>, praying the still idealistic and hopeful teens could divert Mutant Enemy Terrorist No. 1 from his path of doctrinaire madness\u2026<\/p>\n

The gamble paid off in all the wrong ways. Rather than shocking modern day Cyclops<\/strong><\/em> back to his senses, the confrontation hardened the renegade\u2019s heart and strengthened his resolve. Moreover, after McCoy the younger somehow cured his older self, he and the rest of the X-Kids were trapped in their own future and began gradually defecting to the fundamentalist team\u2026<\/p>\n

Eventually, the temporally misplaced First Class all ended up living with the elder Cyclops\u2019 crew, but everything changed after Gladiator<\/em> of the Shi\u2019ar<\/em> realised that Jean Grey<\/em> AKA Marvel Girl<\/em> – and future host of the cosmic force known as the Phoenix<\/strong><\/em> – was back. The alien overlord rashly attempted to abduct and execute her for the crimes of her older self\u2026<\/p>\n

The insane pre-emptive punishment plan was foiled by an assembly of X-Men, Guardians of the Galaxy<\/strong> and intergalactic buccaneers Hepzibah<\/em>, Ch\u2019od<\/em>,\u00a0 Raza<\/em> Longknife<\/em> and insectoid medical wizard Sikorsky<\/em> – collectively known as The Starjammers<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

During that cosmic conflict, 16-year-old Scott met his believed-dead dad Christopher Summers<\/em>, now called Corsair<\/em> and undisputed leader of the cosmic privateers. When the mutant heroes returned to Earth, Scott chose to remain in space with the father he had spent most of his brief life assuming killed in a plane crash\u2026<\/p>\n

Scripted by Greg Rucka and illustrated by Russell Dauterman, Carmen Carnero & Terry Pallot, stellar saga Starstruck<\/strong> collects issues #1-5 of Cyclops: <\/strong>(July-November 2014), following the chronal castaway to the ends of the universe and even further into uncharted emotional territory\u2026<\/p>\n

The story begins as the still shell-shocked teen spends some time in hard vacuum with his dad\u2019s exotic paramour Hepzibah. Together they are testing his new spacesuit, which allows him to fire his fearsome optic blasts safely through his helmet. That and reminiscing about how he got here and revelling in the sheer majesty of the intergalactic firmament, of course\u2026<\/p>\n

For most of his career Scott Summers has been capable and competent but also dour, grim, despondent and simply no fun at all. Here, however, we get to see the true hero he always was, whilst also following a nervous, unsure kid hungry for affirmation and still capable of ingenuous wide-eyed wonder.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s never more ably demonstrated than when his attempts to write a letter to Jean (the girl everybody in the future tells him he will marry and lose) are interrupted by an attack on the ship. The Starjammers are wanted by almost every empire and ruling authority in the universe, but this ambush by the scurrilous Brotherhood of Badoon<\/em> is easily repulsed and only results in the freebooters capturing their attackers\u2019 vessel primarily intact\u2026<\/p>\n

Not so easily handled is the growing gulf between Scott and Corsair. The boy simply cannot accept why his father would allow him – and indeed his future self – to believe he was dead for decades\u2026<\/p>\n

The grizzled star-pirate thinks he has a solution. Giving Scott a sword liberated from the vessel (apparently a crucial piece of kit for any space-farer regularly indulging in close combat) Corsair suggests a father-and-son vacation: a few months tooling around the galaxies in their newest prize, just getting to know each other\u2026<\/p>\n

At first the grand tour is all mind-bending exploration and eye-popping alien encounters, but eventually Scott starts seeing a disturbing pattern to Corsair\u2019s actions and arrives at a ghastly conclusion. His dad is a drug addict and their numerous stopovers in quirky cosmic bazaars and seamy sidereal marketplaces are just opportunities to restock his personal pharmacopoeia\u2026<\/p>\n

One such jaunt introduces the kid to unlikely barkeeper\/crimelord Baroque<\/em> and leads Scott into a potentially life-changing VR encounter with a svelte and sexy alien temptress named Vass<\/em>. Sadly, anything he might have learned is promptly forgotten when a merciless multi-species band of bounty hunters corners the father-&-son team.<\/p>\n

These wily thief-takers are utterly unprepared for Cyclops\u2019 optic blasts, however, and the humans get away relatively unscathed\u2026 except for Corsair\u2019s latest \u201cstash\u201d\u2026<\/p>\n

The next crisis occurs soon after as the Badoon ship catastrophically malfunctions, stranding them on an isolated planetoid. Painfully scouring through crash wreckage later, Scott discovers a tracking device – now destroyed – and finally confronts his father about his addiction.<\/p>\n

He is doubly appalled when Corsair shamefully reveals that rather than buying narcotics, he\u2019s been visiting every criminal dive in creation to score universally-proscribed nanite tech: the only thing currently keeping him alive\u2026<\/p>\n

Stranded on a primitive mudball filled with predators becoming increasingly less cautious and more hungrily curious, Scott at last learns of his unsuspected brother Vulcan<\/em>: a mutant who seized control of the Shi\u2019ar Empire, sparked intergalactic wars and killed their father\u2026<\/p>\n

Of course, his devoted comrades refused to leave Corsair dead, and petitioned enigmatic cult the Shrouded<\/em> to restore him. The cloaked wonders succeeded, but their cure required constant and illicit maintenance\u2026<\/p>\n

Days pass and the last dregs of the contraband chemicals are used, whilst fading father and estranged son grow closer: to the point where they unite to deal with the voracious bird-things stalking them. As Corsair impatiently strives to teach his son everything he\u2019ll need to survive the decades he might be alone on the planetoid, the boy enacts a desperate scheme to save them both. The first step is repairing that fractured tracking device and luring the bounty hunters to their current location\u2026<\/p>\n

Everything goes according to plan and the hunters become the hunted, but at a critical moment Scott, seemingly swayed by the blandishments of the mercenaries\u2019 female slave, sells his own dad out.<\/p>\n

What happens next proves the boy hero\u2019s astonishing tactical genius and saves everyone\u2019s lives – if not necessarily their honour\u2026<\/p>\n

Heart-warming, thrilling, funny and astoundingly action-packed, Cyclops:<\/strong> Starstruck <\/strong>combines cosmic intrigue and dashing derring-do with solid characterisation and wild blue yonder wonderment, and will delight any fan of cosmically light-hearted Marvel Movies like Guardians of the Galaxy<\/strong> or Thor: Ragnarok<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

What more could any wide-eyed, entertainment-starved child of the wondering stars want?
\n\u00a9 2014 Marvel Characters, Inc. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Greg Rucka, Russell Dauterman, Carmen Carnero, Terry Pallot & various (Marvel) ISBN: 978-0-7851-9075-2 (TPB\/Digital edition) When mutant genius Henry McCoy learned he was dying, he used time-travel tech in a last-ditch attempt to give his life meaning. Seeking to prevent an inter-species war, he brought the young, naive X-Men of his own youth into … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Cyclops volume 1: Starstruck”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[79,242,107,70],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-marvel-superheroes","category-pirates","category-science-fiction","category-x-men"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4AFj-6Ob","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26175"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26175\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26178,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26175\/revisions\/26178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}