10 Things Everyone Always Gets Wrong About The X-Men
6. Cyclops - Not Who We Make Him Out To Be
The very first X-Man of them all, Cyclops is perhaps the most misunderstood and the fault lies within the ignorance of the general public. They can blame the media for his inaccurate portrayals as well as some writers who have abused his character as years went by. Just to establish a few factual errors - Cyclops does not shoot lasers from his eyes.
What he emits are actually beams of pure, concussive force. This means the beams do not produce heat and while they can puncture matter they do not burn through it. For those who are interested it was recently 'explained' that the beams actually come from another dimension with his eyes acting as portals. Yeah, we'll just go on waiting until that is retconned as well...
Speaking of his powers many believe that the beams are naturally uncontrollable akin to Rogue's abilities. The truth is that Scott actually damaged a portion of his brain when he and younger brother Alex jumped from a burning plane and Scott's parachute caught fire. The ruby quartz glasses he wears to control these powers were not given to him by Professor Charles Xavier but by Dr. Nathaniel Essex - aka Mister Sinister - who kept an eye on him during his childhood in the orphanage. Once again, most of what is misunderstood about Cyclops stems from the movieverse in which he is nothing more than a soldier to Professor Xavier and a rival for Wolverine.
In the comics, however, Cyclops is a muthafu**in bad@$$. He has completely decimated sentinels, Apocalypse, Sinister, and more. He has taken on the entire group of X-Men at once and won using his knowledge of their skills against them. Scott is a major player not just amongst the X-Men but within the entire Marvel Universe. It's really just quite sad how poorly he's been treated in the films and even within some of the cartoon adaptations. His longstanding rival with Wolverine isn't even that substantial. It was only recently in the comics that two have become known as 'rivals' with only one instance of rivalry between the two in their past. Just another example of how the media has poorly affected the actual source material.