All-New X-Men: Inevitable, Volume 1: Ghosts of Cyclops Review (Dennis Hopeless, Mark Bagley)

In the eight months since Battleworld, Cyclops has died - somehow, somewhen, by possibly someone (the suddenly-lethal-to-mutants Terrigen Mist might’ve got ‘im!). In his wake are a gang of mutant idiots wearing Cyclops masks calling themselves the Ghosts of Cyclops, causing havoc wherever they appear. It’s up to the teenage time-displaced All-New X-Men - including the young Cyclops - to stop them. Not enough Cyclops mentions in this paragraph? CYCLOPS!

Wow, it’s tough to be an X-Men fan these days, especially since their two main titles - this one and Extraordinary - have some major suckitude going on! The Ghosts of Cyclops are a joke: nobodies with lame powers and no goals who may as well be wearing signs saying “Filler”! They’re just meaningless targets for the X-Men to fight. Just like Blob in the second half of the book who shows up to also act as filler/a target for the X-Men. It’s such a boring, uninspired read! 

The young Scott gives the most retarded speech ever. Bearing in mind he’s from the PAST, he talks about how his future is already set in stone and that he’ll grow up to be the asshat Cyclops who recently died mysteriously. Uh, here’s an idea: travel back to your time and, using the knowledge you have of the person you’ll be, become a different person! How can someone who’s from the past, with the ability to alter the future, be so dumb as to believe his future is intractable?! You know of his mistakes, you can avert them! What a fucking moron. 

I couldn’t have cared less about Angel and Wolverine’s relationship drama but I did like the way Bobby talked about his homosexuality, like how it’s easy for others to accept but not as easily for him, as well as Idie’s crisis of faith in Christianity. You know, stuff that actually felt like they took some thought to write rather than just going through the motions with “Random Useless Enemy attacks X-Men for x pages”. Unfortunately these glimmers of quality only last for a few pages. I suppose Mark Bagley’s art throughout is pretty decent too but not especially exciting or standout from the usual Marvel standard. 

Ghosts of Cyclops is another terrible X-Men book that does nothing to take these characters out of the tailspin they’ve been in for some time. All-New has an aptly named writer with Dennis Hopeless!