Why is it a big deal that Cyclops is a deadbeat dad? Isn’t Mr. Vice Guy a trope similar to many real-life heroes who have feat of clay, who have affairs, and so on. It reminds me of the whole Spiderman can’t divorce his wife and that’s less heroic and more evil than getting an annulment from Satan?

It’s just not very well-set up in his previous characterization: from the beginning, Scott Summers has been one of those “emotionally repressed, …Type-A…personalities,” I talk about not working as well in the present, which is part of the reason why he has such a big hatedom.

Now, unlike Reed, Summers has historically been more of a follower than a leader – Xavier’s teacher’s pet and hall monitor, the eternal Leonardo to the Raphael/Michelangelo antics of Bobby and Hank (and Warren, sometimes) – but very much a rules-following, by-the-book guy. And the main thing that made him more than a total wet blanket was his Teen Romance-style angst about whether Jean could ever love a man who shot red eye-beams. So to sum up: Scott Summers = dutiful and into romance. 

Now, I think there was a way that Claremont could have leaned into the Mr. Vice Guy thing, but didn’t quite: namely, actually exploring Scott’s tendencies to have low-stakes, no-labels affairs the moment he thought Jean was dead/not around (thinking about Colleen Wing, Lee Forrester here) as a way to introduce the idea of Scott straining against his own repression and feelings of being trapped in his role as Designated X-Men Team Leader, and then build up from there to establish Scott Summers as one of these heroes with feet of clay (in his case, a tendency to default to following others’ expectations of him despite not really being fulfilled by the life that results in, and then a reactive tendency to try to wreck his own life in a search for independence and self-knowledge):

But there’s not really any follow-through. Scott and Jean never have a chance to talk through this tendency and how it reflects on his feelings about Jean (even though they’ve got one of those creepy psychic-link-true-love things going on which means she knows and he knows she knows) or what he wants from life beyond being her boyfriend and an X-Men. Nor does anyone really call him out on his hypocritcal jealousy around Jean Grey and other dudes (although one time it was Mastermind, so I guess you get a pass there), or really call him out about about dumping Madelyn (granted, a lot of that was the fault of Fall of the Mutants and Inferno, but still). 

Sidenote: I’ve never had a problem with Spiderman being married and, yes, him getting a divorce works so much better than diabolic annulment.