Havok

Alex Summers is the second Summers boy, the one who wasn't there when Scott got the visor, the mission and the mythology. He was pushed out of the same burning plane and landed in a different orphanage, which is most of the story in one sentence. His body soaks up ambient cosmic radiation and dumps it back out as concentric waves of plasma, and for years he simply could not switch that off. The black suit with the target across the chest is not a design flourish. It is a containment garment, built so his own power would stop cooking the people standing next to him.

Everything after runs on the same tension: a man with more raw output than his brother and far less appetite for command, handed command anyway. He ran the government's X-Factor, led a squad through the nightmare universe of Mutant X, and chaired the Avengers Unity Squad, where he stood at a podium and asked the world to stop calling him a mutant. That speech landed like a grenade in the fandom and inside the X-books. Then AXIS inverted him into a villain and burned half his face off. Alex Summers has never once had an easy decade.

Havok arrived in 1969 as the answer to a question nobody had asked, and Marvel has spent five decades trying to make a second Summers a feature rather than a footnote. Neal Adams's containment suit gave him one of the best silhouettes in the line, and Peter David's X-Factor run finally gave him a real command voice. Then came the swerves: Mutant X stranded him in a horror-movie universe for years of publication, Rick Remender's Uncanny Avengers made him the face of mutant assimilation politics, and AXIS turned him outright villainous. Few X-Men have been reinvented this often against their own will.