Because it's about time someone did!
I have so many feelings about Havok, y'all.
So many.
(We just finished recording the Havok & Wolverine: Meltdown episode, in which I went into like a ten-minute off-outline rant about how Havok is amazing and no one ever writes him right. SIGH.)




I first got into comics around the time of government-team X-Factor, so I'm a huge Alex guy. In that run he had a great middle-manager exasperation, and while he displayed as much sarcastic wit as the other characters you could always see the genuine heart driving his actions.
I've never seen a comic with Havok that I have been excited about. He could be a cool character but they never let him be more than a guy living in Scott's shadow
So do i but there mixed at best.... I always love Havok when he juxtaposes Cyclops. and usually he does it so well but by himself as judge by his own merits I sadly usually find him boring and uninteresting....
I, for one, have very rarely liked the way Alex and Scott are written as brothers, but I've never disliked it quite so much as in Factor-X. It's understandably a different world than the 616, but I truly despised the way Alex was portrayed in that world.
But even in regular continuity...I don't know. I don't know the issue, but there's that handball game scene from early in the gov't X-Factor days, and I didn't like that. I didn't like the way they were handled after AvX, going into Uncanny Avengers. It always feels like writers are playing up a one-note angle where Scott is always the over-achiever and Alex is always playing catch-up, and I kind of hate it.
And yet, I remain intrigued about what happened after Bendis brought Havok to the Weapon X facility. I'm way more curious about where Alex is than Scott since Secret Wars, but I also really want to know what they got up to before Uncanny 600.
Anyway, I hope the rant makes it into the final cut of the episode!
I think its been fairly well documented that the quality of this series is varied at best, but my main exposure to him growing up was Mutant X. In the initial story arch (which was supposed to be a 12 issue maxi series) we get to see our Alex in a world where he's not just the other Summers brother. To see him be the leader of a beloved super hero team, have a wife and kid, and live in a world where mutants aren't hated and feared is a really interesting setup for a story. Of course being Alex Summers this quickly all goes to hell, they turn the series into an ongoing and it completely falls off the rails. And then we get the arc where a nurse falls in love with his comatose body.