The new series Marvels Snapshots continues this March with Captain America and Cyclops of the X-Men, in stories focusing on historical context and the human side of superhumanity. The standalone books build on the premise of Marvel's eponymous 1994 series Marvels, in which a photojournalist captured the Golden Age of the Avengers, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, and their ilk on film, retelling classic comics narratives from the POV of an "ordinary person" documenting a world where costumed adventurers exist. Kurt Busiek, the writer of Marvels, supervises the Snapshots series and has assembled different creative teams for each story.
The next installment, Captain America: Marvels Snapshot, revisits the Madbomb story arc from Cap's monthly series, which for a time in the mid-1970s was both written and illustrated by comics legend Jack Kirby. Eisner Award-nominated writer Mark Russell and artist Ramón Pérez will examine the Madbomb's threat to disaffected communities in the South Bronx. Following that will be Marvels Snapshot: X-Men, offering an intimate look at the origin of Cyclops, from writer Jay Edidin and artist Tom Reilly.
As Marvel outlines in their official press release, the one-shot Snapshots will explore these well-traveled heroes from a personal and relatable perspective, in the tradition of the Marvels limited series. Russell says that his Captain America/Steve Rogers story will emphasize “the Madbomb's impact in the South Bronx, a community which had already been effectively abandoned by the rest of the nation, that community's struggle for survival, and of the search for heroes of its own.” The X-Men Snapshot centers on a young Scott Summers, observing the emergence of superheroes in the years before his own mutant powers manifest.
Edidin, who co-hosts the podcast Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men, gushed about the opportunity to write Cyclops' coming-of-age:
This is a story that's pretty personal to me—because I'm me, and it's a Cyclops story; but even more because it's about the ways that superheroes and the stories around them can become lifelines... I'd say it's a dream come true, but given that I'm the kind of uptight overachiever who over-identifies with Scott Summers in the first place, maybe also a bit of an anxiety dream come true.
Captain America and Cyclops are arguably best-known in the Marvel canon as the team leaders of the Avengers and the X-Men, respectively. In this sense, the First Avenger and the ostensible first X-Person have navigated parallel paths over the decades (only meeting to talk about it in an occasional rare crossover such as AvX), and each represents an integral force in the evolution of the Marvel Universe. In adopting the painterly-photography motif so lushly realized by Busiek and Alex Ross in Marvels, the upcoming Snapshots aim to expand our understanding of these two central figures of superhero mythology.