Everything You Need to Know About Cyclops' Optic Blasts (2024)

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Scott fires pure, ruby-tinged concussive energy from his eyes that is constantly projected whenever he opens them. Commonly referred to as an “Optic Blast,” this beam of energy can have incredible force behind it, and just as a regular human can focus their eyes, Scott can focus his own to manipulate the power and size of the aperture of the blast, allowing him to do everything from slice objects (and foes) with thin beams of intense force, or blanket a wide area with concussive energy at long ranges. They can be incredibly powerful, capable of leveling Sentinels or punching holes in mountains, or they can be relatively mild, knocking over or otherwise incapacitating his enemies—or, as we see in X-Men ‘97's opening episodes, allow Scott to do things like soften an aerial landing or glide himself around a battlefield.

This also means that, no, they are not heat rays. The kinetic energy that Scott’s beams are made of does not directly generate heat, but because of its sheer concussive force (and because the beams are, in decades and decades and decades of comics, occasionally described and presented as if they do generate heat—writers and artists are people, and therefore occasionally imperfect!), they can cause burns or ignite sparks through the amount of friction generated by a blast, especially a sustained one. It’s not a heat vision like Superman’s, though, and never has been.

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Scott’s body absorbs ambient energy from around him—practically any kind of energy—and metabolizes it as the concussive energy released by his optic blasts. Although it’s not commonly come up, very early on it was established that Scott needs to regularly release a blast of energy in order to avoid building up too much surplus energy in his body. That said, the energy that powers his blasts is practically limitless due to his body’s absorption methods, but the great focus Scott requires to fire a blast means he can only sustain a singular beam for about 15 minutes before fatigue and a combination of the psionic field around his eyes (more on that later) dissipate the output.

This absorption ability has occasionally manifested in different ways in the comics; once, Scott took a direct lightning blast from Storm to supercharge his optic blast, although it caused him a great deal of pain in the process. But this absorption means...

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No, alas: Cyclops’ power does not involve opening eye-sized portals to another dimension, as you might have heard people joke.

This misconception actually does come from the comics themselves, however, or more specifically, the 1983 Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. The first print of the anthology described Scott’s power as actually being that his eyes are apertures to another dimension where the laws of physics operate differently to our own—and particles from which interact with our reality with an overwhelming transfer of kinetic energy. However, this contradicts prior descriptions of Scott’s power, which as early as the original X-Men run in the ‘60s described Scott’s blasts as being powered by light energy from the sun. A few years later a new run of the handbook re-wrote this description to better align with the already-established idea that Scott constantly absorbs energy from other sources, however the original print of the Official Handbook and its erroneous explanation has occasionally been referenced in other material.

The idea, however, inspired by this error, was actually codified into Marvel continuity fairly recently—and not with Cyclops. As a nod to the infamous handbook mix-up, in the 2017 run of Ultimates by Al Ewing and Travel Foreman America Chavez used her own dimensional-gateway powers to briefly travel to an actual alternate dimension of concussive energy, and open up a gateway to use its energy as an offensive attack. Scott’s beams are very much from our own dimension, and pretty much always have been.

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Although in the 21st century the comics formally introduced the idea of “Secondary Mutation”—a new ability beyond a Mutant’s original power, like Emma Frost’s diamond form or Beast’s more feline form—another aspect of Scott’s powers that is not considered a second ability, but is vital to him not blasting his own neck into pieces every time he opens his eyes, is a psionic field around his mind and body. The field—which is basically skin-close to Scott’s body, and can’t be manipulated or expanded to cover others—is attuned to the same forces that his eyes generate when opened, cancelling out energy blowback on himself and reflecting it back to its point of origin. The field’s potency is why even just closing his eyelids can stop Scott from constantly firing off blasts.

It also makes Scott invulnerable to the mutant powers of his brother Alex, aka Havok, whose plasma waves are negated by the psionic field around his body. This is not this case for his brother Gabriel, aka Vulcan, whose Omega-Level energy manipulation powers can still harm Scott (and even replicate his abilities).

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Aside from the psionic field, Scott uses sunglasses and his iconic field visor. Both use a synthetic ruby quartz that resonates with the field that protects his body, allowing him to see regularly without constantly firing off energy. Using both sensors built into the side of the visor and into his gloves, Scott can manually fire blasts, and he can also manipulate the aperture of the lens to adjust the angle and width of his optic blasts. Most versions of the visor over the years have incorporated a spring-loaded safety function to prevent accidental discharge.

A combination of lingering physical and mental trauma from his childhood and years of eventual overreliance on his ruby quartz accessories has made Scott’s powers frequently difficult for him to control. His ability to control them without the use of ruby quartz has waxed and waned at times over the years—at times therapy and psychic aid has helped Scott control his blasts without the use of lenses, and for a brief period after inheriting a fragment of the Phoenix Force during Avengers vs. X-Men, he could not only properly control them, but they were greatly enhanced in strength. This effect however quickly degraded, and occasionally renders Scott’s blasts particularly unstable—either in terms of power or even, rarely, suddenly unusable.

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Although not considered a primary aspect of his mutant ability—although it’s definitely an aspect enhanced by it—a lifetime of using his powers has seen Scott develop a remarkable sense of spatial awareness when it comes to using his environment to reflect his optic blasts, allowing him to bank shots off of surfaces and still hit his target with pinpoint accuracy. Scott can even hit opponents moving at superhuman speed, or refract his beams in multiple directions to hit multiple opponents at once.

However, there have been some suggestions in the comics that Scott’s abilities have the potential to not necessarily need to rely on this subset of his powers. When a young version of Scott was teleported into the present day by Beast alongside the rest of the original X-Men in the mid 2010s, he displayed the ability to twist and bend the direction of his optic blasts mid-air, without the need to bounce them off of a surface. That said, it’s not something that the adult Scott has particularly used too often since.

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Beyond his optic blasts, Scott has many skills—he’s an expert martial artist, a master strategist and commander, and much like his father before him, an extremely skilled pilot (a skill that goes hand in hand with his aforementioned superhuman spacial awareness). Also, a lifetime of growing up (and becoming intimately involved with) psychics has honed Scott’s ability to resist telepathic abilities to a degree few other mutants can—and even though most X-Men receive some amount of training to resist psychic powers, Scott is on another level. This isn’t really a power Scott has through mutation, but it’s a fun thing to note as skill he’s developed that is almost as vital as an ability as his mutation is in the field.

Although not a general resistance, over the years Scott has learned how structure his mind in such a way that he can create a “black box” that probing telepaths—even ones he trusts in his mind, like Jean or Emma—cannot access, allowing him to hide information that powerful psionics can’t get out of him. Sure, it’s not energy beams out your eyeballs that can crack mountains in two, but “I have shacked up with telepaths so powerful my mind is just built like this” is still pretty remarkable.

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