Sometime last week a colleague and I spent our lunch break playing the classic game hangman. The category chosen was Marvel Comics characters, and the character my colleague picked was Douglas Ramsey, aka Cypher. Marvel nerd though I may be, it took me awhile to guess the character as he is relatively obscure and I have not been reading a lot of X-Men comic books lately. As I got it, my colleague said, "he's got a lame superpower" or something like that.
Up until exactly that point, I actually agreed. Of the New Mutants, the team into which the character was introduced in the 80s Cyper was arguably the weakest, as his power involved neither physical force nor some form of mind control but the ability to translate language and nothing more. Of course he would look like a complete wimp next to the likes of Sunspot, Cannonball, Magma, et al. It's sad because Chris Claremont created and wrote him to show that heroes don't need to be powerful to be, well, super, but in the end it clearly didn't work that way.
What occurred to me at exactly that moment, though, was the question: what if he was taken out of the context of the X-men and put in something else, as, say, a superspy?
In Captain America: Civil War, which I had watched not too long before that hangman game, Bucky tells Cap of the threat of several other Winter Soldiers whom he believes the villainous Zemo intends to bring out of deep freeze. In describing them as possible world-destroying threats, Bucky mentions, as one of their talents, the ability to speak 30 languages. Remembering both this line and Cypher's lone superpower, I thought, wouldn't the ability to speak any language one hears, make someone a truly formidable hero? Spy movies like the Mission Impossible movies and the Bourne series play up the lead character's ability to blend into an environment, and in Bourne's case that usually involves the ability to speak the local language. A character that can do that naturally could be an amazing spy, especially if he was able to hone those abilities through training, which he could easily get from S.H.I.E.L.D.
Essentially, this is my pitch to the people who make Marvel Comics (not the movies), to do something with a long-existing, not particularly prominent mutant property other than kill him or retroactively alter his sexual orientation.
Cypher is a fantastic Marvel character in that, unlike Steve Rogers who went from being a 98-pound weakling to being the ultimate fighting machine, he actually stayed the 98-pound weakling, even after getting his superpower (which for mutants like him, happens at puberty).
A few years back in the "Necrosha" storyline I think Marvel took up a long-standing fan suggestion to have Doug's language-acquiring powers include the ability to learn fighting ability as a form of "body language" which led to him defeating his entire team, the New Mutants. This was a bit of redemption for the character, and they followed it up (sort of) by including him in a new X-Factor team formed by a writer whose work I enjoy, Peter David.
Now, as much as I enjoy David's writing, I think to keep Cypher in an ensemble book full of fantastical characters (even if they're playing detective, as I think they are in this book) is a waste of his talents, which are more suited to the kind of work that the Black Widow and Winter Soldier do than to traditional "superheroing."
Not that I think Cypher deserves his own book; if sales warranted it he would surely have had one by now. I do think, though, a change of scenery is in order for this character.
I don't know if you ever get to read this, folks at Marvel, but if you do I hope you consider it.
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