Every installment of Abandoned Love we will be examining comic book stories, plots and ideas that were abandoned by a later writer without retconnng away the previous story. Click here for an archive of all the previous editions of Abandoned Love. Feel free to e-mail me at bcronin@comicbookresources.com if you have any suggestions for future editions of this feature.

Today, we take a look at who the original third Summers brother was going to be.

We first learned what happened to Cyclops' parents when Cyclops and his brother, Havok, were little kids, in Uncanny X-Men #144 (by Chris Claremont, Brent Anderson and Joe Rubinstein)...





In Uncanny X-Men #156 (by Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum and Bob Wiacek), Corsair fills in the rest of the details...







In X-Men #23 (by Fabian Nicieza, Andy Kubert and Matt Ryan), Mister Sinister warns Cyclops about the Legacy Virus while also subtly suggesting that Cyclops has a SECOND brother (heck, honestly, it makes it sound like Cyclops could have MULTIPLE other brothers)...







Soon after, Adam-X the X-Treme debuted in the pages of the 1993 X-Force Annual (by Fabian Nicieza, Tony Daniel and a bunch of inkers)...



And he made it clear that he was from another planet...



In X-Men #39 (by Fabian Nicieza, Terry Dodson and Matt Ryan), while Adam looked for his heritage, he ran into an old man was a pilot in Alaska. The old man later crashes his plane and Adam had to do anything to keep him alive, trapped in the wilderness while injured from the crash...











Go to the next page to see the biggest clue yet that Adam was the third Summers brother, as well as the revelation of who the actual third Summers brother was!

After Nicieza left the X-Books, he then did a Captain Marvel mini-series, and in it, Adam-X guest-starred in #3 (art by Ed Benes and Mike Sellers) and there, it was revealed what Adam-X's deal was - he was the son of the Shi'ar emperor plus a woman from Earth...





Nicieza later explicitly said that that was his intent. But then he never did anything more with the character, so he never got a chance to implement the idea.

Instead, years later, in the mini-series X-Men: Deadly Genesis, designed to tie-in with the anniversary of the All-New, All-Different X-Men, Ed Brubaker, Trevor Hairsine and Scott Hanna (working from an editorially-driven mandate, mind you) came up with the idea that there was a second team of X-Men in between the original X-Men being captured on Krakoa and the All-New, All-Different X-Men. This team was then killed and Xavier wiped everyone's mind of their deaths. He did this in part because one of the people killed was Kid Vulcan, brother to Cyclops and Havok. Well, Vulcan wasn't actually dead - he was just in stasis, and the House of M brought him out of stasis by giving him a bunch of power (the energy from all of the mutants losing their powers) and sending him for revenge, as he forces the truth from Xavier in the final issue of the six-book mini-series...









Vulcan then left Earth for revenge on the Shi'ar Empire.

If anyone has a suggestion for Abandoned Love, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com